At this point Anthropic is a pure marketing and PR company. Super catchy names like Opus, Mythos and Fable trying to get you to think that these software products are actually super-human life changing experiences. Boris Cherny coming to HN “Hi! it’s Boris from the Claude Code team” to get real tech people’s goodwill.
From Opus 4.6 there are no noticeable improvements for me in code generation. It works very well, till 90% completion, if you guide it correctly. And you need a little luck. For serious production code I need to understand what I’m doing so it helps a bit, sometimes.
I think saying no is more important now with AI, as features can be built so quickly now. But there are a lot more costs after the feature has been built. Mostly with AI the code isn’t understood that well, wich incurs a cognitive debt. Then there are extra maintentance and documentation costs. And the costs of carrying around features that add no value.
I can imagine that if you’re a startup and want to try new features quickly, it makes sense to say yes more. But the senior mentioned in the article will also be able to understand that.
Code is a liability. Saying no is because the engineer wants to reduce complexity, not because she/ he is so subjectively “obsessed” with code quality. The term “quality” is nowadays misunderstood by management. It means the right amount of effort to build the product as fast and for as low as cost possible, taking into account a team of engineers that can easily add and modify code.
That’s a promise, no technical guarantee. Then there’s Cloud Act and FISA.
> Google is likely very happy to give up on the privacy violations
“likely”, exactly. This can change any time. We’ll just have to trust them. Scrolling through this thread it seems about zero trust in a US ad company who’s specialty is feeding off people’s privacy.
We should by now demanding technical guarantees. Open source, end-to-end encrypted with e.g. an overseer board checking the company. Companies like Proton are doing this.
Please not the schools. We don’t need privacy-invading closed systems with built-in slot machines. We need deterministic open systems where kids’ privacy is protected.
> What part of GitHub's executives' grand plan is "have a barely-functional service
What about lock-in, being a monopoly? Why wouldn’t you maximize on saving costs? Sure some people leave, but the majority is not going anywhere. And if the platform dies they’ve made more money than to keep it alive.
I think Microsoft’s home game is “monopolize and enshittify”. They are the masters and know the exactly what amount of enshittification is too much. E.g. Hashimoto quitting GH is probably totally worth the 10 SREs they fired. Us plebs cannot go anywhere.