I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops.
— Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code
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.
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.
[0] https://github.com/resources/insights/ai-powered-workforce-p...
"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.
But I was more getting at, say, staying out of the sun or being skinnyfat as a vegan, and suddenly you look "sickly"/"frail" when you'd be given the grace of looking like most people otherwise.
A similar analogy would be someone saying "well, of course you do" if you have any malady while having been vaccinated. My point being to bring up the thought terminating cliche of it compared to doing the necessary further analysis to link the malady with the suspected cause.
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> "Vegans and vegetarians may have higher stroke risk"
It was a lump vegetarian + vegan group with a weak CI bounded at 1.02 for 3/1000 cases over a decade. The same group also had a more robust benefit of less heart disease than meat eaters. The stroke outcomes aren't replicated in other cohorts either, afaik. But the heart disease benefits are.
> "Vegans had a 43% higher risk of fractures overall compared to nonvegetarians, as well as higher risks of hip, leg, and vertebral fractures."
The study used a single baseline questionnaire for 17+ years and looked at vegans with correctable nutrition deficiencies to see +15/1000 hip fractures over 10 years. I'll grant that a poorly planned diet, especially 30 years ago with less nutritional understanding, has worse health outcomes. Just like I wouldn't use the average American's diet to lambast an omnivore diet (compared to, say, the "Mediterranean" diet).
> "vegans had lower iodine, bone health scores" (RBVD study)
On bones: p=0.02 in 72 people with 5% less QUS score in their heel bone (not DXA nor bone density tested). No body weight mediation nor data about health outcomes like fractures, osteoporosis, and no time dimension since it was just a snapshot (cross-sectional).
On iodine: It's a surrogate biomarker from a single pee test. Study didn't look at iodine-related health outcomes like thyroid dysfunction, goiter, or clinical consequences.
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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.
You mean like returning 529s and operating with reduced QoS?
Instead, the whole system just shits the bed, catastrophically.
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.
Don't use it. Maybe wait a few more years. If it's not valuable/useful, then not using it, while everything matures, will not be a problem.
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".