No wonder most people at Anthropic believe our jobs are in jeopardy, they've already made a system wherein the machines are treating them like pets.

I really don't get the tendency here from Anthropic to describe what's most likely churn? A high pressure amount of changes/PRs a day on a TUI to wrap a while loop? I'm not going to be a reductionist here so I'm going to cut it off there, I'm positive that the complexity of handling multiple terminal emulators is something that needs some handling (even if doing their own rendering engine was a self made problem). Yes I've vibe coded my own harness from scratch without writing any of it, I still know how it works.

I'm also not sure that they addressed point 2 in any actual capacity? They say "the system verifies itself" which is cool and is something that automated testing has done for decades, but they eschew the mental model of how the system works as a whole and prefer instead to have the LLM focus and summarize a slice of the system when they need to know about it or ask for it. But.... That's not knowledge? That's just search a la google? And thus seems to be subject to the same problems where the quality of your search dictates the quality of your knowledge that you surface at any given time?

N.B. Changed "1000 PRs" to "A high pressure amount" to be vague since the article is vague here on what CC undergoes.

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jonahx 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> have the LLM focus and summarize a slice of the system when they need to know about it or ask for it. But.... That's not knowledge? That's just search a la google? And thus seems to be subject to the same problems where the quality of your search dictates the quality of your knowledge that you surface at any given time?

This is the crux. Take pause, because hidden here is a sea-change in our fundamental trust model of software...

There is no longer anyone to turn to if this system breaks by, eg, having a critical bug that no one can figure out. No causal model in anyone's head that can be appealed to, to slowly and methodically debug. By design, the system is too large for that, and everything hinges on Claude itself being able to find and understand the right slice of the system in any situation. As long as that very new invariant holds, everything will be all right. If it fails catastrophically, there is no recovery. You are the owner of a recovered alien spacecraft with tech you have no hope of understanding.

The new trust model is: We trust Claude to always understand the system enough to debug anything or make any reasonable change we could want. The risk might be worth the reward. But it's worth explicitly laying out the deal we're making.

Tbf, it's worth pointing out that many large legacy systems already work like that (sort of), with "Claude" replaced by "whoever happens to be maintaining it this year".

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patrickdavey 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

"Tbf, it's worth pointing that many large legacy systems already work like that (sort of), with "Claude" replaced by "whoever happens to be maintaining it this year".

The real difference as I see it is that in the human maintained old style system, the human would take things slowly and ensure they understand any changes. Claude let loose will just say "yes, I know how to do this" and bork the system, because it doesn't have a concept of humbleness in the face of complexity!

	▲	daveguy 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Not only that, when you have a human designed and implemented system you know it's at least coherent enough that someone understood it at some point well enough to take responsibility for it. No such assurance with the llms.

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peab 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

most large software companies are already too large for anyone to have a complete mental model of.

The idea that someone at say, Google, will be able to fit even half of the system architecture in their heads is not realistic. It also hinges on being able to find and understand the right slice of the system in any situation.

But we have all sorts of guardrails to make that easy - i.e logs, traces, etc

	▲	jonahx 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Right, that's what I alluded to in my last sentence. It is true that this gamble has existed in the form you mention for many years. Still, I sense something new here, both in scale and in the attitude of trust. Also, I find those massive, incomprehensible human-built systems frightening too.

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Terr_ an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> wherein the machines are treating them like pets

I know some people will groan hearing the phrase again, but: "Reverse centaur." A centaur is a synergistic combination of two things, but now those things are in the wrong position: The human is the computer's tool.

Naturally, how "wrong" it is tends to depend on whether you ask the people who do all the work or the people who own all the computer-capital.

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hgh 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it's just a different focus on what matters.

There's clearly enormous (human) work that goes in to building and tuning their models.

The software they develop around their model is, relatively, trivial. It's not clear that enormous amounts of (human) energy need to go in to that code.

It seems largely a function of applying human energy towards the things that are marginally most important to generating you money and putting you in front of competitors.

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xyzsparetimexyz 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>The software they develop around their model is, relatively, trivial

30,000 changes a day is not my idea of trivial.

	▲	californical 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I mean a harness around a model is pretty trivial, I’ve also built one (heavily relying on LLMs to build it). With a few thousand lines of code over the course of a week or so of my limited evening energy, I have agentic loops, ide integration, and a limited selection of custom tools which are all very safe (no unintended changes), along with session management and awareness of git. It works great, is customizable, and allows integration with any provider. If they need 30k changes per day, it’s not due to the nature of the problem!

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status_quo69 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, sure we can assume that (although the Anthropic article from the other day say that claude mostly builds Claude) but this is the Claude Code team which, I again am assuming so I could be wrong, focuses on the TUI/CLI interface to those models, not necessarily the models themselves. That coupled with the fact that this is how a large portion of their clientele interact with their moat, it would be odd to me if they didn't apply significant work towards this thing to keep the hype or productivity train moving

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frereubu 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My favourite quote at the moment: "May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?" Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872

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markbao an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I really don't get the tendency here from Anthropic to describe what's most likely churn? 1000 "PRs" a day on a TUI to wrap a while loop?

From the article, the 30,000 changes a month are in the monorepo, and Claude Code is in a separate repo. So it’s not the TUI that has 1,000 PRs a day.

I could easily see 1,000 PRs a day on the backend. Big tech was doing more than that pre-AI.

	▲	status_quo69 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Fair enough, I did invent the 1000 a day because the article was vague, I'll edit my submission accordingly to also be vague

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ls-a 5 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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