5 comments
The recklessness kinda works for everybody until some point. Go fast and break things... then cash out before investors realize, unless you manage to capture the market so you can keep breaking things because people will swallow.
What's working for them is having a huge amount of resources and very good people to design a cutting edge agent harness, RLHF the hell out of their models, and build out a tremendous amount of inference capacity. I'm sure their process for making code changes in any of their client apps is very fast, but a TUI built around a chatbot is also not a particularly complicated application. So yes it's working for them, but the vibecoding that they are selling is clearly not what they are doing in practice.
They’re not talking about the chatbot TUI. The chatbot TUI was and is in JavaScript. They’ve ported the JavaScript runtime.
Yes, and it's working for them, but it's not their core competency nor does it have much to do with the actual product that people pay them for (apart from being a source of bugs to avoid), so the fact that it's working for Anthropic doesn't necessarily imply that it's actually a good idea in general. It's working for them, with emphasis on for them. Or it's actually a demo of the future and it would work for anyone, who's to say? There's no doubt that AI (and especially Claude as industry leader) helps you carry out significantly more complicated side quests than in the past, in part by enabling that "recklessness" with surprisingly little risk. Maybe an exhaustive enough test suite is really all you need. But Anthropic is not in a position to demonstrate that as the universal future of all things, not just side quests.
Not GP but the js runtime has a long tail of case edges you simply can't emulate with a single app.
"Yes, the AI rewrote the code. No, we do not pretend that we've scrutinized the code, or that we understand it. It works, tests pass, so we don't care, and so shouldn't you."
The "recklessness" is offered as the new normal. Because it kinda, well, works for them.