Sorry, this was more of a rant than I thought it would be, I hit one of my own nerves while writing it. This is what happens when you’re not in a good position to escape enforced AI usage hell. Tl;dr in bold at end.

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I can think of several practical measures, because I’ve tried them myself in an effort to make my coerced work with LLMs less painful, and because in the process I’ve previously fallen into the gambling trap Johnny outlined.

The less novel things I tried are things they’ve half-assed themselves as “features” already. For example, Johnny found one of the things I had spotted in the wild a while back - the “system_reminder” injection. This periodically injects a small line into the logs in an effort to keep it within the context window. In my case, I tried the same thing with a line that summed up to “reread the original fucking context and assess whether the changes make a shred of sense against the task because what the fuck”. I had tried this unsuccessfully because I had no way to realistically enforce it within their system, and they recently included the “team lead” skill which (I rightly assumed) tries to do exactly the same thing. The implementation suggests they will only have been marginally more successful than my attempt, it didn’t look like they tried very hard. This could be better implemented and extended to even a little more than “read original context”.

For this leak, some of the very easy things they could have done was to verify their own code against best practises, implement the most basic of tests, or attempt to measure the consistency of their implementation. Source maps in production is a ridiculously easily preventable rookie error. This should already be executed automatically in multiple stages of their coding, merging and deployment pipelines with varying degrees of redundancy and thoroughness the same way it is for any tech company with more than maybe 10 developers. There is just no reason they shouldn’t have prevented huge chunks of the now visible code issues, if were they triggering their own trash bots against their codebase with even the simplest prompt of “evaluate against good system design and architecture principles”. This implies that they either weren’t doing it at all, or maybe worse, ignored all the red flags it is capable of identifying after ingesting all of the system architecture guides and textbooks ever published online.

Anthropic is constrained in that some of the fixes which should be pushed to users are things which would have significant trade-off in the form of cost or context window, neither of which are palatable to them for reasons this community has discussed at length. But that constraint doesn’t prevent them from running checks or applying fixes to their own code, which reveals the root cause: The problems Anthropic are facing are clearly cultural. They’re pushing as much new shit as they can as quickly as possible and almost never going back to fix any of it. That’s a choice.

I saw a couple of signs that there are at least a few people there who are capable, and who are trying to steer an out of control titanic away from the iceberg, but the codebase stinks of missing architectural plans which are being retrofitted piecemeal long after they were needed. That aligns with Anthropic’s origin story, where OpenAI researchers accurately gauged how gullible venture capitalists are, but overestimated how much smarter they are than the rest of the world, and underestimated the value of practical experience building and running complex systems.

With the resources they have, even for a codebase of this unreasonable size, they could and should vibe code a much better version within a couple of months. That is not resounding praise for Claude, only a commentary on the quality of the existing code. Perhaps as a first step they could use their own “plan mode” which just appends a string that says not to make any edits, only to investigate and assess requirements…

Were I happy to watch the world burn, I’d start my own damn AI company that would do a much better job at this, because holy shit, people actually financed this trash.

Tl;dr, you’re right that it doesn’t bode well for their prospects of improvement, but it’s not because there aren’t many things they could be doing practically. It’s because they refuse to point the gun somewhere other than their own feet.