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by giancarlostoro 48 days ago
...I've said this a few times, and sometimes I get downvoted for it sometimes I do not... This is what happens when you only hire CS people with no real world engineering experience. Sure they can build ML models, but I see how they improve upon them after years, and its always some really old "lesson learned" elsewhere in the industry. There's a thousand projects that make things like Claude Code use less tokens, and edit more efficiently, and nobody at Anthropic or Codex implements a single one of these approaches.

It screams inexperience building real software. If I were anthropic I'd hire devs for Claude Code who arent just AI builders, but tool builders, who care about UX and systems.

1 comments

Building ML model training and serving infrastructure is real-world engineering. Nevermind the user-facing apps and supporting services.

> Sure they can build ML models, but I see how they improve upon them after years, and its always some really old "lesson learned" elsewhere in the industry. There's a thousand projects that make things like Claude Code use less tokens, and edit more efficiently, and nobody at Anthropic or Codex implements a single one of these approaches.

They have fully internalized the bitter lesson; the result is they get better returns improving the next model over squeezing out performance from the current one.

> Building ML model training and serving infrastructure is real-world engineering. Nevermind the user-facing apps and supporting services.

Looking at Anthropics status info for the last 90 days only serves to prove that they aren't hiring the right people for the right roles.

> They have fully internalized the bitter lesson; the result is they get better returns improving the next model over squeezing out performance from the current one.

Sure, but there's so many things they could be doing that don't require tweaking the model directly to improve it, the community builds all sorts of tools that improve Claude Code directly, and yet nobody at Anthropic takes any initiative in those directions, it feels like either they don't care about building user-facing software, or they don't have any UX experience.

> Looking at Anthropics status info for the last 90 days only serves to prove that they aren't hiring the right people for the right roles

Look at any[1] dashboard over the past 6 months. It's less about the people working there an more about what leadership is demanding, industry-wide: Productivity* is the only metric that matters now - measured by how quickly teams under them can squirt out new features. Leadership desperately need a win because of the amounts invested, so stability becomes what it is now. Nothing to do with the rank and file, though it's Engineering that will be blamed when the time comes, I hope the multitudes of CTOs are earning enough to justify them being sacrificed to appease shareholders.

1. If your company has a SEV or SLA dashboard, look at it and compare the levels before and after mandated AI-productivity pushes by management.