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Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

olafalders.com

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Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#41

Post by vmg12 »

skybrian wrote: post #26
DanielHB wrote: post #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.

An OpenAI subscription seems like a decent alternative for people using open source coding agents. It has usage limits too, but for $20/month it’s not bad.

The nice thing about the chatgpt subscription is that they allow you to use it in any harness.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#43

Post by vmg12 »

Anthropic's willingness to completely change how claude code works is one of the stated reasons why the Pi coding agent exists. When people are dedicating significant time to building workflows on your product, consistency is very important.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#44

Post by overgard »

hedgehog wrote: post #13
ayhanfuat wrote: post #8

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.

Experienced in what dimension? I've been using these tools for about a year and coding for 20+ years, and frankly these long horizon tasks are the OPPOSITE of what I want. I want quick iteration cycles so that it doesn't spend a lot of time and tokens building things I need to throw out. I think the people that mostly want long horizon tasks are: AI labs, because they want you to spend tokens, and vibe coders, who are mostly using it for entertainment purposes.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#45

Post by Shadowmist »

mdavid626 wrote: post #28

It happened to me today. I was reading agent's answer and it asked me something. I didn't even get to the question - it accepted something! Jesus Christ. Where are the software engineers?!

I’ve seen that a few times. Had to disable the TUI mode because clicks to focus the terminal window were being interpreted as an approval even though the click was nowhere near the question being asked. I’ve also never chosen to enable auto mode but somehow it is on and approving shell commands I didn’t want approved. Scary since I’ve caught it adding things like auto approve flags to terraform apply commands.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#46

Post by oalders »

blixt wrote: post #38

So much attribution to malintent here, but most likely they're trying to build a product with the features that they themselves would use, and from my own experience it's very frustrating to leave a Claude session running and come back to find it did nothing because it got stuck on a question. Furthermore, believing that the only thing saving you from disaster is Claude deciding to ask you a question is not a great c…

>Meanwhile, this article was written by Claude

The prose was written by me, with the research being done by Claude and also clearly attributed. I left Claude's research as a series of bullet points so that it would be clear that I'm not passing off an LLM's work as my own, but if anyone wants to dig deeper, they have some starting points to consider.

I don't publish prose written by an LLM for the same reason I would not have an LLM solve a crossword puzzle for me -- there's no joy in that.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#47

Post by trq_ »

Hi everyone,

It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it.

First, overall wanted to apologize and agree that this did not meet our bar and does not represent how we plan to ship on Claude Code.

To give you a motivating sense, as the models get more powerful, usage patterns start to change. I'd gotten a lot of feedback that AskUserQuestion tool was starting to block some long running jobs unexpectedly and so I tried a change to help that.

Our internal feedback on this was good, but the rollout should have been opt-in (like it is now) and on the Changelog.

Thanks for the feedback! We're always trying to make Claude Code better while balancing it with how people use it in many diverse ways. I did not really intend AskUserQuestion to be a safety gate when I first built it, but I realize it has evolved in that direction for some users.

I'm still exploring other ways of helping with this problem of balancing longrunning work and input, but will take lessons from the rollout here.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#48

Post by hungryhobbit »

overgard wrote: post #39
dehrmann wrote: 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.

They also randomly changed how copy-paste works in a way that made it really annoying to copy text. Vibe-coders pumping out features: this is the reaction you're going to get if you inflict this on your users! Nobody wants software that updates every day and changes in fundamental ways that are hard to keep up with.

THIS ONE IS HORRIBLE!

Copy/paste is one of the most basic, low-level features of a modern operating system. NO APPLICATION SHOULD EVER SCREW WITH IT, IN ANY WAY!

And I say this not just as a seriously annoyed user, but also as a professional UI developer: it is a well-known anti-pattern to override the user's expectations, at any level ... and that applies tenfold to the most basic patterns that every other app follows.

I don't care if you added a magic way to write all my code for me: if the only way to invoke it is to break copy/paste, you've failed at development!

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#49

Post by oalders »

trq_ wrote: post #47

Hi everyone, It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it. First, overall wanted to apologize and agree that this did not meet our bar and does not represent how we plan to ship on Claude Code. To give you a motivating sense, as the models get more powerful, usage patterns start to change. I'd gotten a lot of feedback that…

Author here. Thanks for this context. I do hope this leads to more rigorous attention to the Changelog moving forward.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#50

Post by dan_i »

trq_ wrote: post #47

Hi everyone, It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it. First, overall wanted to apologize and agree that this did not meet our bar and does not represent how we plan to ship on Claude Code. To give you a motivating sense, as the models get more powerful, usage patterns start to change. I'd gotten a lot of feedback that…

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