Anthropic is the market leader for advanced AI coding with no serious competitor currently very close and they are preparing to IPO this year. This year is a transition year. The period where every decision would default toward delighting users and increasing perceived value is ending. By next year they'll be fully on the quarterly Wall Street grind of min/maxing every decision to extract the highest possible profit from customers at the lowest possible cost.
This path is inevitable and unavoidable, even with the most well-intentioned management and employees.
Some greatest hits:
- CoreAudio, Mac OS memory management, kernel in general, and many other decisions
- Google's internal dev tooling, Go, and Chrome (at least, in its day)
- C#, .NET, and Typescript (even Microsoft does good work)
One of the hallmarks of heroic engineering work is that everyone takes it for granted afterward. Open source browsers that work, audio that just works, successors to C/C++ with actual support and adoption, operating systems that respond gracefully under load, etc. ... none of these things were guaranteed, or directly aligned with short-term financial incentives. Now, we just assume they're a requirement.
Part of the "sensibility" I'm talking about is seeking to build things that are so boring and reliable that nobody notices them anymore.