alt Hacker News> Half their agentic usage is coding. When that's your reality, you train for it. You optimize the tool use, the file editing, the multi-step workflows - because that's what your paying users are actually doing. Google doesn't have that same pressure.
I wonder if this is a strategic choice — anthropic has decided to go after the developers, a motivated but limited market. Whereas the general populace might be more attracted to improved search tools, allowing Google/openai/etc to capture that larger market
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They’re doing a lot of dev hostile stuff:
- limiting model access when not using claude code
- claude code is a poorly made product. inefficient, buggy, etc. it shows they don’t read the code
- thousands of open GitHub issues, regressions introduced constantly
- dev hostile changes like the recent change to hide what the agent is actually doing
However, they are very good at marketing and hype. I’d recommend everyone give pi or opencode a try. My guess is anthropic actually wants vibe coders (a much broader market).
It's more likely that anthropic feels that if they can crack just programming, then their agents can rapidly do the legwork of surpassing the other labs.
> Google doesn't have that same pressure.
I doubt it. Gemini is heavily used internally for coding with integrations across Google's developer tooling. gemini-cli is not meaningfully different from claude code.
They are heavily dogfooding. Coding is needed to orchestrate the training of the next Claude model, data processing, RL environments, evals, scaffolding, UI, APIs, automated experiments, cluster management, etc etc. This allows them to get the next model faster and then get the next one etc.
Making a model that's great at other kinds of knowledge/office work is coincidental, it doesn't feed back directly into improving the model.