Hacker News Reader

Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

Boris: "I don't prompt Claude anymore. I have loops prompting Claude and figuring what to do".

Boris: "I haven’t written a line of code by hand in, I think, eight months now… Claude Code, 100% written by Claude Code".

Boris: "There’s no manually written code anywhere at the company… All of the SQL is written by models. Everything is just built by the models... Claude instances communicate with each other (e.g., over Slack) in autonomous loops"

This does not sound like they review the code either. So, either the frontier labs like Anthropic have figured out something that very few companies could replicate, or they are being incredibly deceptive. I don't know which is true.

View on HN

Judging by how it feels being a customer and using their products, I can confidently say:

1. Yes, we know, and can tell.

2. No, they haven't figured out anything. Just vibe coding it with their bleeding dege models.

> No, they haven't figured out anything. Just vibe coding it with their bleeding dege models.

I'm sure you were saying "bleeding edge" but my first impression was to translate dege to mean degen/degenerate which made this so much more fun to read.

A new term has been coined! aka "hodl"

So with #2 they are betting that the future models will be able to reign in the mess that the current generation leaves in its wake. It's a bold bet but not an outrageous one either.

Where I'm at we use Claude for many coding tasks but we don't have infinite token pockets like Anthropic does. Everything is very focused on how to get the most out of the tokens and prove you're the one who deserves to have a ton extra granted next month. We can't afford things like have one guy tossing the equivalent in $165k at 64 simultaneous instances for days on end to just see if a Rust rewrite really works well or not like they did with Bun - but Anthropic still did that regardless. This doesn't prove the opposite either, it just appears asking whether or not others are doing the same is a bad oracle for Anthropic's honesty here.

I think that will be one of the most interesting things with models in the future. Even if we somehow 100% stopped dead where they are from a a model perspective, being able to run it twice and fast for half the price in the future will enable a hell of a lot more practical usage.

They work on research problems you can define a clear solution criteria for.

The kinds of business software I work on don't have those characteristics. If I needed something like a utils library, I think I could easily have Claude write the whole thing and not read the code.

As always, the essential skill in engineering is not providing the right answer it's about asking the right questions.

What puzzles me is this: research means that we are exploring something that has not done before, yet using Claude to generate code means slicing and dicing what has been done many times before. So, I'm not sure how to make sense of both at the same time: Anthropic is pushing the boundary of AI, yet all the knowledge and engineering in form of code can be generated from the previous work?

How I interpreted their thoughts on "loops" and "graphs" etc, is that they 1. have unlimited token allowances, and 2. are working on problems where the solution itself can be described by code.

It reminds me of property based testing. I really liked the idea when I heard about it, but most of what I work on does not tend to behave in a way that can be easily described mathematically like that.

Maybe I'm just not clever enough to do it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com