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Anthropic acquires Stainless

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Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#271

Post by strange_quark »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #57

I had never heard of Stainless, but it is deeply concerning that Anthropic are able to use monopoly money to kill software at their whim. First Bun, and now this. It's one thing for a corporation to do it with their own money, because at some point the board will ask them why they're wasting money. But Anthropic isn't even profitable. They're doing this with billions of dollars of borrowed money. Same thing with Open…

100% agree with everything you said. To your point, I don't understand why every acquisition like this isn't treated as a total failure on the part of the AI companies. If Claude is so good and software engineering is a dead career, why couldn't they have Claude Code fix its ridiculous resource consumption or rewrite itself in better fit language instead of buying a JS runtime? And I've never heard of Stainless, but generating API clients from a spec seems like the exact thing AI should be good at! It's totally ridiculous, the tech industry is completely rotten and I feel bad being a part of it.

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#272

Post by mattfrommars »

Incredible and congrats. I'm doing a bit retro that during the boom of AI and LLM, I was busy doing my day job in Java CRUD and figuring things out about micro services.

It had never occurred to me to go like, "I'm going to make an open source product for LLM". How is something like built from scratch from an idea? And what is the idea?

For example, it is fairly straight foreword to build a dash board of something with React as front end + backend API. This will be a typical web app.

But stainless is something different, from my limited knowledge in this space, its appears to be SDK, something like OpenAI SDK that reduces boilerplate code to interact with LLM providers by providing list of tools (MCP), temperature, context memory and bunch of other parameters...

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#273

Post by sakesun »

perplex wrote: post #236
EmeraldSky wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles. Yet look at the positions they’re hiring for in marketing, finance etc.: https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs Why aren’t they dogfooding their own products to replace such roles?

I've seen this at work. Giving Claude Code to a mediocre programmer gets you mediocre results. The really effective engineers with coding agent can accomplish a lot. Thousand monkeys...

...And then they train their next generation models with these elite engineers' skills.

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#274

Post by TylerH »

fnord77 wrote: post #266
rattray wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and their team is joining Anthropic to build, who knows, some dumb integration to make Hubspot data available in Claude, or something equally as boring. Fun fact, I named it "Stainless" after Stainless Steel pipes, likening ourselves to a high-end plumbing supply shop. If you look at the earliest versions of stainlessapi.com on archive.org, you'll see our original motto was "Quality fittings for your REST API".…

I can't even figure out what Stainless does (did)

Nothing (AI slop to create an unnecessary product, funded by A16Z).

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#275

Post by robocat »

kaashif wrote: post #258
tikhonj wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top trading firms had top-end recruiting figured out for ages, without jumping through all these hoops. There are plenty of other reasons to acqui-hire, but it is not the only or even the most effective way to hire the strongest engineers

Trading firms are surely not hiring for the broad founder-like skill set Anthropic is. Trading firms want narrow extreme technical brilliance.

> founder-like skill set

Successful founder is deeply filtering for very uncommon skills. Effectiveness, grit, decision making, independence, technical plus sales ability.

University is a shit filter in comparison.

The current word is "taste" but even that is way too narrow. Intelligence is close, although usually too academic (hence the VC uni dropout theme).

The other big problem with a independent capable people is that they rarely apply for jobs.

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#276

Post by bandrami »

abirch wrote: post #229
EmeraldSky wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles. Yet look at the positions they’re hiring for in marketing, finance etc.: https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs Why aren’t they dogfooding their own products to replace such roles?

AI can let you downsize the number of employees that you have and maintain the status quo or it can let you maintain the number of employees, reduce technical debt, improve products, and services.

But Anthropic is adding employees

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#277

Post by bandrami »

joe_mamba wrote: post #230
EmeraldSky wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles. Yet look at the positions they’re hiring for in marketing, finance etc.: https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs Why aren’t they dogfooding their own products to replace such roles?

>Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles. Who claimed that? Their customers will be happy if their product replaces all the junior positions and midwit developers off the payroll. then that's already a huge saving to any company's bottom line. Even if it doesn't directly replace workers, reducing the bargaining power of those spoiled SW devs and not hav…

> that's already a huge saving to any company's bottom line

Possibly not if they are paying the full cost of inference

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#278

Post by resonious »

joe_mamba wrote: post #230
EmeraldSky wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles. Yet look at the positions they’re hiring for in marketing, finance etc.: https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs Why aren’t they dogfooding their own products to replace such roles?

>Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles. Who claimed that? Their customers will be happy if their product replaces all the junior positions and midwit developers off the payroll. then that's already a huge saving to any company's bottom line. Even if it doesn't directly replace workers, reducing the bargaining power of those spoiled SW devs and not hav…

> Who claimed that?

Dario Amodei

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#279

Post by sunnybeetroot »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #92
sunnybeetroot wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did they acknowledge publicly mythos was fear mongered? Grok returned no evidence.

Maybe you should ask Grok to explain what GP said

I did and it couldn’t find evidence of Anthropic backtracking on Mythos fear mongering. I used Grok given it has access to all Twitter data and these kind of things would have been newsworthy on Twitter. The most I could find is this report showing Mythos isn’t any more groundbreaking that GPT 5.5. https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-openais-gpt-5...

If you or anyone had any evidence to support GP’s claim I’d love a reference to it.

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#280

Post by Scoundreller »

kaashif wrote: post #256
perplex wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this at work. Giving Claude Code to a mediocre programmer gets you mediocre results. The really effective engineers with coding agent can accomplish a lot. Thousand monkeys...

I've also seen this. But I'll extend it to saying that giving Claude to a bad programmer gives bad results. And seeing how people use it: good programmers review output and iterate to get better output. But bad programmers simply trust the output is good: they have no ability to review it themselves and often don't try.

As a mostly non-programmer it got me a lot done.

With about 5-10h over the weekend using free tier Claude and ChatGPT I managed to put together a scraper for a particular thing on a website I’m interested, grab the item images, do an initial pass with local OCR, if it hit some keywords, run openCV to crop for better OCR and dump the hits for further investigation.

Nothing particularly advanced but it would have taken me a horrendous amount of time without it to be half as good, like it did when I built a similar scraper 10 years ago.

Neither were very good code quality i’m sure.

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