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Claude Sonnet 4.6

anthropic.com

871–880 of 1001 posts

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#871

The weirdest thing about this AI revolution is how smooth and continuous it is. If you look closely at differences between 4.6 and 4.5, it’s hard to see the subtle details. A year ago today, Sonnet 3.5 (new), was the newest model. A week later, Sonnet 3.7 would be released. Even 3.7 feels like ancient history! But in the gradient of 3.5 to 3.5 (new) to 3.7 to 4 to 4.1 to 4.5, I can’t think of one moment where I saw e…

> Or, somehow, against all probability and plausibility, are we all still early?

What does this even mean? It's obvious we're still early and I think it's a very common opinion.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#872
post #862
post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that? Troubleshooting and fixing the big mess that nobody fully understands when it eventually falls over?

> Troubleshooting and fixing the big mess that nobody fully understands If that's actually the future of humans in software engineering then that sounds like a nightmare career that I want no part of. Just the same as I don't want anything to do with the gigantic mess of Cobal and Java powering legacy systems today. And I also push back on the idea that llms can't troubleshoot and fix things, and therefore will event…

My experience so far has been they are somewhat good at troubleshooting code, patterns, etc, that exist in the publicly viewable sphere of stuff it's trained on, where common error messages and pitfalls are "google-able"

They are much worse at code/patterns/apis that were locally created, including things created by the same LLM that's trying to fix a problem.

I think LLMs are also creating a decline in the amount of good troubleshooting information being published on the internet. So less future content to scrape.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#873
post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Last I checked, the tractor and plow are doing a lot more work than 3 farmers, yet we've got more jobs and grow more food. Not sure when you checked. In the US more food is grown for sure. For example just since 2007 it has grown from $342B to $417B, adjusted for inflation[1]. But employment has shrunk massively, from 14M in 1910 to around 3M now[2] - and 1910 was well after the introduction of tractors (plows not…

That's his point. Drastically reducing agricultural employment didn't keep us from getting fed (and led to a significantly richer population overall -- there's a reason people left the villages for the industrial cities)

I'm not sure that's what they meant. Read like this:

> the tractor and plow are doing a lot more work than 3 farmers, yet we've got more jobs and grow more food.

it sounds to me like they mean "more job and grow more food" in the same context as "the tractor and plow [that] are doing a lot more work than 3 farmers"

But you could be right in which case I agree with them.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#874
post #867

The demise of saas has been overplayed imho. When companies buy software they are essentially buying something that solves a problem and the insurance that comes with that. Part of that means they get to pick up the phone and complain if something doesn't work and someone on the other end has to listen. There is also a strong community aspect to software, someone asks for an enhancement others can benefit etc. I just…

Does this matter if a 2 person startup can blow them away on price?

A 2 person startup cannot provide a dedicated developer for your account, a personal contact for each of their thousand customers, is at high risk of being acquired/changing their business model/founders abandoning it, etc. For enterprise, long-term stability and personal contact matters more than price. A typical SaaS contract is 0.x% of yearly revenue of big corps and nobody wants to be the one person risking the business for such miniscule savings. Another often overlooked part: Employees are the biggest cost center, much larger than any contract. So retraining a single team of 10 employees can often be more expensive and more disruptive to the business than just sticking with a legacy provider and established processes.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#875
post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trained out No need. Just add one more correction to the system prompt. It's amusing to see hardcore believers of this tech doing mental gymnastics and attacking people whenever evidence of there being no intelligence in these tools is brought forth. Then the tool is "just" a statistical model, and clearly the user is holding it wrong, doesn't understand how it works, etc.

It's a lot simpler. These models are not optimized for ambiguous riddles.

There's nothing ambiguous about this question[1][2]. The tool simply gives different responses at random.

And why should a "superintelligent" tool need to be optimized for riddles to begin with? Do humans need to be trained on specific riddles to answer them correctly?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47054076

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037125

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#876
post #867

The demise of saas has been overplayed imho. When companies buy software they are essentially buying something that solves a problem and the insurance that comes with that. Part of that means they get to pick up the phone and complain if something doesn't work and someone on the other end has to listen. There is also a strong community aspect to software, someone asks for an enhancement others can benefit etc. I just…

Does this matter if a 2 person startup can blow them away on price?

This is my take as well. Everyone (correctly, in my opinion) assumes that customers won't bother to recreate a SaaS themselves with AI because it requires at least some skill, time, and knowledge.

But SaaS doesn't die because of all the customers creating one-off solutions themselves. It does the "desktop program" -> "mobile app" pricing transition.

It drops monumentally in price because now a very small (sub five) group can clone an experience and charge pennies on the dollar.

Why pay $15/month/user if some other reasonably stable company offers you $1/month/user?

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#877

The demise of saas has been overplayed imho. When companies buy software they are essentially buying something that solves a problem and the insurance that comes with that. Part of that means they get to pick up the phone and complain if something doesn't work and someone on the other end has to listen. There is also a strong community aspect to software, someone asks for an enhancement others can benefit etc. I just…

I think it's a move from feature-centric SaaS to data-centric SaaS. You can say that a SaaS consists of two components, the features and the data on which those features operate. If the cost of feature development goes to 0, and development speed goes to infinity, you can no longer compete on features alone. The Constraint shifts; it's no longer what features you can deliver, it's whether you have access to enough da…

Yes, data is the new playing field, but if a specialised tool can do more with less data it'll still win market share. We can generalise to say that won't be the case in XYZ years due to generative AI but i'm not buying it yet.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#878
post #867

The demise of saas has been overplayed imho. When companies buy software they are essentially buying something that solves a problem and the insurance that comes with that. Part of that means they get to pick up the phone and complain if something doesn't work and someone on the other end has to listen. There is also a strong community aspect to software, someone asks for an enhancement others can benefit etc. I just…

Does this matter if a 2 person startup can blow them away on price?

You'd be surprised how little price factors into the equation for decisions like this. Anyone that tried to acquire customers as a fresh start-up knows that trust means a lot to established companies.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#879

The demise of saas has been overplayed imho. When companies buy software they are essentially buying something that solves a problem and the insurance that comes with that. Part of that means they get to pick up the phone and complain if something doesn't work and someone on the other end has to listen. There is also a strong community aspect to software, someone asks for an enhancement others can benefit etc. I just…

> I just don't see a world where every corporation is building their own accounts, crm, hr software.

This is the world we live in. Majority of top level managements are now reevaluating each and every 3rd party tool they use and prospects of re-building that themselves. Don't forget that at those levels they are easily dealing with at least six figures per tool.

The tools are complex, clunky to use, complaints are often directed to the tools. We now the pain points, we know what the tools do, how hard would it be to instruct AIs to make better version addressing the deficiencies we face?

At some point some of them will realize the old truth that any business system is at least as complex as the business process it models. Those processes are indeed quite complex.

But you don't know what you don't know and extreme carefulness does not get you promoted to the top level management. So will indeed see attempts (typically unsuccessful) to rewrite common 3rd party tools left and right.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#880
post #867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this matter if a 2 person startup can blow them away on price?

A 2 person startup cannot provide a dedicated developer for your account, a personal contact for each of their thousand customers, is at high risk of being acquired/changing their business model/founders abandoning it, etc. For enterprise, long-term stability and personal contact matters more than price. A typical SaaS contract is 0.x% of yearly revenue of big corps and nobody wants to be the one person risking the b…

I'm not sure this matters. Enterprise is always slow to move anyways, and frankly, not usually worth the trouble for early startups.

What happens instead is that the new cheaper competitor proves themselves in the 1-10 seat company range for a few years. Then 5 to 10 years later, when the enterprise is evaluating renewals again, they go "Why are you so much more expensive? Look "X-two-guys" over there only charge 5% as much as you for the same product!" to the current SaaS they buy from.

Will they all move? No. But enough will, eventually.

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