[taylorlapeyre]

It really feels like Anthropic's product area is extremely overextended at this point. If they want to extend themselves horizontally in an unlimited fashion, they will need unlimited focus, and agents can't supply that. Things will fall through the cracks. Why should I believe that Anthropic will care about this product in 2, 3 years? Whereas I firmly believe that Figma will care greatly about its product in that time

[gck1]

OpenAI and Anthropic have realized that their entire business is exactly one open weight model drop away from Chinese labs that matches Opus 4.5 performance.

They realized they have no product or ground to stand on. Once such model drops and once chip manufacturers catch up with demand, they are dead, if their only product is inference.

So OpenAI decided to do weird things like buying up all the hardware that exists or will exist in the next 2 years to buy time to build the product. Then launch things like Sora, ChatGPT shopping, ads etc. They seem to be struggling with this.

Anthropic, being late to the game of hoarding up all the hardware, decided to "buy time" by hiding CoT, implementing KYC (especially for Chinese users), to delay the efforts of distillation. The products they build in the interim are SaaS clones designed from the POV of AI agents and tight integrations with their models.

And it seems like Google is just sitting aside, watching things unfold, since their business model doesn't stand on inference.

The most likely scenario is that OpenAI and Anthropic will still crash and burn when such open model is released.

Figma's survival is still questinable though. Most likely scenario is likely that there's going to be an open source alternative that has AI integration at the core level, rather than an afterthought.

[iamflimflam1]

Exactly this. There are now many great open source coding agents. All we lack is a good model to point them at.

Models are going to commodities - just switch the most affordable.

Longer term, running models locally is going to be increasingly available.

[spyckie2]

It is officially the 2010 Google era at Anthropic (the era where Google released tons of new products and spread themselves too thin).

Anyone remember Google's social media platform??? Google Plus?

This is a good era to be in! Its the era of product experimentation.

As long as you realize that 90% of the products will not be supported long term if it doesn't contribute to bottom line revenue, then just appreciate it for what it is, a bunch of smart people trying to create useful products.

Just don't be surprised if Anthropic goes the Google route, which is shutting down the majority of the products that are too small / not successful enough to impact their revenue.

[zormino]

You mean you aren't still using Google Duo and Allo? Google Reader? Playing games on your Stadia? I'd be worried about really locking into a specific Anthropic product at this point other than Claude Code

[maronato]

I never recovered from Inbox being killed.

[lunarboy]

I still fondly remember playing cyberpunk 2077 on release date with no download time. What the future could have been . Probably would have become economically infeasible regardless with GPU prices due to AI though

[aurareturn]

Every Anthropic release uses Claude models.

Not every Google product release used Google search. Some of them were completely outside of Google's domain.

[bauerd]

They are building infrastructure components that they will soon wire together with an orchestration layer. Managed agents, scheduled tasks, workflow webhook automation.

[taylorlapeyre]

The infrastructure piece is what they do best. I'd be happy if Anthropic became the AWS of AI. But this product is just a mediocre shot at Figma, when no such shot is strictly necessary for them. These kinds of consumer products are not what they do best.

[bauerd]

It would be interesting if they’re dogfooding it by building these research projects on those building blocks

[jjcm]

Unifying experiences and tying them together is always harder than net new. It's the GRRM problem - expanding out the universe is easy, wrapping it up on the other hand...

[3sdfs]

Ultimately OAI and ANthropic are destined to crash and burn - they have gambled a lot on LLM's paving the way toward accelerated research, discovery etc etc. But its not happened and its not happening - the only 'large' revenue stream they have all converged on is selling tokens in relation to software production. Which is pretty anti-climatic given all the hyping.

Keeping the hype alive through to IPO is critical now.

[JulienZammit]

Been watching the same pattern. The weekly shipping cadence is impressive but I'm skeptical these products get loved in 2 years. Claude Code gets the focus because it drives revenue. Everything else feels like option value for the IPO narrative. Kind of makes me want to build on the API directly rather than on any specific product surface.

[wraptile]

Locking into products with such low entry cost for 2-3 years is an outdated pov. It's not photoshop that you need to spend months to retraining yourself - the entire selling point of AI-powered software is that you can pick it up in a week and replace or just compliment your existing tools with almost no added effort.

[tomashertus]

Are they, though? My thinking is that their roadmap is heavily focused on the SDLC and solving problems related to software development, so their model will be optimized for that domain. That leaves room in the market for models that are specialized in other areas of expertise.

[throwaway041207]

Agree. I'm building a software factory at my job right now that leverages Claude Code. It seems like almost daily Anthropic is releasing new products or features on existing products that seem to overlap with the factory I'm building. I still think my project provides a more coherent workflow from a SDLC standpoint, bringing an idea to a ticket, to a prompt, to a plan, and finally coding and creating a PR, but it definitely feels like Anthropic is heading in that direction as well. It'll be interesting if they eventually bring all of this together into a single uber tool.

[taylorlapeyre]

If that is what they are optimizing for, then they are not doing a great job on that either. Their latest model is more expensive and less impressive, their downtime is abysmal by any comparison, their "Dispatch" product is unworkable - conversation threads don't sync properly, the UX is quite bad -, their Desktop app is slow and clunky, Cowork is by all accounts mediocre.

[mocamoca]

I feel like it's a good way to build the best PoC in any vertical. Either they create a product, or the big players will but Anthropic can provide them with the infra.

[alwillis]

> Why should I believe that Anthropic will care about this product in 2, 3 years?

There's no reason to believe Anthropic will stop caring about this product--they're not Google [1] after all.

> It really feels like Anthropic's product area is extremely overextended at this point.

I don't think so. They have one core product: the Claude model; they're enabling different ways of accessing it. Claude Code for developers, Cowork for general business tasks, and chat for consumers.

This is their first graphic design product, but it fits nicely because once you create a prototype, you can hand it over to Claude Code to make the website, mobile app, or whatever.

The advantage Anthropic has is their ecosystem. A Claude user will be way more productive using Design because all of their context is with Claude; other AI tools don't "know you" the way Claude does. Claude already knows your style and your preferences; it's much more likely to create designs you'd like.

When you go to an AI you don’t normally use, you essentially have to start from scratch.

[1]: https://killedbygoogle.com