Comment by randysalami | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randysalami | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I read the article but I find this response kind of strange. Am I alone in this?

Wanton accountability for a multi-billion dollar cutting edge company… leaves more to be desired from the best? Take Apple or Google or any top tech company of the past at its prime and compare. This kind of behavior then would probably reflect poorly on the institutions behind the tech and not maintain their image of technical brilliance because it shows weakness in a vulnerable way. It is human. It is not strategic.

By wanton accountability, I mean things like saying “This was my change!” or “ wanted to apologize and agree that this did not meet our bar and does not represent how we plan to ship on Claude Code”. It makes them (the company) look weak? Accountability is important but where, how, and when you do it is even more important. These stakes are, not joking, life and death, and in this big game of chess we get paid for, naivety not only in our technical implementation can weaken our position.

Not trying to attack, just trying to learn and probe with the community. Maybe a cost of this kind of transparency on the internet. I am wondering if this a new trend and tech companies are changing in a way I don’t understand! In any case, it’s really cool work that is being with Claude Code!

> it shows weakness in a vulnerable way. It is human. It is not strategic.

Are you complaining that the answer is too human and that a multi billion company should not allow a human who made a mistake to own the mistake in public, being honest about what happened in this case?? Would you prefer complete silence from them like you most certainly would from Google or Apple.

That sounds incredibly sad to me, we don’t even expect humanity from big tech since that’s what we’ve become accustomed to seeing.

fTR both the Anthropic dev response and the blog post seem to believe that a single person can be blamed for something like this, which I wholeheartedly disagree with! Nobody reviews your changes? There’s no QA? Not even an AI checking the release notes match the diff from the previous release?? Blaming a dev for “putting a serious bug in production” sounds really 90’s to me.

> It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it.

In a sense yes, I think it is actually reasonable to complain that the answer is too human/individualized here because it likely wasn't this individual human who made this decision, but he's making it seem like it is so that we are less likely to blame the company as a whole.

It's counterintuitive but when one singular person owns up to the problems that, at the root, are actually systemic to the decision making of the whole company it plays on the psychology of us as humans.

"I'm in charge of maintaining it" - This is not the same as "I'm in charge of all of the decision-making behind the implementation of how this tool works for users".

I actually agree exactly with your last point that one single person taking blame is counter-intuitive/non-productive here, but it actually seems like what these large companies desire is to have one person be the fall guy to play on people's sympathies.

If this were some small startup it would make sense but this is not that case.

It’s also an unforced error in my eyes for a multi-billion dollar company with competitors in the US and outside. Mistakes happen but no reason to turn a mistake into a revelation about processes that leaves no ambiguity, one that leaves the mythos (pun) of your company less than before.

I did make the decision, and shipped the PR.

Unfortunately this is a sign that the systems by which PRs are shipped need serious inspection.

For example in incident management, the industry settled on blameless postmortems. Blame is pointed at the systems which allowed incidents to occur, never the human(s) who triggered the incident. "Just don't make that mistake again" simply doesn't work. Humans make mistakes!

There are too many stakeholders in a product this large, even if every one of them wishes it were not so. The systems by which this PR shipped need serious inspection.

Habibi, I don't think anyone is really blaming you personally. We are piling on to the fact that this piece of critical infrastructure many of us depend on day in day out is being built in such a way that a single developer can wake up one morning, ship a change they thought might be nice, and then walk it back the next day.

I don't really care, in a most positive way towards you.

I don't hold you accountable even if you twirled your mustache like a villain. You are not responsible for Claude Code. Why did the leadership set up such a weak, error-prone process?

Again, not asking you directly, because it doesn't matter to me what you say, respectfully.

Okay I stand corrected then.

Seems strange for a company of your size to have one person push changes that should have easily caught this edge case then. Seems like a change even a small handful of people could have reasonably thought up this side effect of.

This is the kind of weakness I was alluding to… internal information that shows dysfunction is now shown to the public and there is no ambiguity. People pay attention and there is a low tolerance for unforced errors.

There has to be a second PR approver. There's no way a company as large this can allow an individual the ability to push to production without a secondary person involved.

When there's at least two people involved you can then start to look at more systematic factors that go beyond any single human mistake.

When both the submitter and approver miss that there's no changelog entry for a PR does that mean a checklist is needed? Should the changelog be automated with the commit message which can be improved for external consumption?

I'd find it very hard to believe that this high profile change just happened to be the only change missing from the changelog.

Bugs are always going to happen but housekeeping like writing something to a changelog when a commit is merged can be quality assured.

I don't know, this is a company that is pushing the narrative of software engineers becoming obsolete. Why do you think they would have respect for Software Engineering processes. As few as they are concerned, a few coders working in isolation with Claude Code is all that you need. (pun unintended)

If there really is no PR reviewer and no separate QA what is Anthropic even doing. I have respect for someone owning their mistake but as others have mentioned it reveals what may be a systemic issue.

Hey, mistakes happen. As we saw with the recent AWS billing issue. But Anthropic is a leading company that makes cutting-edge AI which will kill people. It’s literally a matter of life and death and at this point, it is the place to be if you want to be the best. So as an institution, I don’t want human answers, I want the right, most professional answers. We used to have it. Human responses with every word chosen to maximize every aspect that needs to be maximized, by engineer grey beards no less! And maybe they don’t want to have it. That’s why I made my original comment. Maybe it’s a strategic decision to allow this kind of accountability in a public forum. I think it’s wanton but others might find it refreshing.

And to clarify why it even matters to me is, these firms are in competition within the US and outside. Every decision by every person has an effect. Moves like this have a cost. I’d have imagined that at the level these companies operate, any public facing engineer only communicates correctly with the proper perspectives in mind... We have more data points now we didn’t have before.

To drive the point home, now we and every other competitor knows, for free, processes that are going on at Anthropic, that in my opinion make them (as a company) look weak. I

> But Anthropic is a leading company that makes cutting-edge AI which will kill people. It’s literally a matter of life and death and at this point

But Stihl makes cutting-edge chainsaws which will kill people. It’s literally a matter of life and death and at this point

> So as an institution, I don’t want human answers, I want the right, most professional answers.

We deeply regret our auto-saw feature activated while you were sawing unattended. Your safety is our top priority.

Not the person you asked.

I expect the person responsible for Claude Code to explain the reason this direction was chosen.

It is ridiculous to expect individual contributors to do so.

Where is the leadership? Can individual contributors decide to significantly alter the workflow of millions of customers? Were any customers consulted at all?

Isn't Anthropic anti software engineering? This state of affairs is exactly what you should expect.

> we don’t even expect humanity from big tech since that’s what we’ve become accustomed to seeing.

There is a difference between humanity in communication and saying the problem was a human choice.

You can have humane communication about a system failure and actors in that system. Or you can have cold matter of fact press release voice about an individual persons failure.

I don’t think anthropic statement was any less distant than other times big tech brushes off a whiopsie. They just used personal language to ingratiate the reader.

It doesn't feel strange to me at all. It feels like a very human response from the person that introduced the change. I great appreciate that, rather than ignoring the problem, or some canned corpspeak response.

We already lived in a post truth world. Now we live in a post logic world. Nothing makes sense anymore

Reply on news.ycombinator.com