It makes sense that anthropic is cranking out these products trying to find and maintain a foothold in the market.

But part of me just wishes they would go back to developing and refining an excellent and user-friendly harness.

I can't imagine what the long term support is for the dozens of products they release every three months.

Meanwhile, they're shipping a more and more buggy and Byzantine Claude code with a million switches and tons of ways to use it wrong.

The subscription play really does feel like a bait and switch lock-in: "we can focus less on the harness because people with subscriptions need to use it, and focus on growth."

Interested to see if this works out for them.

I bet subs are not their main source of revenue (by far), big cos are throwing big dollars to them, offering things like this entrenches these corps more into their products (makes it harder to just switch to OpenAI if your entire infra is built on top of their products)

This movement is brilliant for them

> The subscription play really does feel like a bait and switch lock-in: "we can focus less on the harness because people with subscriptions need to use it, and focus on growth."

Of course it is and they're not hiding it. Paying 200$ a month for the equivalent of maybe 2000$ is no secret. Theyre at the frontier of the models and they need to stay there to stay relevant. Otherwise they will fall like the majority of these "AI" companies will when the bubble bursts.

How does releasing "Claude managed agents" keep them at the frontier of the models?

It doesn't specifically? It's built into their whole business model though.

> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. >So does Bitcoin... > And Mr. Back’s thesis project focused on C++ — the same programming language Satoshi used to code the first version of the Bitcoin software.

This is such poor quality writing, I'm kind of shocked to see it in nyt. It reads like a family guy cutaway lampooning a whodunnit.

I honestly can't believe this warranted a full piece. I was wondering if this a symptom of the author going down some llm psychosis rabbit hole?

_youre absolutely right, you've repeatedly shown signs that back is satoshi. The pattern is clear: back isn't just some cypherpunk, he's Satoshi._

Are you seriously asking or just using this space as a soapbox?

If you are, here's some useful info:

Every city in the United States has what could be categorized as a standing army in the form of a police force. They are ready and highly trained to violently stop civil unrest.

The police force deploys sophisticated technology and dragnet methodology to track and build profiles on all citizens that attend protests.

Similarly, the media and status quo is captured so thoroughly that all forms of mass protest appear eventually degenerate into lawless havoc to onlookers, which perpetuates a cycle of violence.

The state has no problem in engaging in mass arrests. And when the cultural moment has moved on, individuals are stuck fighting extreme charges and face having to make the difficult choice of pleaing out to resume what semblance of life remains. And if you want to fight, risk facing some of the most inhumane conditions in the developed world by spending some time in a federal prison.

So, "where is the entire US population?"

Mostly surviving and scared.

Yeah, why do people think every police department have been able to buy military vehicles and equipments for the last decades? To combat crime? LOL

What's your number?

My strategy is to go until I can't take anymore pain, then just walk away guilt free.

> There's a legit justification.

Maybe I'm just out of touch, but it feels like every day I look at hackernews, there's another articulate response patiently explaining why it's ok for companies to sell you things you don't own, and dictate how to use the things you think you own.

I just fundamentally don't accept it, and find it exhausting to engage in the constant overton window shifting.

For anyone reading this and wondering where the truth could possibly be:

We can't really know what the truth is, because Anthropic is tightly controlling how you interact with their product and provides their service through opaque processes. So all we can do is speculate. And in that speculation there's a lot of room (for the company) to bullshit or provide equally speculative responses, and (for outsiders) to search for all plausible explanations within the solution space. So there's not much to action on. We're effectively stuck with imprecise heuristics and vibes.

But consider what we do know: the promise is that Anthropic is providing a black-box service that solves large portions of the SDLC. Maybe all of it. They are "making the market" here, and their company growth depends on this bet. This is why these processes are opaque: they have to be. Anthropic, OpenAI and a few others see this as a zero-sum game. The winner "owns" the SDLC (and really, if they get their way the entire PDLC). So the competitive advantage lies in tightly controlling and tweaking their hidden parameters to squeeze as much value and growth as possible.

The downside is that we're handing over the magic for convenience and cost. A lot of people are maybe rightly criticizing the OP of the issue because they're staking their business on Claude Code in a way that's very risky. But this is essentially what these companies are asking for. The business model end game is: here's the token factory, we control it and you pay for the pleasure of using it. Effectively, rent-seeking for software development. And if something changes and it disrupts your business, you're just using it incorrectly. Try turning effort to max.

Reading responses like this from these company representatives makes me increasingly uneasy because it's indicative of how much of writing software is being taken out from under our feet. The glimmer of promise in all of this though is that we are seeing equity in the form of open source. Maybe the answer is: use pi-mono, a smattering of self hosted and open weights models (gemma4, kimi, minimax are extremely capable) and escalate to the private lab models through api calls when encountering hard problems.

Let the best model win, not the best end to end black box solution.

Don’t turn vibe coding into your day job (because the vibe won’t keep vibing). Write code (that you own) that can make you money and hire real developers.

I am reminded of OpenAI's first voice-to-voice demo a couple of years ago. I rewatched it and was shocked at how human it was; indiscernible from a real person. But the voice agent that we got sounds 20% better than Siri.

There's a hope that competition is what keeps these companies pushing to ship value to customers, but there are also billions of compute expense at stake, so there seems to be an understanding that nobody ships a product that is unsustainably competitive

These companies don't get the chance to raise a trillion dollars, and you're laughing???

This is largely the world we've created with litigation practices.

Corpo is very careful to show empathy that can be perceived in some way as accepting blame in a way that would open them to litigation.

Yeah, our litigation culture to me is just an inability for individuals/companies to resolve conflicts and escalate it to the legal system. And unfortunately there are many elements in the system that discourage us from reconciling and push us towards escalating.

Like anything else, it's easier to complain about the legitimacy of something and nitpick it to death than it is to do the actual thing.

Most people on HN aren't scientists, even if they fancy themselves as such.