So.. their billing system is using '$>claude | jq' somewhere?
HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
341–350 of 568 posts
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#342> 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.
> This is very surprising. Dude what is it with HN and using extra soft words that don't at all mean the actual thing they're supposed to mean. Nothing there is a surprise. This is very bullshit and probably (in a better world for sure) very illegal. Can't bill more than you've actually delivered and what the customer in advance agreed on. Stop with this god-awful corporate-washed lingo. You're not being professional…
Can't say I disagree with you, this is, indeed, a bunch of bullshit, and a regulator should fine Anthropic for these shenanigans.
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then you use the smallest, cheapest local model to keep their AI bot busy
My insurance company and Synology would be my first targets. I'd gladly throw ~1k at each. Of course, I suspect the true business model to be to do nothing. You sell the "service" to people customers, but your enterprise customers pay you a subscription fee to not execute the order. ELaaS: Everybody Loses as a Service
Take it further.
Tell the original customer that if the company pays to have this not done to them, they will get a portion of the proceeds. Many customers might even end up getting more back than they were originally stiffed for.
Scale it enough and it would be stupid for a customer NOT to do this
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#344Hey everyone, Thariq from the Claude Code team. We've been on this since the bug surfaced. Everyone affected is getting a full refund and an extra grant of usage credits equal to their monthly subscription as our apology. You can see my original post here: https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245 . We’re still working on sending emails to everyone affected. Our support flow wasn't set up to route a complex bug…
But why did you say that > 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. What prevents you from issuing compensations?
To be fair, that looks like an LLM response.
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The future is going to be arguing with AI chat agents designed to waste your time. It's phone menus, but worse - at least most phone menus can get you to a human if you figure out the right incantation. This issue would have never gotten a response if it didn't go viral.
I don't think it's as one sided as you think. I made a skill that has been exceptional at using Claude to handling support and getting me refunds with minimal friction on my end. It's got many pathways for escalation if customer support is unresponsive: social, TrustPilot, etc.
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#346Hey everyone, Thariq from the Claude Code team. We've been on this since the bug surfaced. Everyone affected is getting a full refund and an extra grant of usage credits equal to their monthly subscription as our apology. You can see my original post here: https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245 . We’re still working on sending emails to everyone affected. Our support flow wasn't set up to route a complex bug…
Please do explain why someone at Anthropic decided, on purpose, to write code that says something along the lines of: "if ( git_history_str contains "HERMES.md" ... )" then { bill more money }
Somebody (or something) wrote this code. This bug wouldn't be happening for any other reason. It's not a glitch, an oversight, a feature gap, or a temporary outage. It is a piece of written code in your system.
Everyone here is upset about the $200, which is probably much less money than the time that engineer spent ranting about the overcharge on GitHub.
The real problem in my mind is that that bit of code existed in the first place.
Why?
Are you vibe coding your billing!?
Without review!?!?
Or worse, a human being decided to add this to your code base? And nobody noticed or flagged it during code review?
Or much, much worse, Anthropic is purposefully ripping off customers?
This deserves a thorough post-mortem.
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#347Hey everyone, Thariq from the Claude Code team. We've been on this since the bug surfaced. Everyone affected is getting a full refund and an extra grant of usage credits equal to their monthly subscription as our apology. You can see my original post here: https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245 . We’re still working on sending emails to everyone affected. Our support flow wasn't set up to route a complex bug…
You also seem to have a bug where people get randomly invoiced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693679 I got a random invoice for $45.08 back in March, despite not having auto top up enabled. Trying to reach support met with a brick wall. Based on the post I linked to, I'm not the only one facing this problem.
I also got randomly invoiced $5.00 for absolutely no reason on the 28th. I don't have auto-reload enabled, nor did I explicitly buy extra usage.
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#348> 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.
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Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#349HERMES.md -- so beyond fraudulently billing their customer, this is also exposing plainly anti-competitive conduct against the Nous Research open source AI agent software which competes with claude code by intentionally selectively overbilling hermes users?
I saw this bug mentioned on Reddit a few days ago when it first got reported and someone said it was also triggered by certain file names used in OpenClaw.
I don't think it's as sinister as you're implying. I think it's part of them disallowing 3rd party clients from using Claude Code subscription and someone making a bad assumption that certain files in a repo being a good signal that someone is attempting to bypass those rules.
It's still not a good look for Anthropic, but I don't take this as a secret attempt to sabotage a competitor. I take it as them trying to enforce rules that they had very publicly announced.
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#350Hey everyone, Thariq from the Claude Code team. We've been on this since the bug surfaced. Everyone affected is getting a full refund and an extra grant of usage credits equal to their monthly subscription as our apology. You can see my original post here: https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245 . We’re still working on sending emails to everyone affected. Our support flow wasn't set up to route a complex bug…
Please do explain why someone at Anthropic decided, on purpose, to write code that says something along the lines of: "if ( git_history_str contains "HERMES.md" ... )" then { bill more money } Somebody (or something ) wrote this code. This bug wouldn't be happening for any other reason. It's not a glitch, an oversight, a feature gap, or a temporary outage. It is a piece of written code in your system. Everyone here i…
Anthropic obviously vibe code everything and it shows