alt Hacker NewsNo 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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> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
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> 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".