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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

Because it's not "special developer access". It's just "normal developer access". The phrasing gives an impression they accessed something other users cannot.

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It would be normal standard English to assume that special modifies the word access. That would make the sentence semantically be the same as “special access, specifically the type of access used by developers”

Compare with a sentence like “the elevator has special firefighter buttons” which does not mean that only some special type of firefighter uses the button.

Counter-point: as a wordsmith, it's incumbent on the article's author to make their point in an unambiguous way. In your example, rather than write "the elevator has special firefighter buttons", the author could choose to write "the elevator has buttons which are only available to firefighters". Or alternatively, "the elevator has buttons which are only available to certain firefighters".

The amount of care the author puts into their phrasing determines whether their point comes across as intended, or not. The average magazine reader can likely figure out that there's no such thing as "special" firefighters with "privileged" access to elevator buttons that other firefighters lack. They may not have the programming knowledge to do likewise with "developer access", even if they are reading a magazine like "Wired".

It's Newswriting 101-level stuff.-

In your example, "firefighter buttons" is a noun phrase which refers to a particular type of button. "Special" applies to the whole of "firefighter buttons," not just to "firefighter" and not just to "buttons." The same would apply for "special developer access."

So it isn't normal developer access, like an API, there's something special about it that most developers with access to the API could not access.

> the elevator has special firefighter buttons

If you said that to anyone they'd assume there are non standard buttons beyond the normal "call" / "fire" buttons. Special changes the meaning in both sentences.

Firefighter buttons are meant to only be used in very rare special occasions (emergencies) so "special" is just emphasis, whereas developer access is a completely normal way to use the product and thus "special" suggests additional significance. Sure not everyone uses the product as developers, but then not everyone uses the 18th floor button either.

Developer access isn’t normal to a lay audience. That’s my point. To a lay audience developers are special computer expert people who do completely different things than they do.

From the perspective of a non technical reader developer access isn’t normal, it’s special.

The HN audience doesn’t see that. But the phrase isn’t confusing to normal people.

I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that if someone bothers to say "special developer access" rather than just " developer access", there must be some difference between the two. There's clearly not any reason that " developer access" wouldn't be sufficient to describe using APIs though, so it's hard not to read the word "special" as being at least redundant if not actively misleading.

In content intended for an audience of developers, it's reasonable to assume "special developer access" means access for special developers. If the audience is the general public, it would be sensible to interpret it as "special access for developers," in contrast to the normal sort of access most other people use.

Yeah and Wired could just write it in a clear way so that no disambiguation or head scratching is needed.

If Wired wants to portray normal access to Anthropic's API platform as a special fringe activity, rather than a normal way to programmatically use AI, it really says something about Wired. And this is Hacker News, right? Should we be on some watch list or something for thinking having control via API access is normal dev access!? MCP isn't even that old yet! ;D It's possible to write clearly and not that hard, I'm pretty sure they are hyping.

> If Wired wants to portray normal access to Anthropic's API platform as a special fringe activity, rather than a normal way to programmatically use AI,

I know people on HN might mot understand this, but programmatically using anything is a special fringe activity, even if the manner of programmatic use is normal for such use.

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