Unless I'm mixing up stuff, this was addressed explicitly by an Antrophoc Dev on HN (I am not a developer, don't use the product, have zero equine animals in the game :)
Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it
91–100 of 257 posts
Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work at a company with approximately $1 million in revenue per engineer and multiple 10+ year old codebases. We use agents very aggressively, combined with beads, tons of tests, etc. You treat them like any developer, and review the code in PRs, provide feedback, have the agents act, and merge when it's good. We have gained tremendous velocity and have been able to tackle far more out of the backlog that we'd been…
Why are you using experience and authoritative framing about a technology we’ve been using for less than 6 months?
The person they are responding with dictated an authoritative framing that isn’t true.
I know people have emotional responses to this, but if you think people aren’t effectively using agents to ship code in lots of domains, including existing legacy code bases, you are incorrect.
Do we know exactly how to do that well, of course not, we still fruitlessly argue about how humans should write software. But there is a growing body of techniques on how to do agent first development, and a lot of those techniques are naturally converging because they work.
Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it
#93Earlier 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.
> Users are going to have to pay that back at some point.
That’s not how VC investments work. Just because something costs a lot to build doesn’t mean that anyone will pay for it. I’m pretty sure I haven’t worked for any startup that ever returned a profit to its investors.
I suspect you are right in that inference costs currently seem underpriced so users will get nickel-and-dinked of a while until the providers leverage a better margin per user.
Some of the players are aiming for AGI. If they hit that goal, the cost is easily worth it. The remaining players are trying to capture market share and build a moat where none currently exists.
Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's about catching when it goes off the rails before it makes a mess The latest "meta" in AI programming appears to be agent teams (or swarms or clusters or whatever) that are designed to run for long periods of time autonomously. Through that lens, these changes make more sense. They're not designing UX for a human sitting there watching the agent work. They're designing for horizontally scaling agents that work…
None of those wild experiments are running on a "real", existing codebase that is more than 6 months old. The thing they don't talk about is that nobody outside these AI companies wants to vibe code with a 10 year old codebase with 2000 enterprise customers. As you as you start to work with a codebase that you care about and need to seriously maintain, you'll see what a mess these agents make.
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Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you using experience and authoritative framing about a technology we’ve been using for less than 6 months?
The person they are responding with dictated an authoritative framing that isn’t true. I know people have emotional responses to this, but if you think people aren’t effectively using agents to ship code in lots of domains, including existing legacy code bases, you are incorrect. Do we know exactly how to do that well, of course not, we still fruitlessly argue about how humans should write software. But there is a gr…
I think programming effectiveness is inherently tied to the useful life of software, and we will need to see that play out.
This is not to suggest that AI tools do not have value but that “I just have agents writing code and it works great!” Has yet to hit its test.
Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's about catching when it goes off the rails before it makes a mess The latest "meta" in AI programming appears to be agent teams (or swarms or clusters or whatever) that are designed to run for long periods of time autonomously. Through that lens, these changes make more sense. They're not designing UX for a human sitting there watching the agent work. They're designing for horizontally scaling agents that work…
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…
This seems pretty in line with how you’d manage a human - you give it a time constraint. a human isn't guaranteed to fix a problem either, and humans are paid by time
Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of those wild experiments are running on a "real", existing codebase that is more than 6 months old. The thing they don't talk about is that nobody outside these AI companies wants to vibe code with a 10 year old codebase with 2000 enterprise customers. As you as you start to work with a codebase that you care about and need to seriously maintain, you'll see what a mess these agents make.
I maintain serious code bases and I use LLM agents (and agent teams) plenty -- I just happen to review the code they write, I demand they write the code in a reviewable way, and use them mostly for menial tasks that are otherwise unpleasant timesinks I have to do myself. There are many people like me, that just quietly use these tools to automate the boring chores of dealing with mature production code bases. We are…
It's not called vibe coding then.
Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it
#98Anthropic 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 appreciation from developers, they might very quickly lose it because of this sort of stupidity (for no good reason).
Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's about catching when it goes off the rails before it makes a mess The latest "meta" in AI programming appears to be agent teams (or swarms or clusters or whatever) that are designed to run for long periods of time autonomously. Through that lens, these changes make more sense. They're not designing UX for a human sitting there watching the agent work. They're designing for horizontally scaling agents that work…
None of those wild experiments are running on a "real", existing codebase that is more than 6 months old. The thing they don't talk about is that nobody outside these AI companies wants to vibe code with a 10 year old codebase with 2000 enterprise customers. As you as you start to work with a codebase that you care about and need to seriously maintain, you'll see what a mess these agents make.
I feel like you could have correctly stated this a few months ago, but the way this is "solved" is by multiple agents that babysit each other and review their output - it's unreasonably effective.
You can get extremely good results assuming your spec is actually correct (and you're willing to chew through massive quantities of tokens / wait long enough).
Re: Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it
#100How long until the status display is just an optimized display of what the human wants to see while being fully disconnected from what is actually happening? Seems like this is the most probable outcome: LLM gets to fix the issues undisrupted while keeping the operator happy.
heh kind of like giving an engineering manager a nice dashboards with lots of graphs and knobs. it keeps them out of your hair.