Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps

#161

Post by wqaatwt » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

trollbridge wrote: post #88

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were the only issue, I’d say Anthropic were fine. Dario took the tremendous goodwill his row with Hegseth gave him and blew it. The major problems are Anthropic’s back-end instability and front-end kludginess (Electron!) revealing the gap between Anthropic’s capability and marketing, and Dario bizarrely copying Altman’s 2023 fire-and-brimstone playbook that had already massively backfired.

Using Electron in this day and age shows a particular lack of effort, considering how easy it is to use an agent harness to build native versions of apps. I mean, we're a tiny little business and we somehow find the bandwidth to do it.

Yet… VS code somehow became the most popular IDE that happens to be generally viewed favorably by most of its users.

I personally hate it due to various reasons but I don’t feel like the Electron part is the issue (Java based Jetbrains IDEs generally seem way more bloated)

Re: Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps

#162

Post by wqaatwt » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

thfuran wrote: post #111

jack_pp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it stifle competition / innovation? You can use other harnesses, pay API for anthropic models or cheap chinese models. You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol. It either is a good deal or it isn't, if it is just say, thanks free VC money, if it isn't say fuck you.

Any service or product delivered at a loss seems pretty plainly anti-competetive. Whether it is actually subsidized to that extent, I’m not sure.

Well if their gross margins are positive (I really doubt they aren’t) there isn’t much of a case to be made. You can expect meaningful R&D and capital investments to pay off short term and you can’t make any meaningful projections either to determine if they are dumping or not.

Re: Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps

#163

Post by threatofrain » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #93

trollbridge wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Electron in this day and age shows a particular lack of effort, considering how easy it is to use an agent harness to build native versions of apps. I mean, we're a tiny little business and we somehow find the bandwidth to do it.

It shows Anthropic doesn’t trust its agents to write native apps. That cuts cleanly against its marketing. And if the Electron app were flawless, that would be one thing. It isn’t. It’s buggy, feature light, constantly updating and slow.

Anthropic being a big company means they could trivially hire an iOS team. The failure to make a good native app is a business decision. Claude or not, leadership could've snapped their fingers, allocated the budget, and fixed the frontend UX by now if it were important enough.

Re: Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps

#164

Post by wqaatwt » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

dcrazy wrote: post #125

thfuran wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any service or product delivered at a loss seems pretty plainly anti-competetive. Whether it is actually subsidized to that extent, I’m not sure.

The entire LLMaaS industry is priced below cost. Even if the marginal cost of electricity and bandwidth to produce one token is less than the price of that token, the amortized infrastructure and R&D costs make the entire venture unprofitable. If pricing below cost were illegal, it would essentially make starting up a business—any business—impossible.

You can’t calculate what that cost is though regardless. If the gross margin is positive you can’t confidently challenge their longterm growth projections however optimistic or unrealistic they are.

Re: Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps

#165

Post by cmrdporcupine » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

trollbridge wrote: post #88

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were the only issue, I’d say Anthropic were fine. Dario took the tremendous goodwill his row with Hegseth gave him and blew it. The major problems are Anthropic’s back-end instability and front-end kludginess (Electron!) revealing the gap between Anthropic’s capability and marketing, and Dario bizarrely copying Altman’s 2023 fire-and-brimstone playbook that had already massively backfired.

Using Electron in this day and age shows a particular lack of effort, considering how easy it is to use an agent harness to build native versions of apps. I mean, we're a tiny little business and we somehow find the bandwidth to do it.

It just seems like Anthropic has made a deliberate choice to make themselves a TypeScript dev shop.

From Claude Code being written in React (!!) to acquiring the Bun people so they they could have their very own bespoke JS/TS runtime (and then... rewriting the whole thing), to having the CC "native" app being Electron, etc.

It just seems like it comes down to a choice at the highest level to hire people from a "full stack" background, and build in and and prioritize TypeScript as their dev language, for better or for worse.

I personally think it's worse and that shows in the performance and quality of CC, but I'm biased.

Codex, FWIW, is written in Rust, and it is by far snappier and more reliable, though less featureful for now.

Re: Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps

#166

Post by bigyabai » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

solenoid0937 wrote: post #120

phyzix5761 wrote: post #86

There seems to be a smear campaign against Anthropic ever since the DoD incident.

OpenAI has a $8B PR budget. Makes you wonder if they'd spend any of that on social media. I saw a guy trashing Anthropic on Threads the other day, looked up his LinkedIn and he worked for OpenAI in PR.

People use Threads? Seems like an empty place to do native marketing.

Re: Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps

#167

Post by wqaatwt » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

exitb wrote: post #23

bakies wrote: post #6

Think I'm about to switch. I can't build the automations i'm trying to with claude code anymore. Since they locked away the non-interactive usage and channels can't be used without interacting with the console on startup. I had a good web interface for running CC in containers in k8s but I think it's time to bail out and build around a codex subscription and pi.dev now. I have local models hooked up to pi dev and tha…

I'm happy using Codex for alternative harnesses and non-interactive usage, but it does make me wonder when OpenAI will start to squeeze their customers in the same way.

When they release a model that’s generally considered superior to Opus/Fable and/or start running out of money.

Re: Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps

#168

Post by wqaatwt » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

CodingJeebus wrote: post #40

exitb wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy using Codex for alternative harnesses and non-interactive usage, but it does make me wonder when OpenAI will start to squeeze their customers in the same way.

Agreed, these types of posts often feel like they're missing the forest for the trees. Sure, migrate away from Claude and maybe that will provide some runway, but all of these companies are built on the same economic fundamentals that do not scale. We are currently in the "$7/mo Netflix with all the good movies" era of AI that will leave and never return.

Or LLMs become a commodity if open models are ever good enough for > 95% of use cases. The product if fundamentally different than tv-shows or movies since its so interchangeable.

Then the cost would end up being deprecation + electric + some low operating margin (i.e. what non SOTA models cost on OpenRouter)

Re: Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps

#169

Post by cyberax » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

jack_pp wrote: post #73

cyberax wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This method of bundling should be illegal in general, as it stiffles competition.

How does it stifle competition / innovation? You can use other harnesses, pay API for anthropic models or cheap chinese models. You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol. It either is a good deal or it isn't, if it is just say, thanks free VC money, if it isn't say fuck you.

It would make it impossible for makers of 3rd-party harnesses to compete with Claude Code. This principle is not just limited to LLMs.

> You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol.

I don't particularly care about Claude or harnesses.

Re: Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps

#170

Post by spongebobism » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:10 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #5

Zambyte wrote: post #2

Not sure why this was flagged, Anthropic has obviously been burning bridges. I thought this line was funny though: > If you want to autocomplete, like I do, you don’t need Fable, or even Opus; Sonnet works fine. It reads like "if you want to go to the grocery store, you don't need a space shuttle, or even a SR-71 Blackbird; a Cessna works fine."

Sounds like the author is using "autocomplete" as a derogatory way of referring to LLMs in general (eg. "LLMs can't code, they're just autocomplete on steroids")

> To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. [...] If you want to autocomplete [...] But if you want to use FOSS trusted tools like Zed, OpenCode, Pi, Nanocoder, etc. [...]

isn't he just contrasting 2 use cases of LLMs?