Also Claude owes its popularity mostly to the excellent model running behind the scenes.

The tooling can be hacky and of questionable quality yet, with such a model, things can still work out pretty well.

The moat is their training and fine-tuning for common programming languages.

>> Also Claude owes its popularity mostly to the excellent model running behind the scenes.

It's a bit of both. Claude Code was the tool that made Anthropic's developer mindshare explode. Yes, the models are good, but before CC they were mostly just available via multiplexers like Cursor and Copilot, via the relatively expensive API.

Huh what moronic failure did Anthropic do? Every Claude Code user I know loves it.

I don't know if the comment was referring to this, but recently, people have been posting stuff about them requiring their new hire Jared Sumner, author of the Bun runtime, to first and foremost fix memory leaks that caused very high memory consumption for claude's CLI. The original source was them posting about the matter on X I think.

And at first glance, none of it was about complex runtime optimizations not present in Node, it was all "standard" closure-related JS/TS memory leak debugging (which can be a nightmare).

I don't have a link at hand because threads about it were mostly on Xitter. But I'm sure there are also more accessible retros about the posts on regular websites (HN threads, too).

Ah I believe codex has similar issues. Terrible code quality but goes to show it doesn't really matter in the end.

Yes that was pretty much my own takeaway, too.

After some experience, it feels to me (currently primarily a JS/TS developer) like most SPAs are ridden by memory leaks and insane memory usage. And, while it doesn't run in the browser, the same think seems to apply to Claude CLI.

Lexical closures used in long-living abstractions, especially when leveraging reactivity and similar ideas, seems to be a recipe for memory-devouring apps, regardless of browser rendering being involved or not.

The problems metastasize because most apps never run into scenarios where it matters, a page reload or exit always is close enough on the horizon to deprioritize memory usage issues.

But as soon as there are large allocations, such as the strings involved in LLM agent orchestration, or in non-trivial other scenarios, the "just ship it" approac requires careful revision.

Refactoring shit that used to "just work" with memory leaks is not always easy, no matter whose shit it is.

> it doesn't really matter in the end

if you have one of the top models in a disruptive new product category where everyone else is sprinting also, sure..

Code quality never really mattered to users of the software. You can have the most <whatever metric you care about> code and still have zero users or have high user frustration from users that you do have.

Code quality only matters in maintainability to developers. IMO it's a very subjective metric

It's not subjective at all. It's not art.

Code quality = less bugs long term.

Code quality = faster iteration and easier maintenance.

If things are bad enough it becomes borderline impossible to add features.

Users absolutely care about these things.

Okay, but I meant how you measure is subjective.

How do you measure code quality?

> Users absolutely care about these things.

No, users care about you adding new features, not in your ability to add new features or how much it cost you to add features.

I don’t know about moronic, but:

https://github.com/ctoth/claude-failures

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796

There’s a sample group issue here beyond the obvious limitations of your personal experience. If they didn’t love it, they likely left it for another LLM. If they have issues with LLM’s writ large, they’re going to dislike and avoid all of them regardless.

In the current market, most people using one LLM are likely going to have a positive view of it. Very little is forcing you to stick with one you dislike aside from corporate mandates.

Recently there was a bug where CC would consume day/week/month quota in just a few hours, or hundreds of dollars in API costs in a few prompts.

The people who don’t love it probably stopped using it.

You don’t have to go far on this site to find someone that doesn’t like Claude code.

If you want an example of something moronic, look at the ram usage of Claude code. It can use gigabytes of memory to work with a few megabytes of text.

I've used and hate it, it's garbage.

There is right now another HN thread where a lot of users hate Claude Code.

To be fair, their complaints are about very recent changes that break their workflow, while previously they were quite content with it.

There have certainly been periods of irrational exuberance in the tech industry, but there are also many companies that were criticized for being unprofitable which are now, as far as I can tell, quite profitable. Amazon, Uber, I'm sure many more. I'm curious what the basis is to say that Anthropic could never achieve profitability? Are the numbers that bad?

your prediction is going to be wrong, even with all those caveats

Investors are getting antsy and are going to start demanding AI companies start producing real returns.

Anthropic et al. better figure it out sooner rather than later because this game they’re all playing where they want all of us to use basically beta-release tools (very generous in some cases) to discover the “real value” of these tools while they attempt to reduce their burn with unsustainable subscription prices can’t go on forever.

Maybe. Maybe not.

But if this party is sustainable, what’s the deal with the rate limits that everyone is going on about?

If my prediction is wrong these should be trillion dollar companies yesterday with what their liars proclaim, until then we know that Anthropic has only made $5billion total revenue to data due to the Pentagon lawsuits and that required $20billion.

Can't wait to see how much public money they need going forward! Hopefully our progeny don't die in the subsequent climate crisis before they can unleash true shareholder value.