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Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

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Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#231

Post by lossyalgo »

oblio wrote: post #223
semiquaver wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the suite of linters, test suite and documentation in your codebase cannot be equated to “a better prompt” except in the sense that all feedback of any kind is part of what the model uses to make decisions about how to act.

What if LLMs, at the end of the day are machines, so for now generally dumber than humans and the best they can provide are at most statistically median implementantions (and if 80% of code out there is crap, the median will be low)? Now that's a scary thought that basically goes against "1 trillion dollars can't be wrong". Now, LLMs are probably great range extenders, but they're not wonder weapons.

Also who is to say what is actually crap? Writing great code is completely dependent on context. An AI could exclusively be trained on the most beautiful and clean code in the world, yet if it chooses the wrong paradigm in the wrong context, it doesn't matter how beautiful that code is - it's still gonna be totally broken code.

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#232

Post by lossyalgo »

pjc50 wrote: post #78
pzs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related question: how do we resolve the problem that we sign a blank cheque for the autonomous agents to use however many tokens they deem necessary to respond to your request? The analogy from team management: you don't just ask someone in your team to look into something only to realize three weeks later (in the absence of any updates) that they got nowhere with a problem that you expected to take less than a day t…

> blank cheque The Bing AI summary tells me that AI companies invested $202.3 billion in AI last year. Users are going to have to pay that back at some point. This is going to be even worse as a cost control situation than AWS.

Didn't you hear? Ads are coming! (well not to Claude, because I guess they plan to somehow get unlimited SV funding?!)

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#233

Post by lossyalgo »

jorl17 wrote: post #164
jwr wrote: post #98

Anthropic is walking a very thin line here. The competition between models is intense and the only differentiator right now is the so-called harness that gets put over them. Anthropic needs a niche and they tried to find one by addressing developers. And they have been doing very well! What I think they are forgetting in this silly stubbornness is that competition is really fierce, and just as they have gained apprec…

Is Claude Code really what makes them money, or is it their models? Both? Neither? Do they believe that owning the harness (Claude Code) itself will lead to significantly more money? I can sort of see that, but I wouldn't think they are necessarily betting on it? I use Anthropic's models wherever, whenever I can, be it cursor, copilot, you name it. I can't stand Claude Code for some reason, but I'll kill for those mo…

Well they can just wait until other AI companies like Cursor become dependent on them, then jack up the prices without warning[0].

[0] https://generativeai.pub/cursors-pricing-change-sparks-outra...

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#234

Post by cesarvarela »

lacoolj wrote: post #181
ChicagoDave wrote: post #179

I noticed this too, but I think there's a much bigger problem. The way Claude does research has dramatically changed for the worse. Instead of piping through code logically, it's now spawning dozens of completely unrelated research threads to look at simple problems. I let it spin for over 30 minutes last night before realizing it was just "lost". I have since been looking for these moments and killing it immediately…

Was this from a specific model or all of them?

It is not related to the model, I think, it is the newer Claude Code versions.

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#235

Post by segmondy »

charliea0 wrote: post #60
the_harpia_io wrote: post #13

[flagged]

I assume it's to make it harder for competitors to train on Claude's Chain-of-Thought.

It is, but Anthropic is deluded if they think they can gain a moat from that. They gladly copy/borrow ideas from other projects that's why they are paranoid that folks are doing the same.

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#237

Post by epiccoleman »

skerit wrote: post #206
epiccoleman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you paying per-token after Anthropic closed the loophole on letting you log in to OpenCode?

When did they successfully close the loophole? I know they tried a few times, but even the last attempt from a week or two ago was circumvented rather easily.

Oh, sounds like I'm just out of the loop then. I had an Opencode install that I was planning to check out, and then like, the next day there was the announcement from a week or two ago, so I just kinda shrugged and forgot about it.

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#238

Post by adastra22 »

thesz wrote: post #219
adastra22 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a voting algorithm that we use, but we're not at the level of confidential disclosure if we proceed further in this discussion. There's lots of research out there into unbiased voting algorithms for consensus systems.

You conveniently decided not to answer my question about quality of the solutions to vote on (ranking FizzBuzz memorization). To me, our discussion shows that what you presented as a simple thing is not simple at all, even voting is complex, and actually getting a good result is so hard it warrants omitting answer altogether.

Yeah, you've got unrealistic expectations if you expect me to divulge my company's confidential IP in a HN comment.

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#239

Post by gitaarik »

hippo22 wrote: post #161
the_harpia_io wrote: post #13

[flagged]

You look at what Claude’s doing to make sure it doesn’t go off the rails? Personally, I either move on to another ask in parallel or just read my phone. Trying to catch things by manually looking at its output doesn’t seem like a recipe for success.

I often keep an eye on my running agents, and occasionally feel the need to correct them or to give them a bit more info because I see them sometimes diverge into areas I don't want them to go. Because they might spend much time and energy on something I already know is not gonna work.

Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

#240

Post by aadarshkumaredu »

Calling it “hiding” assumes the default should be full exposure of internal reasoning. That’s not obviously true.

There are three separate layers here:

What the model internally computes

What the product exposes to the user

What developers need for debugging and control

Most outrage conflates all three.

Exposing raw reasoning tokens sounds transparent, but in practice it often leaks messy intermediate steps, half-formed logic, or artifacts that were never meant to be user-facing. That doesn’t automatically make a product more trustworthy. Sometimes it just creates noise.

The real issue is not whether internal thoughts are hidden. It’s whether developers can:

• Inspect tool calls • See execution traces • Debug failure modes • Reproduce behavior deterministically

If those are restricted, that’s a serious product problem. If what’s being “hidden” is just chain-of-thought verbosity, that’s a UI decision, not deception.

There’s also a business angle people don’t want to acknowledge. As models become productized infrastructure, vendors will protect internal mechanics the same way cloud providers abstract away hardware-level details. Full introspection is rarely a permanent feature in mature platforms.

Developers don’t actually want full transparency. They want reliability and control. If the system behaves predictably and exposes the right operational hooks, most people won’t care about hidden internal tokens.

The real question is: where should the abstraction boundary sit for a developer tool?

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