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HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

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Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

#121

Is sasha-id an Anthropic employee or official bot, or a prank? The structure of its response is strange, plus that gif. Cherny's response seems like the only legitimate one. My question is serious; apologies if the answer is obvious to you.

I'm confused about the timeline of events; in the PR, the github actions user lists this as a possible duplicate of https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53171, which was created earlier, and doesn't seem to be have been edited after the fact. Did sasha-id just copy that bug report and get credit for discovering?

Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

#122
post #102

Anthropic employee here (opinions are my own): the response " [...] However, I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation [...]" was, as you imagined, generated by Claude. I don't like it, but can't do much about it.

> I don't like it, but can't do much about it. Is the culture really such that you can't escalate an obvious, fairly minor mistake that is turning into disastrous PR? That would explain a lot of recent Anthropic takes actually.

Such culture has become common in big tech.

Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

#123
post #3

> However, I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation for degraded service or *technical errors* that result in incorrect billing routing. This is very surprising. I've never seen a legitimate business not give refunds for technical errors of their own fault. Minimum Anthropic should credit the full amount to them.

Not sure that reasoning has ever stood up in court.

Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

#124
post #81
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not legally enforceable, but absolutely something that it would say in order to dissuade you from going to small claims court

Just saying, small claims court is a farce. You can win, and then the losing side just ignores the verdict. Then you can go back and figure out how to get your money, depending on the business this might be really hard. And this isn't a hypothetical. I have had this and never seen any of the money from the judgement....

I sat in small claims court one day to watch.

A plaintiff won a judgment. He asked the judge: “what do I do now?” The judge replied: “well, if you’re reading the paper one day and see ‘defendant wins the Powerball,’ then you know exactly what to do.”

Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

#125

Anthropic employee here (opinions are my own): the response " [...] However, I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation [...]" was, as you imagined, generated by Claude. I don't like it, but can't do much about it.

It reads like the inventors of Claude can't get Claude to apply a "human in the loop" workflow.

Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

#126
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many countries, this also isn't legally tenable.

Anything they say is legal until a judge says it's not. And to get to that point, you need to be willing to spend a lot more than 200$.

Not really. For example, in the UK you could report them to Trading Standards and they'll enforce the law on your behalf.

Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

#127
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and there would be no hope of the company ever improving. I don't see anything wrong with this. My integrity and values are above any company's. Companies can go to hell for all I care

[flagged]

This is a horrendously bad-faith take. You know full well it’s *not* just a one-off $200 issue: they treat customers like this at scale.

Don’t pretend this is an isolated matter, or that CS/billing is the only arena where Anthropic has such systemic issues.

I don’t know you, but your response honestly reads like it’s coming from someone wrestling with their own moral compromises. If so, please take a good hard look in the mirror. (E: yep — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953576)

Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

#128

"I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation for degraded service or technical errors that result in incorrect billing routing." Not sure I've ever seen a company openly take this position. This is a crazy policy.

More and more I feel that the one thing Github needs to turn the tide of bad press, is to allow adding clown or turd reaction emoji on comments

Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

#129
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you even need to go that far. Just refute the charges with your credit card. Very high likelihood of a successful refund since they already acknowledged their error in writing.

There's a fundamental power imbalance: if you do this to any service, they will likely ban your account. So the monetary reward has to be enough to merit moving all your data and workflows off them in advance and never using them again.

^ This.

I naively disputed Steam not honouring a refund (it was for about 0.5% of what I've spent with them up to that point), a couple of £pound at most. I'd paid by PayPal and as Steam refused to abide by UK law (Consumer Rights Act says broken stuff has to be fixed or refunded), I raised the issue with PayPal. I expected Steam would refund me, instead they did not dispute that they'd unlawfully failed to refund me, so PayPal - Steam's provider - cancelled the charge.

In response, Steam 'limited' my Steam account - effectively closing it temporarily. Now it's limited so they won't use PayPal to sell me anything now, so I haven't bought anything from them since [I have cashed in CS skins, and used that cash to 'buy' games].

It was an interesting lesson in 'might is right'. PayPal were able to refund the transaction because Steam want them and had no argument against the refund. Steam were able to cut me off because this appears to be a loophole in UK consumer law - sellers who break the law can just dismiss buyers who ask for refunds. Lesson learnt.

From Steam's point of view, they pissed off a customer and probably burnt 30mins-1hour of support time in answering my requests, way more than the cost of the refund. But selling games, which I later found Steam knew was broken, and then not refunding because I had the tenacity to try and fix it - meaning that the game sat open for longer than their auto-refund time - is not on imo. Petty of me for sure. Crap of Steam too.

Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

#130
post #3

> However, I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation for degraded service or *technical errors* that result in incorrect billing routing. This is very surprising. I've never seen a legitimate business not give refunds for technical errors of their own fault. Minimum Anthropic should credit the full amount to them.

The official response feels AI generated. I suspect this is a preview of our future. "You're totally right! I'm sorry but you're going to have to piss off anyway. Would you like to spend a few more hours discussing it with our AI chatbot? It won't help. But if it makes you feel better, it will probably cost us an extra $0.12 in tokens." I'll bet the first human at Anthropic learns about this from HN.

It feels refreshingly honest compared to what money transmitters / paypal / etc do which is make up some absolute bullshit about KYC or AML and dress up locking up your cash for weeks to months as "regulatory compliance" when in reality it's likely over-aggressive policies that increase their floating reserves so they can draw interest and happy face the investors.
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