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Discussion (186 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Layer-wise, the app is pretty far removed from request routing to GPU pools.
I'm not saying Anthropic isn't to blame for a system that is literally approaching one-nine uptime; they certainly are. I am saying that jumping to the "it must be vibe coding's fault" is an emotional confirmation-bias belief, not an evidence-based belief.
Instead, the whole system just shits the bed, catastrophically.
But that's really not what they have. They have AI experts who are creating incredible LLMs.
Everything else is more than meh: Claude Code is really bad. Such a turd would never have gained any traction if it wasn't for the LLMs behind it.
I use LLMs to code daily (Claude Code still, mind you, for I didn't take the time to switch yet) and these modesl are both amazing and pathetic.
If you don't verify everything they output, they do the absolute craziest thing imaginable.
One example is I got an Anthropic model notice a "pattern" in range bound integer values. I had them range bound between, e.g., 0xCAFE0000 and 0xCAFEFFFF. And at some point a comparison/validation was needed and instead of doing an integer comparison the Anthropic model went ballistic: instead of doing an integer comparison it converted the numbers to a string, then started doing substring matching on "0xCAFE" and went even more "expert" by verifying at which position the match was happening. All that while explaining why it couldn't possibly fail.
Why did it do that? Very likely because, in a comment, it saw "0xCAFE..." as a string. And the thing saw a pattern.
Can you believe it? There's a pattern. So it must light up connections. We've got a pattern!
Now amount of kludge, hidden pre-processing, hidden post-processing is fixing the "quality" of the code produced by something that, instead of doing an integer comparison, converts things to string and then does substring searches and indexes computation.
There's no fixing that.
Yesterday: had to use three guard clauses before pushing data... Two of the three "logic gates" (as the model would explain they were, which is kinda right) he got right. The third one: same thing... It was planning to go ballistic, introduce countless lines of code, insane abstractions, to make a test that was solved with a one line timestamp comparison.
It's because it does things like that that the people who explain that they don't code anymore are delusional if they think this gives, as of today, quality code.
It's like that other dude who was happy to produce 37 K LOC per day and counting.
> ... it really says something about the quality of the world's best agentically produced code
Oh it is totally shit code. But if you monitor everything and vet everything they do, it's helpful.
I find these LLMs way more helpful at finding the source of bugs (not fixing them: finding them, which is 90% of the job anyway) and at acting like rubber-ducks then at writing code.
Claude Code sucks. Claude Code CLI sucks. Their only "solutions" to all problems is to create VMs, headless browsers, and resort to incredible hacks (the infamous "game loop" that modifies the characters output by the LLM is just shameful) etc. to try to hide the misery. It's miserable kludges everywhere.
And the only reason these miserable kludges are not entirely falling apart is because they rest on the shoulders of actual giants: projects like Linux, QEMU, etc. that were not vibe-coded.
It's sad to have useful tools (the models) and to make such poor use of them.
I'm pretty sure that, in the end, it's just like open-source powering the entire world by now: we'll have open-source projects like Pi and then newer ones that are going to come out and fix the mess we have now. And they're not going to be 100% vibe-coded by people whose jobs is "to write loops".
Goes to show how fake this industry has become when VC dollars have flooded it.
Somehow it is fine to vibe code infrastructure or security because someone (with a clear vested interest) wants you to spend more tokens at their casino because that is how they "win" at the casino (which they work at).
Except in reality, this part of software is critical and irresponsible to 'write loops" and we all know that he doesn't believe what he is saying.
Except now it's the "AI did it" fallacy where if you know a company uses AI, even infra scaling issues must be due to AI, and if you had just used less or no AI, you would have been spared even though that has never been true.
The usual response to this goes something like "well they made claims that AI is good" therefore anything short of perfection supposedly debunks the claim.
This is literally they saying they are letting their LLM run wild(ish) and seeing the status.claude.com we can see the result.
This is a case where the outcome is the direct result of the engineering practices like the ones they describe.
PS: Yes I use Claude, Coded, Amp and Cursor agents every day so I am not saying here LLMs are not valuable.
LE: They did not made claims that "AI is good" they made claims that developers/computer engineers are not needed anymore in the near future. Thats is a stronger claim and has a direct relation with a product they have which needs computer engineering (yes infra counts too) and which seems to be down more than we expect as a good quality bar.
Unless you have inside knowledge of their infra ops and management tools, it is just guessing and blaming veganism. For all we know it could be tools from Nvidia or anyone else failing under massive load.
It could be the veganism. Some things are. Leaping to it as the only possible explanation for every ailment is exactly the fallacy.
[0] https://github.com/resources/insights/ai-powered-workforce-p...
The issue is that it's a thought-terminating cliche, and it would be nice to have one place on the internet that isn't just who can post one the fastest with the most glee to the giddy seal-clapping of the audience.
"Vegans and vegetarians may have higher stroke risk" - https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49579820
"Vegans had a 43% higher risk of fractures overall compared to nonvegetarians, as well as higher risks of hip, leg, and vertebral fractures." - https://sniglobal.org/plant-based-diets-and-fracture-risk/
"The Impact of a Vegan Diet on Many Aspects of Health: The Overlooked Side of Veganism" - https://www.cureus.com/articles/138315-the-impact-of-a-vegan...
"..people who followed a vegan diet had noticeably low levels of iodine in their bodies, an element that is essential for growth, bones, and brain function. In addition, vegans had lower bone health scores..." - https://www.bfr.bund.de/en/press-release/vegan-vegetarian-be...
So indeed, the "it must be veganism" is not an unfounded concern when health complications arise, in a very similar way to "it must be the AI" is a valid concern when software issues arise.
[1] https://pi.dev/ [2] https://openrouter.ai/rankings
https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/nemesis8
OpenCode is nice if you don't want to do a lot of research and just want to get started right away. The OpenCode Go plan for $5 a month for your first month is a great way to do this, with good models to choose from and reasonable usage limits for a beginner.
As far as I can tell, they tick the same boxes- but one has the support of a big boy model provider.
One caveat is that it doesn't do MCP tools, but can wire them up with bash (or use CLIs if those are available).
(pi.sh also documents other install methods, like `npm`, on their homepage)
If trust and security is the issue, unfortunately "better" ideas like hashpipe [1] never achieved critical mass
It's plain horrible. You could have, for example, a compromised server serving malware but only one out of every 100 download. The only signature you rely on is TLS.
Proper package distribution are using proper signatures schemes, are decentralized, even for some offer reproducible builds (meaning you can rebuild the whole package yourself and verify your build matches), etc.
Hashpipe is an attempt at reproducing some of those guarantees. Not unlike container pining using hashes. It at least fixes the "Jack and John installed this already and I know I'm getting the same version as they did".
Proper software distribution is signed, reproducible and ideally also uses some proof-of-existence for the hashes.
My bet is this: in the face of the countless supply chain attacks, we'll see more and more people getting very serious about security, including the security of software distribution. And curl bash'ing won't be part of it.
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/quickstart
Oh wait (from another comment under this article): > https://pi.dev/models is throwing an internal server error for me.
It's just people who have internalized "don't paste commands from the Internet into your terminal" and aren't thinking about exactly what makes pasting commands from the Internet into your terminal dangerous, and how that applies to this specific case.
/s
oh wait...
"curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash"
(right from https://claude.com/product/claude-code)
Further - what the flicking fuck do you think an installer is going to do on your system? Not run any commands? Because I've written installers for every platform... they ALL can run commands.
So what exactly is the complaint in this comment? If you want to go read the install script - knock yourself out (or hell, point your agent at it...).
You think it's hard to obfuscate shell calls from inside a built executable?
What it tells us is that you're probably searching for reasons to grouse about AI.
We are back to the baseline. The availability of our tools isn't adding anything in the long term because the productivity increase we get from the tooling is negated by the time we're back to doing it the old fashioned way due to downtime, so there is no claimed productivity increase espoused by the pontificators of the tooling.
There aren't many tools that remain useful at that rate.
I get the power of LLMs, and I do find them useful. But I find them useful in much the same way I find a really good set of random tables useful, or a good set of rules for procedurally generating something like a star sector for a science fiction campaign.
For my day job developing software, and for the RPG campaigns and books I run and publish today, LLMs are, in many cases, random tables on steroids. After using them for two years, even with all their improvements, I am continually reminded by the results I get that, at the heart of it, I am still dealing with what amounts to randomly generated content.
Yes, I know it is more accurate to call the process probabilistic rather than random. And yes, somebody can construct a technically deterministic setup with fixed weights, fixed seeds, fixed sampling parameters, and a frozen runtime environment. But that is like saying you can recreate a rainstorm if you get a thousand butterflies to flap their wings in exactly the right way. It may be technically true, but it is not how the technology behaves in normal day-to-day use.
For practical purposes, given the same prompt and the same apparent starting conditions, the result can differ each time you use a model. The outputs will often be highly correlated, and often useful, but they are not deterministic software in the ordinary sense.
So far, I am failing to see how the inherent probabilistic nature of the technology can be fully overcome. I understand how we got to where we are today from older neural net technology, including the systems used for vision and sound. What we have now can be very useful. But my view is that it is being badly oversold and overhyped. Its probabilistic nature is being vastly underestimated, and that is a major reason for much of the weirdness and many of the failures we keep seeing.
In tabletop roleplaying, there have been times when hobbyists relied too much on procedurally generated content and ultimately got burned by it, either through campaigns that were not as fun or products that were subpar. Each time, the lesson was the same: there is no substitute for human judgment.
Any workflow or technology incorporating LLMs has to keep humans in the loop, and not merely as rubber stamps. The human has to remain the primary decision maker.
Those chemical interactions and quantum effects lead to emergent properties like judgment, experience, context, accountability, and an understanding of consequences. Those are not properties that LLMs possess, regardless of how useful their output can be.
That is not to say that, in the future, LLMs won’t be used as part of other systems that add some of those properties. But that is not what we have today, or what can be seen in the foreseeable near future.
What can your company do?
Hire some Developers?
Thirty years ago, you had an OS and you installed applications. No problem.
Later, you had to build and use apps on the internet, an infrastructure that is susceptible to DDOS attacks, government firewalls, and other security risks. Still fine, sort of.
Now, you not only have to build apps on the internet, you also have use LLMs to build apps to remain competitive with other developers. Future (human) maintainers of your code might not properly understand how it works, and if the providers of the LLMs screw up or go rogue, you are properly fucked.
There is a dependency/technology stack debt that is creating risks that need to be acknowledged.
And I know like one guy who does use them. He's not a developer by trade, he just has to write programs sometimes.
I'm not using AI coding tools yet, and even if they force me at gunpoint to use them at work no one can force me to in my spare time
I'm not too worried about the case where no one can code anymore because that will be after I'm dead
Hard to do when each individual provider wants to lock your company into multiyear enterprise contracts.
what does someone do when a certain brand coffee maker keeps breaking; they buy a different brand.
Use an Anthropic competitor?
400k isn’t crazy for the FANG set but it’s still a subset of the developer market and hundreds of thousands of those jobs have been cut in the last few years as they all collectively work to lower SWE pay.
60k a year it needs to be a full irreplaceable part of the infrastructure for I think. There are very few kinds of software that meet that bar right now (certain design tools etc that have no replacement). 12k/year is in the expensive but reasonable for the right tooling category (Matlab etc.).
I don’t know what the future holds. I know the big AI companies are banking on being able to charge for a replacement SWE that works 24/7. Still not convinced these are it yet, as useful as they can be under the right circumstances.
Today is the Latvian holiday of Jāņi, to mark the passage of the summer solstice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C4%81%C5%86i
Grab yourselves some beer or beverage of choice and some cheese (we usually have caraway cheese), alongside skewered meat and get some rest!
I mean, what else am I going to do while Claude is down, write code manually, like they did in the 90s or something?
ClaudeCode still has a 99.27 % uptime
ClaudeCowork has 99.52 % uptime
ClaudeForGovernment has 99.93 % uptime
but VPN's can be detected and perhaps already are by these AI companies and it can lead to the ban/restriction of an account so not many people would prefer to use VPN.
Then, theoretically speaking, I suppose that it might be possible to perhaps toggle off these AI companies for enterprises or licenses of dev's
Though I imagine that it would mean taking an ID and having a special dev tag so as to not remove the general purpose chat bots that these sites still operate.
I do imagine that it might be really interesting to have a single day where AI esp closed source is/are turned off and see how that pans out but looks like till then claude is sprinkling its downtime throughout any part of the day/month randomly with their downtimes.
[*] https://claude.ai/api/organizations/<ORG_ID>/chat_conversations/<CONV_ID>/completion
API Error: 529 Overloaded. This is a server-side issue, usually temporary — try again in a moment. If it persists, check https://status.claude.com.
:)
"it's look like when the lights turning off, we return to socialize lol"
ps. if you say you still capable of developing software without the Internet, you're lying. Perhaps, to your own self.
Me too, but let's be honest, I'm not talking about "Hello world!" experiments, I'm talking about developing usable software. I'm pretty sure, you won't be patching a Linux kernel driver on your own machine without googling stuff.
I've learned to code years before the Internet, but we've had it for so long, I'm honestly not sure anymore if I'm truly capable of building [real] stuff while offline. And I can't just ignore it, there's a feeling now, that with AI advancements, I may soon no longer be able to code efficiently without any AI.
I wouldn't like it and it'd be slower, but I still understand my environment in sufficient depth to work without external info if I absolutely have to. Even with AI, once in a while I ask it to just give me some hints instead of solving something for me, so I'm forced to do the work.
Anthropic has massive capability issues due to massive user growth. It happens often when EU and US work hours collide. They have smart people working on it. Don’t waste your energy complaining.
Cheers
Yeah AI Data Centers do that....
Claude is down....