alt Hacker News> it shows weakness in a vulnerable way. It is human. It is not strategic.
Are you complaining that the answer is too human and that a multi billion company should not allow a human who made a mistake to own the mistake in public, being honest about what happened in this case?? Would you prefer complete silence from them like you most certainly would from Google or Apple.
That sounds incredibly sad to me, we don’t even expect humanity from big tech since that’s what we’ve become accustomed to seeing.
fTR both the Anthropic dev response and the blog post seem to believe that a single person can be blamed for something like this, which I wholeheartedly disagree with! Nobody reviews your changes? There’s no QA? Not even an AI checking the release notes match the diff from the previous release?? Blaming a dev for “putting a serious bug in production” sounds really 90’s to me.
Replies
Hey, mistakes happen. As we saw with the recent AWS billing issue. But Anthropic is a leading company that makes cutting-edge AI which will kill people. It’s literally a matter of life and death and at this point, it is the place to be if you want to be the best. So as an institution, I don’t want human answers, I want the right, most professional answers. We used to have it. Human responses with every word chosen to maximize every aspect that needs to be maximized, by engineer grey beards no less! And maybe they don’t want to have it. That’s why I made my original comment. Maybe it’s a strategic decision to allow this kind of accountability in a public forum. I think it’s wanton but others might find it refreshing.
And to clarify why it even matters to me is, these firms are in competition within the US and outside. Every decision by every person has an effect. Moves like this have a cost. I’d have imagined that at the level these companies operate, any public facing engineer only communicates correctly with the proper perspectives in mind... We have more data points now we didn’t have before.
To drive the point home, now we and every other competitor knows, for free, processes that are going on at Anthropic, that in my opinion make them (as a company) look weak. I
Not the person you asked.
I expect the person responsible for Claude Code to explain the reason this direction was chosen.
It is ridiculous to expect individual contributors to do so.
Where is the leadership? Can individual contributors decide to significantly alter the workflow of millions of customers? Were any customers consulted at all?
> we don’t even expect humanity from big tech since that’s what we’ve become accustomed to seeing.
There is a difference between humanity in communication and saying the problem was a human choice.
You can have humane communication about a system failure and actors in that system. Or you can have cold matter of fact press release voice about an individual persons failure.
I don’t think anthropic statement was any less distant than other times big tech brushes off a whiopsie. They just used personal language to ingratiate the reader.
> It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it.
In a sense yes, I think it is actually reasonable to complain that the answer is too human/individualized here because it likely wasn't this individual human who made this decision, but he's making it seem like it is so that we are less likely to blame the company as a whole.
It's counterintuitive but when one singular person owns up to the problems that, at the root, are actually systemic to the decision making of the whole company it plays on the psychology of us as humans.
"I'm in charge of maintaining it" - This is not the same as "I'm in charge of all of the decision-making behind the implementation of how this tool works for users".
I actually agree exactly with your last point that one single person taking blame is counter-intuitive/non-productive here, but it actually seems like what these large companies desire is to have one person be the fall guy to play on people's sympathies.
If this were some small startup it would make sense but this is not that case.