I generally agree that the harness isn't good, but it works and gets the job done and that seems to be the singular goal of the top 4 or 5 companies building them.

We saw what Claude Code looks like inside, and it's objectively bad-to-mediocre work, but the takeaway seemed to be 'yeah but it works and they've got crazy revenue'.

That's where we're at. The harness is kind of buggy. The LLM still wanders and cycles in it sometimes. It's a monolithic LLM herding machine. The underlying model is awesome and the harness works well enough to make it super effective.

We can do so much better but we could also do worse. It's a turbulent time. I'm not super pleased with it all the time, but it's hard to criticize in many ways. They're doing a good job under the circumstances.

I see it kind of like they're at war. If they slow down to perfect anything, they will begin to lose battles, and they will lose ground. It's a highly contentious space. The harness isn't as good as it could be under better circumstances, but it's arguably a necessary trade off Anthropic needs to make.