Comment by jacobgold | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobgold | Hacker News Reader

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Anthropic's and OpenAI's products are janky and their services are unreliable, but they have incredible product-market fit and revenue growth. They deserve a ton of credit for getting the big things right.

The risk for them is that someone matches their products while also having non-janky products and reliable services.

Distributed systems infrastructure, especially, is much less forgiving of vibe coding than application code. Coding agents are not even close to being good enough to design and build large-scale systems the way expert humans can.

There is nothing wrong with using agents to help write infrastructure code, but these systems have a way of punishing anyone who builds things they do not fully understand.

I'd love to see either Anthropic or OpenAI really step up their infrastructure game.

> I'd love to see either Anthropic or OpenAI really step up their infrastructure game.

It's worth noting that OpenAI's official uptime numbers are significantly better than Anthropic's:

99.9x% for API/Codex, versus <99.5% for Claude API/Claude Code.

I'd obviously like OpenAI's numbers to be higher too, but this is one reason it really annoys me when the head of Claude Code goes on podcasts implying that software engineering as a whole, not just the act of writing out code, is basically solved.

One wonders why hasn't months of presumably near-unlimited internal Mythic solved the issues unrelated to hardware shortages yet.

100%. It really depends on the application domain and system complexity.

I see a lot of people speaking about a 10x productivity improvement and so on. When I work on hobby projects, I do see that. Just last weekend, I set up a hobby project that I've been thinking about for a while. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me at least a week to implement manually, but instead, it took me three hours.

But some of the systems I have to work on during the day are so big and complicated that you can spend multiple days on a small feature or even just tracking down a bug, even with the support of Opus.

Expecting even a 2x productivity improvement on some those systems is wildly unrealistic. I'm seeing a lot of people get stressed out because the productivity gains from simple application building trickle into the expectations for these complex systems.

That said, if things keep improving at this rate it might just be a matter of time.

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