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Comment by mccoyb | Hacker News Reader

I find these blog posts (and the originals, with Anthropic's C compiler and Cursor's browser) somewhat funny, as if they have this enormous power to build ... but they can't build something unique or new. Like the software sucks, but look how powerful the process is (the models are indeed powerful).

And it's a bit of a shame: by virtue of their position (their embedding in the fabric of venture capitalism), it seems like they can only make a subset of things -- what they can make is dictated enormously by capital, as they are engines of capital.

Not sure the point I'm trying to make, I just find it amusing.

Perhaps the point is that it might be more worthwhile to give independent creators a billion dollars to play around with agent swarms if we want to keep diversity in the evolutionary algorithm that is the software industry high.

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Because it's mostly a load of crap.

Most of these reusable, automated workflows sound really cool in theory, but in practice either they require a lot of customization (not really reusable) or a lot of babysitting (not really automated).

AI has improved my productivity significantly, I'm not a hater, but we also have to be honest about its (current) limitations. The whole "software factory" thing is just a pipe dream people sell to execs / investors / online courses.

Yes and this can be proven because what Anthropic says and does is vastly different

They say SaaS is dead and you can vibe code any SaaS using Opus and yet despite having Mythos with them they have to use JS terminal to run Claude Code.

Why don't they just vibe code CC? Why doesn't Dario have a 100000 agent swarm to run entirety of Anthropic or at least software department?

They've said for some time that Claude Code is 90% LLM generated code.

Yeah and it's still a cli tool running on JS

So it's not a brag

They could just write in Rust directly can't they? If they do that then they're doing what they preach

My app is written in TypeScript. With agents I could rewrite it in Rust, I just don’t need to so I don’t. It doesn’t warrant that level of performance and the business logic is more digestible in its current form. Given the amount of reviewing I need to do now, readability is worth more than performance. There are always tradeoffs.

Are you implying that them attempting a Rust rewrite would fail, and this is why they’re not doing it?

Anthropic was saying that you don't need to review the code anymore.

If that was the case, it just makes no sense at all to use JS. Take the free performance gain and don't read the code.

Yep they can just prompt Fable or Mythos!

Here is the prompt they can use:

Claude, migrate Claude Code into Rust. Make no mistakes!

Genuinely Fable would do a decent job.

Yep and they still don't do it! So we should do as they do, not as they say

I do somewhat agree. I can only speculate that they're pumping out new features incredibly fast and they don't want to fall a month behind the competition.

Why will they fall behind competition when any feature is just an English prompt away?

Unless they're lying that is!

True.

> business logic is more digestible in its current form.

Well, Anthropic spent many $ teling everyone that code is dead so this doesn't matter to them does it? Their business logic can be written in English!

What do you mean by “they spent $ telling everyone that”? If anything, they told everyone that to receive $ in investments. Those statements are pure PR hype.

claude code VSS - 70Gb

codex VSS - 600Mb

Also famously terrible. If not for the walled garden and the fact that anthropic can take away our ability to use custom harnesses any day, I would not be using CC. Given some of the features they add I've also started to suspect that their models are making product decisions. Not necessarily intentionally, but more in the sense that I think their engineers just let their models build and add whatever it feels like is a good idea to the codebase and then they just publish that.

Yes, that's true, but in the post, they even mention that building the spec is the scarce resource.

  For that to work, the swarm has to actually follow the spec, which is what much of this post is about. We gave the swarm 835 pages of prose and it came back with a database. What was scarce in this experiment, and what we expect to be scarce in software engineering going forward, is the right description of intent.

We're rediscovering the "architect" job role a decade or so after switching to agile processes and staff engineers largely replaced it. God help us when they rediscover UML for agents.

I feel like the scarcity of (idealized) Product Managers is even more acute.

Easily the biggest delta between a good one and a bad one I've ever encountered. It's so easy to test too. Just ask a product manager if they can give a talk on <some product they own> in 2 hours. If they respond by slacking all of the engineers that work under them to stop what they're doing and give them the info to give that talk, fire them. If they are ready to talk right now then give them a raise.

I mean, how long are these pages? Assuming 40 or so lines per page, that would be 33400 lines of spec turned into 200,000 lines of Rust, or about 6 lines of code per line of spec. That's a very detailed spec, much more than any software specification I have ever written in my career. It's not obvious to me that writing this spec would meaningfully save work over incrementally building individual features, especially when you think about what it would take for human beings to meaningfully review whether those 835 pages contain the right intent.

not only that, but what all of this misses is the fact that the specification that they used was a product of writing the software, not the other way round. It would be much, much more difficult to first write a correct specification than to first write a correct program, because programs are formal systems that can be executed to observe their correctness. You can’t do that with a specification.

Or to validate the accuracy and efficacy of the actual code produced.

but that's what we use the agent "swarm" to do .. it's also not scarce. what's scarce is imagination.

Well, the tool works well. I am grateful that Nature has seen fit that the same kind of person who can make it doesn’t also have the ability to identify what needs exist in the market because then all software would flow out of OpenAI and Anthropic and the rest of us would run about their legs and peep about. Whether product development will survive the next generation of models is still unknown.

bro it can't even make a button that doesn't look like it was designed in 2018, everything is ass. Product development isn't going anywhere.

it feels kind of like a concept car a large manufacturer would show off at a motor show. Everyone knows there is no intention to actually ship that thing, but they're exploring concepts and technology and trying to make inroads in what comes next.

The bottleneck has always been on the product side for 99% of cases. For the 1% where it's engineering, LLMs don't help as much.

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