They have. Claude Code was their internal dev tool, and it shows.
replyAnd yet even dogfooding their own product heavily, it's still a giant janky pile. The prompt work is solid, the focus on optimizing tools was a good insight, and the model makes a good agent, but the actual claude code software is pretty shameful to be the most viable product of a billion dollar company.
replyWhat artifact are you evaluating to come to this conclusion? Is the implementation available?
replyThe source for one of the initial versions got leaked a while ago and let’s say it’s not very good architecturally speaking, specifically when compared with the Gemini CLI, which it open source.
replyThe point of Claude Code is deep integration with the Claude models, not the actual CLI as a piece of software, which is quite buggy (it also has some great features, of course!)
At least for me, if I didn’t have to put in the work to modify the Gemini CLI to work reliably with Claude (or at least to get a similar performance), I wouldn’t use Claude Code CLI (and I say this while paying $200 per month to Anthropic because the models are very good)
A. I use it daily to take advantage of the plan inference discount.
replyB. Let's just say I didn't write the most robust javascript decompilation/deminification engine in existence solely as an academic exercise :)
The tongue-in-cheek jokes are kind of obvious, but even without the snark I think it is worth asking why the supposed 100x productivity boost from Claude Code I keep hearing about hasn't actually resulted in reliability improvements, even from developers who presumably have effectively-unlimited token budgets to spend on improving their stack.
replyI love how people like Simon Willison and Pete Steinberger spend all this effort trying to be skeptical of their own experiences and arrive at nuanced takes like “50% more productive, but that’s actually a pretty big deal, but the nature of the increase is complicated” and y’all just keep repeating the brainrotted “100x, juniors are cooked” quote you heard someone say on LinkedIn.
replyAI gives you what you ask for. If you don't understand your true problems, and you ask it to solve the wrong problems, it doesn't matter how much compute you burn, you're still gonna fail.
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