Live data from Hacker News

Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

olafalders.com

11–20 of 133 posts

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#11
post #3

Depends on who you ask. For me it sounds good. For Anthropic it might increase load and make them less money but give them better KPIs.

Make them less money? By automating use of their product, that costs money to use?

Anthropic makes more money when people use 5% of what their subscription offers them. This allows them to sell more subscriptions without paying for more capacity.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#12
As soon as tokens stop being subsidized I would not trust any harness made by a company that also charges for the compute.

Right now the interests align, but as soon as more tokens -> more profit (instead of more revenue and more losses) the perverse incentives will be too big to avoid.

It seems inevitable that open source harnesses will win. These companies would do better to just open source their harnesses.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#13

I really hate this direction both Anthropic and Open AI are following. They are in this silly competition whose model/harness can go unattended the longest, no matter what. And it is never explicit, you learn about it after you get bitten by it. Claude Code has auto mode which is supposed to take over permission prompts but no, they had to couple that with “I will assume this is what the user wants” and made it unusa…

It's what some more experienced users want and the companies are following the well-trod path of optimizing heavily for power users at the expense of complexity, only now it's gotten easier to add absurd amount of code to a project. Not necessarily to make it work right. Personally I have some tasks where sessions between one and five days are typical so I appreciate that it's possible.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#14

As soon as tokens stop being subsidized I would not trust any harness made by a company that also charges for the compute. Right now the interests align, but as soon as more tokens -> more profit (instead of more revenue and more losses) the perverse incentives will be too big to avoid. It seems inevitable that open source harnesses will win. These companies would do better to just open source their harnesses.

[deleted]

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#15
post #7

The headache I recently had was it somehow started interpreting mouse clicks in the terminal to mean I clicked an option when I was really just trying to get/confirm window focus.

This bit me too. If I wanted a mouse-driven app, I'd use the GUI. I don't understand why they're trying to replicate that experience in a text environment.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#16
post #7

The headache I recently had was it somehow started interpreting mouse clicks in the terminal to mean I clicked an option when I was really just trying to get/confirm window focus.

The new fullscreen UI is really bad. The old one (scrolling) starts to bug out after a while, but it van just be restarted and resumed.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#17

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766895 I would love Claude Code to be a little less vibe-coded. The underlying model is excellent, but we're being pretty much forced into using CC to use the subscription model.

I am a longtime and heavy Claude Code user, but Anthropic's product management overall (including for their Desktop/web products) has been really baffling me. I agree that these things often have the air of having been vibe coded without enough human input, and change so quickly (often without a particularly compelling reason for the change) as to be aggravating.

The most recent one that's had me annoyed is the "Fullscreen" TUI feature, which is super unintuitive, implementing its own text highlighting and copy-on-select mechanics, overriding your terminal's native right click. Easy to disable but terrible defaults, IMO. It's not even really clear to me what problem it was actually supposed to solve.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make them less money? By automating use of their product, that costs money to use?

Anthropic makes more money when people use 5% of what their subscription offers them. This allows them to sell more subscriptions without paying for more capacity.

I don't think the current subscription price is intended to be a money maker. It's the loss leader to get people invested in the companies' tooling, and make those people more willing to start paying higher enterprise rates as they grow.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make them less money? By automating use of their product, that costs money to use?

Anthropic makes more money when people use 5% of what their subscription offers them. This allows them to sell more subscriptions without paying for more capacity.

Their enterprise customers pay via metered actual use.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make them less money? By automating use of their product, that costs money to use?

Anthropic makes more money when people use 5% of what their subscription offers them. This allows them to sell more subscriptions without paying for more capacity.

Do we have any concrete numbers of how many of their users are subscription vs enterprise, though? Because enterprise users are paying API prices (or at least my employers are)
Post reply on HN