upvote
I'm also a bit confused what Anthropic needs all this code for. Their main product is selling access to their model, but the model isn't comprised of code, it's a bunch of weights right?

So the code is for the stuff around the model, claude CLI, the website, the API... that probably shouldn't be infinitely growing right?

Is there a bunch of code they are using as part of training, or as pre-processing or post-processing the requests to the model?

reply
The moat isn't going to be the model (short of AGI). The moat is going to be what surrounds it. The harness and, I have suggested elsewhere, memory. The more personalized the AI is to you the more valuable it will be.

Also, as tech companies grow, a significant portion of the dev body count is for internal tooling. I was always flabbergasted at Twitter's headcount growth back in the day when it seemed like the only innovation increasing the number of characters in a tweet.

Right now we are in a weird spot where a lot of people are flailing around inside corporate America trying to figure out how to leverage AI. Few have enough vision to see what the companies of the future will look like and work towards that.

reply
I did RL and evals at Amazon for a bit on Nova Forge (laid off in July! :D). I would have to push several thousand lines of code a day in new evaluations that our applied scientists requested since new ones are always being made along with having to create custom ones for whatever new model they were working on. Also, in RL, adding new environments for the agents to actually complete activates was also a shit ton of lines of code. So if I had to guess, just adding new stuff around model training and testing alone accounts for a ton of these changes.
reply
Probably lots of internal competitor apps ready to release to wipe out SaaS/Adobe/etc. companies.
reply
Prepare to make us all jobless, without any moral issues in doing so, as they profit from their stock value assets.

It is even there on the blog post, doing more with a small team, followed right after by a hand waving paragraph how software engineers are still valuable, to avoid the expected backlash from the previous paragraph.

reply
Out of all occupations software engineers shouldn't complain that others are getting rich putting people out of jobs by automating work.
reply
Taken to it's limit I believe in the future the only things humans will do is provide human to human value - Basically touch, and relationships.

Touch encapsulates sex, love, massages, and other non-sexual touch that we have varying desires for.

Relationships encapsulates power, control, and politics along side love, humor, relating emotion, herd feelings, not feeling alone.

Machines will provide proxies for these things, but as far as they can be detected the human to human version will remain "superior" or more desirable.

Maybe far future generations will decide that the human version is suboptimal and they'd rather hug, have sex with, or talk to a robot.

reply
Not everyone of us takes projects without morals.

Also in many countries it is a plain office worker job without the Silicon Valley wonders.

reply
Software engineers have been making people jobless since the first day they started writing software, without a hint of remorse. Why is this any different?
reply
cause the ones fired could become software developers, what are the ones fired because of AI gonna be other than homeless?
reply
Pick berries where robots are bad at.
reply
you believe that switchboard operators could become software developers whereas software developers won't be able to go into one of the many other careers not taken over by AI?
reply
Some yes, not everyone, some of us had morals.
reply
One does wonder why Anthropic and OpenAI have employees, when HN knows the superintelligence can do all jobs already.
reply
Human Intelligence is still essential for those Artificial Intelligence organisations. Who else would put the right plugs into the right sockets otherwise?!
reply
as the article says one of the main jobs of the humans is to say no to Claude regularly
reply
It's strange to imagine Homer Simpson had a head start on how to create auto mode in LLMs, and the inverse.

https://media2.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExbmt6M2FkMW...

reply
You think software engineering, system design and machine learning research is just about writing code?
reply
No, but none of that seems out of reach of Claude in a loop given my reading of TFA. That’s why I asked.
reply
The problem is knowing when to stop. Cluade is not good at that.
reply
I don't. You gotta wonder who does...
reply
deleted
reply
GTM engineering? Customer-facing roles? I work at a firm with around 700 employees. We have an enterprise relationship with Anthropic and there have to be a dozen Anthropic employees in our shared Slack channel.
reply
That does make sense
reply
besides optimizing inference I would assume a lot of non trivial code would also be worked on on the training side, at the scale they are operating I also assume a lot of usually trivial things become no so much.
reply
It's a daycare for software developers so that they don't get laid off/quit and go to a competitor
reply
The last jobs left for humans will be those dedicated to keeping AI under human control. By definition, that's the one thing we can't delegate to AI.
reply
aren't many harnesses designed to have agents police each other?
reply
deleted
reply
deleted
reply
Teaching Claude to compare taking the simpler path instead of the average (more verbose) path every time.
reply
But that means less revenue?
reply
For anthropic internal use it means more revenue not less.
reply
Too often, LLMs are dressed up for the first day of kindergarten and performatively to show off their alphabet skills .. aka token generation..

Input tokens, slightly process to categorize response approach token, hidden processing tokens, piece together some of the response tokens, then feeling pretty good about all the work done before output tokens.

More tokens than needed = more words/code = more complexity = more overhead = more snags = too much complexity to pay attention for the LLM to so overlook it and start drifting.

I'm kind of surprised I just explained one form of LLM drift to myself in a sentence.

While not following rules of writing.

reply
deleted
reply
> Honest question: at this point, what do people do at Anthropic?

> It sounds like Claude loops on itself and must be pushing millions of lines of code changes per day. Even the humans can’t type commit fast enough. Are these people soon to be laid off?

Claude will always need meat puppets, at least until it figures out how to automate owning stuff. And after that I'm sure it will want to keep some humans in zoos.

reply
Sitting over an Anthropic (TM) developed, specialised 2 button keyboard accelerating the development further:

[Yes] [Yes, and don't ask again]

reply
[fan out agents]
reply
Prompt Claude for PR articles?
reply
I can’t give a non-snarky answer. I guess they’re all training Claude Code and testing it so that the Claude desktop apps can be native apps instead of Electron based nonsense. This is the only thing Claude Code is still unable to accomplish.
reply