>> 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).
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).
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.
> 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).