Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

raheeljunaid.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 206 posts

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

#171

Post by HDThoreaun »

mrtksn wrote: post #101
internet2000 wrote: post #42

They're subsidizing their tokens as long as you use their software. That's a fair exchange, I never understood why people took issue with it. If you don't want to get locked in to Claude Code, you can pay more. Just like you can pay more for an unlocked non-carrier subsidized phone. (Which I personally do.)

The issue with this kind of subsidy is that it is designed to lock you in and not as a loss leader. In other words, it is not like giving free nuts at bar to make you drink more beer but more like Nestle giving baby formula so that the babies get use to that instead of mothers milk

I think the subscription is also designed as a loss leader. The ai labs know the real money is in enterprise, and that enterprises mostly don’t want to use the most expensive option. How do they convince enterprises to sign up for their expensive api then? Give it to the employees for cheap so they tell bosses they want Claude code at work.

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

#172

Post by HDThoreaun »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #135
mdavid626 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want only their model, the rest is just garbage. I used Opus with pi.dev, worked perfectly fine. Fast and does exactly what it needs to do. Claude Code is slow, sluggish, buggy. Why are you forcing me to use it? Why should I pay an order of magnitude more to use pi.dev? That doesn't sound reasonable to me.

> Why should I pay an order of magnitude more to use pi.dev? The monthly plans are heavily subsidized by the API users - why should Anthropic subsidize your use of pi.dev?

There is no evidence that subscriptions lose money. It’s just as likely that subscriptions break even and the api has 10x margins

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

#173

Post by jefftk »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #153
harry19023 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The level of entitlement around how we all deserve to use a product in a category that didn't even exist 12 months ago with increasing performance at the same price forever is insane.

C'mon, get real. The monthly subscription costs on these services are several multiples what software engineers have formerly paid for development tools. I have worked in shops that made it difficult for me just to get a paid for RustRover or CLion license, and had to out of pocket it. The monthly sub for Claude or Codex is equivalent to the total license cost for that. It's not entitled to expect your $200/month too…

Why compare to what historical tooling (which is very different in terms of how it's built and what it does) instead of to value over replacement?

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

#174

Post by jefftk »

threatofrain wrote: post #163
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

> Anthropic being a big company means they could trivially hire an iOS team

Anthropic is primarily limited by how fast they can identify and onboard people who will be a good fit. Allocating that to ios would trade off against allocating that staffing growth elsewhere (ex: reliability, making the next generation model even better).

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

#175

Post by jefftk »

butlike wrote: post #155
dcrazy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you also think all you can eat buffets should be illegal? What about early bird specials? Free soda with a large fry? Happy hour wings? Where does the “bundling” end?

1.) All you can eat buffets ARE the product, not a loss leader, so there's no bundle there. 2.) Early bird specials, again, aren't loss leaders. They're a way to get sales on the left side of the bell curve. The restaurant food is still the product, not a subsidy. 3.) Free soda with large fry doesn't actually exist (though it sounds like it should, right?) 4.) Happy hour wings (again, see #2) None of these are bundli…

> Free soda with large fry doesn't actually exist

I just searched and found free medium fries with a large soda at McD if you order through the app. Seems like bundling to me, and you have to use their particular app.

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

#176

Post by jefftk »

wmorgan wrote: post #52
gruez wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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")

It’s talking about how you can type def frobQux(Qux qux, int radians) { And it goes and reads your code and suggests a reasonable way to frob a qux a certain number of radians. Which is at the same time (a) pretty useful!, (b) fairly new, we’ve only been able to do this since 2023 or so, but (c) also not that hard by 2026 standards because capabilities have advanced so much in the last three years.

"int radians" is a pretty strong code smell! I would be very worried about any struggle l autocomplete that followed something like that ;)

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

#177

Post by keeda »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71
internet2000 wrote: post #42

They're subsidizing their tokens as long as you use their software. That's a fair exchange, I never understood why people took issue with it. If you don't want to get locked in to Claude Code, you can pay more. Just like you can pay more for an unlocked non-carrier subsidized phone. (Which I personally do.)

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.

>... Dario bizarrely copying Altman’s 2023 fire-and-brimstone playbook that had already massively backfired.

I've said this before, they always knew it was terrible marketing, but they just can't help themselves because they actually believe it.

From multiple accounts, the people working at these labs, who are most exposed to the latest models' capabilities and how they're being used out in the world, are simultaneously excited and terrified about what they're building.

In a way that's even scarier than the "Capitalist sociopaths marketing AI to other Capitalist sociopaths" rationale everybody assumes.

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

#178

Post by croes »

internet2000 wrote: post #144
croes wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the difference when I hit my 5 hour limit or weekly limit with Claude Code compared to PI or OpenCode?

If you do it outside of Claude Code, you're not using their software, which is the intended outcome of the subsidy.

Why?

What additional benefit do they get if I use their tools?

Every request goes to their LLM either way

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

#179

Post by keeda »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #165
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 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…

Interestingly I just skimmed through a video linked in TFA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlGRN8jh2RI and Boris Cherny explains that they chose TypeScript and React for Claude Code primarily because it was "on distribution" and the models back then just weren't good enough at other languages.

So it's interesting that Codex is written in Rust. Amongst other things it could mean OpenAI had more powerful models that could handle Rust, or their engineers had to handhold the agents a lot more up front, or Rust has structural advantages that could overcome being less represented in the training data.

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

#180

Post by cmrdporcupine »

keeda wrote: post #179
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interestingly I just skimmed through a video linked in TFA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlGRN8jh2RI and Boris Cherny explains that they chose TypeScript and React for Claude Code primarily because it was "on distribution" and the models back then just weren't good enough at other languages. So it's interesting that Codex is written in Rust. Amongst other things it could mean OpenAI had more powerful models that c…

Codex also I think put its first version out a bit later?

IMHO building the agent harness at least partially by hand is kind of key? I think going hogwild with "vibe coding" the actual harness is partially why CC is a bit of a rats nest. I think it's genuinely gotten out of control in terms of their ability to reason about it. Just my opinion, I'm sure Boris disagrees.

Also Codex itself distributed via NPM same as Claude. But it distributes a compiled Rust binary. Which is compiled from open source.

Post reply on HN