It was "good engineering" only because this was a new kind of product and the customers were not aware yet of what they should get for the money they pay.

The bad quality of the Claude Code program has resulted in increased costs for the customers (very high memory consumption, slow execution, higher and sometimes much higher token count than necessary), and even for Anthropic, but nobody was aware of this, because there was no previous experience to compare with.

This kind of sloppy vibe coding works only when there is no competition. When the competition comes with something much more efficient, e.g. pi-dev, the inefficient application will be eliminated.

Anthropic attempts to protect their badly written program by forbidding its customers to use other coding harnesses, but this will not be able to protect them from competition for long.

If you are the first on a new market without competitors, then indeed time-to-market matters more than anything else and the sloppiest vibe-coded application is the best if it can be delivered immediately.

However, one must plan to replace that with a better and more efficient application ASAP, because the advantage of being the first is only temporary.

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simianwords 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Your kind of critique forgets the tradeoff between getting something out quick vs doing something slowly and nicely.

If you choose slowly, you are depriving your users of the value from your app for a long time. It’s not as clear a choice as you think

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adrian_b 3 days ago | parent [-]

Have you read my entire comment?

I have already said that sometimes time-to-market is the most important, so that should be the priority, but the advantage of delivering immediately the application is only temporary, so you must improve quickly your first possibly vibe-coded implementation, otherwise better alternatives will be delivered by others.

Claude Code is an obvious example of this, because it has practically opened a new market, but because it has remained a mess now there are better alternatives.

What is wrong is not generating instantly a proof-of-concept application that barely works and using it in the beginning, but continuing to build upon that even after you had enough time to rewrite it.

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all_factz 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

They would have to trade off building new features for refactoring. It seems they consider shipping more important, and that as long as the existing features mostly work, that’s good enough. As customers, we have to ask: do we agree? Do we want features over stability? I think the answer is yes, at least for me (and the market seems to agree). But it’s certainly a risk Anthropic is taking.

I will note that this strategy only really makes sense because Anthropic controls the compute. If open-source harnesses could also use Claude max plans, then they’d have to focus much more on stability and quality, or just build an open-source harness themselves, or probably better yet, get out of the harness-building business altogether. So they’re gambling on staying ahead of open-source models, which seems like it’s been a good bet so far, but we’ll see.

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simianwords 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The advantage is definitely not temporary as can be seen by how many people use codex vs Claude code. Claude code works just fine and I have zero issues at usability level. Could they have more features? Yes but I see that they are shipping quick. It is obvious to me that they took the right balance between time to market and clan code

	▲	nonameiguess 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		These discussions are insane. No agentic coding product, including Claude Code, has existed for a full year yet, but people are stating with extreme confidence who has "won" the competition to be the leading or even only provider of this kind of product and having heated arguments over whether or not we can consider the current state of the market to be temporary or not. Imagine having this same argument about Lycos versus Yahoo! in 1995.

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motbus3 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I understand your thoughts, but I don't think they will ever make that existing code good. Not sure if they want to and not sure if they can.

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motbus3 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I guess that now people are more aware on how bad their software is, we cannot blame the "super intelligent ai" to not be ready yet.

The amount of regex matching people found os staggering