[xpe]

> All of this points to their priorities not being aligned with their users’.

Framing this as "aligned" or "not aligned" ignores the interesting reality in the middle. It is banal to say an organization isn't perfectly aligned with its customers.

I'm not disagreeing with the commenter's frustration. But I think it can help to try something out: take say the top three companies whose product you interact with on a regular basis. Take stock of (1) how fast that technology is moving; (2) how often things break from your POV; (3) how soon the company acknowledges it; (4) how long it takes for a fix. Then ask "if a friend of yours (competent and hard working) was working there, would I give the company more credit?"

My overall feel is that people underestimate the complexity of the systems at Anthropic and the chaos of the growth.

These kind of conversations are a sort of window into people's expectations and their ability to envision the possible explanations of what is happening at Anthropic.

[daveoc64]

>My overall feel is that people underestimate the complexity of the systems at Anthropic and the chaos of the growth.

Making changes like reducing the usage window at peak times (https://x.com/trq212/status/2037254607001559305) without announcing it (until after the backlash) is the sort of thing that's making people lose trust in Anthropic. They completely ignored support tickets and GitHub issues about that for 3 days.

You shouldn't have to rely on finding an individual employee's posts on Reddit or X for policy announcements.

That policy hasn't even been put into their official documentation nearly one month on - https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11647753-how-do-usage...

A company with their resources could easily do better.

[xpe]

> You shouldn't have to rely on finding an individual employee's posts on Reddit or X for policy announcements.

I agree with this as a principle. Which raises this question: is it true? Are you certain these messages don't show up in (a) Claude Code and (b) Claude on the Web?

I've seen these kinds of messages pop up. I haven't taken inventory of how often they do. As a guess, maybe I see notifications like this several times a month. If any important ones are missing, that is a mistake.

Anyhow, this is the kind of discussion that I want people to have. I appreciate the detail.

> A company with their resources could easily do better.

Yes, they could. But easily? I'm not so sure.

Also ask yourself: what function does saying e.g. "they could have done better" serve? What does it help accomplish? I'm asking. I think it often serves as a sort of self-reinforcing thing to say that doesn't really invite more thinking.

Ask yourself: If "doing better" was easy, why didn't it happen? Maybe it isn't quite as easy as you think? Maybe you've baked in a lot of assumptions. Easy for who? Easy why? Try the questions I asked, above. They are not rhetorical. Here they are again, rephrased a bit

    > take the top three companies whose product you 
    > interact with on a regular basis. Take stock of
    > (1) how fast the technology is moving;
    > (2) how often things break from your POV;
    > (3) how soon the company acknowledges it;
    > (4) how long it takes for a fix.
    >
    > Then ask "if a friend of mine (competent, hard working)
    > worked there, how would I be thinking about the situation?"

There is a reason why I recommend asking these questions. Forcing yourself to write down your reference class is ... to me, table stakes, but well, lots of people just leave it floating and then ask other people to magically reconstruct it. Envisioning a friend working there shifts your viewpoint and can shake lose many common biases.

[xpe]

Thanks for the example -- you are one of the first people to quote a source, so I appreciate it. This makes constructive discussion much easier. You quoted this:

    > To manage growing demand for Claude we're adjusting our
    > 5 hour session limits for free/Pro/Max subs during peak
    > hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged.
    >
    > During weekdays between 5am–11am PT / 1pm–7pm GMT, you'll
    > move through your 5-hour session limits faster than before.

And yeah, no disagreement from me: many users are not going to like this. Narrowly speaking, I don't want any chance that reduces what I get for what I pay for. I also care about overall reliability, so if some users on the right tail of the usage distribution find themselves losing out, my take is "Yeah, they are disappointed, but this is rational decision for any company with this kind of subscription model."

Broken expectations are highly dependent on perception. People get used to having some particular level. When that changes and they notice, and being humans a strong default is to reach for something to blame. Then we rationalize. That last two parts are unhelpful, and I push back on them frequently.

[willis936]

So you're arguing they're just plain incompetent? Not sure that's going to win the trust of customers either.

[xpe]

> So you're arguing they're just plain incompetent? Not sure that's going to win the trust of customers either.

This is not a charitable interpretation of what I wrote. Please take a minute and rethink and rephrase. Here are two important guidelines, hopefully familiar to someone who has had an account since 2019:

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

[willis936]

I didn't assume bad faith, I simply reworded your conclusions with less soft language so that others would understand your position more clearly.

You are saying what they are doing is hard. That's fine. Their stated goals are to be the responsible stewards of the technology and we agree they are failing at that goal. You would attribute that to incompetence and not malice.

[xpe]

I personally try to follow Rapoport's Rules, and I since think they are consistent with the HN Guidelines, I like to mention them: [1].

I've thought on it, and I will try to start off with something we both agree on... We both agree that Anthropic made some mistakes, but this is probably a pretty uninteresting and shallow agreement. I find it unlikely that we would enumerate or characterize the mistakes similarly. I find it unlikely that we would be anywhere near the same headspace about our bigger-picture takes.

> I didn't assume bad faith

Ok, I'm glad. That one didn't concern me; if I had a do-over I would remove that one from the list. Sorry about that. These are the ones that concern me:

    > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive,
    > not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When I read your earlier comment (~20 words), it didn't come across as a thoughtful and substantive response to my comment (~160 words). I know length isn't a perfect measure nor the only measure, but it does matter.

    > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what
    > someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

Are you sure you didn't choose an easier to criticize interpretation? Did you take the take to try to state to yourself what I was trying to say? Back to Rapaport's Rules ...

    > You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so
    > clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks,
    > I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”

I'm grateful when people can express what I'm going for better than the way I wrote it or said it.

> I simply reworded your conclusions with less soft language

Technically speaking, lots of things could be called "rewording", but what you did was relatively far from "simply rewording". Charitably, it is closer to "your interpretation". But my intent was lost, so "rewording" doesn't fit.

> ... so that others would understand your position more clearly.

If you want to help others understand, then it is good to make sure you understand. For that, I recommend asking questions.

> Their stated goals are to be the responsible stewards of the technology and we agree they are failing at that goal.

No, I do not agree to that phrasing. It is likely I don't agree with your intention behind it either.

> You would attribute that to incompetence and not malice.

No; even if I agreed with the premise, I think it is more likely I would still disagree. I don't even like the framing of "either malice or incompetence". These ideas don't carve reality at the joints. [2] [3] There are a lot of stereotypes about "incompetence" but I don't think they really help us understand the world. These stereotypes are more like thought-terminators than interesting generative lenses.

I'll try to bring it back to the words "malice" and "incompetence" even though I think the latter is nigh-useless as a sense-making tool. Many mistakes happen without malice or incompetence; many mistakes "just happen" because people and organizations are not designed to be perfect. They are designed to be good enough. To not make any short-term mistakes would likely require too much energy or too much rigidity, both of which would be a worse category of mistake.

Try to think counterfactually: imagine a world where Anthropic is not malicious nor incompetent and yet mistakes still happened. What would this look like?

When you think of what Anthropic did wrong, what do you see as the lead up to it? Can you really envision the chain of events that brought it about? Imagine reading the email chain or the PRs. Can you see how there may be been various "off-ramps" where history might have gone differently? But for each of those diversions, how likely would it be that they match the universe we're in?

At some point figuring out what is a "mistake" even starts to feel strange. Does it require consciousness? Most people think so. But we say organizations make mistakes, but they aren't conscious -- or are they? Who do we blame? The CEO, because the buck stops there, right? He "should have known better". But why? Wait, but the Board is responsible...?

Is there any ethical foundation here? Some standard at all or is this all just anger dressed up as an argument? If this assigning blame thing starts to feel horribly complicated or even pointless, then maybe I've made my point. :)

If nothing else, when you read what I write, I want it to make you stop, get out a sheet of paper, and try to imagine something vividly. Your imagination I think will persuade you better than I can.

[1]: https://themindcollection.com/rapoports-rules/

[2]: https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Carving_nature_a...

[3]:https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303819/what-do-t...

[willis936]

Brevity is a virtue. Focus on the cooperative principle.

[achierius]

Do you not think people here work at big companies with big products? I do, and we have a much higher bar for shipping.

[xpe]

>> My overall feel is that people underestimate the complexity of the systems at Anthropic and the chaos of the growth.

> Do you not think people here work at big companies with big products? I do, and we have a much higher bar for shipping.

This form of comment (The "Do you not think {X}?") comes across as a swipe (discouraged by the HN guidelines). It doesn't respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of my comment (also in the guidelines).

[achierius]

That's fair. I'll adjust and say that I think there's a mix: some people certainly are bashing without understanding, but there are also a lot of engineers here whose day to day work is held to a higher standard than I think we see coming out of Anthropic, at least w.r.t. the product side of things (obviously the models are great).

[xpe]

Thanks. Along those lines, here's a sort of thought experiment. Of said engineers who know a higher standard, say we teleported them into Anthropic, what are some likely scenarios?

- How much time would they need to import their standards into Anthropic? ... things like tooling, process, culture, hiring, etc? Maybe externally-sourced discipline and rigor are the missing catalysts. [1]

- OTOH, it seems possible these engineers (many of which are used to certain levels of stability, sanity, internal tooling, etc) would be destabilized by Anthropic's problems, the scale, the rate of hiring, the rate of customer growth.

- Perhaps Anthropic needs new instrumentation to cover end-to-end customer metrics? More internal tool-building teams? A new ops team? A new org structure? I don't know.

The growth, the environment has put Anthropic into a position where these kinds of mistakes are just statistically inevitable ... unless they chose to grow more slowly.

So my overall hunch (very few people really grok the constellation of factors at Anthropic) is fuzzy. That's why I'm trying to lay out some of the questions that underlie it, without resorting to simplistic notions of blame (which paper over the deeper causes).

Lastly, can you think of comparable scenarios with this kind of growth where companies don't have major hiccups? This is driving towards thinking about the outside view [2]. Roughly speaking: don't expect to "beat the market" for long. Entropy wins.

[1]: I recently watched a video where Steve Jobs described a time in early Macintosh history where Apple tried to "professionalize" its management. Hiring proven managers didn't work, so they shifted towards hiring for cultural fit and letting them grow the management skills.

[2]: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/inside-outside-view