[tripleee]

They succeeded in spite of their tech choices. Their model outshone it, which is an extremely rare thing to happen and not something they could've counted on. In any other timeline they could've/would've been hurt by their choices.

It's like "why did you go all in on buying scamcoin 3.0 as your investment strategy?" -- "I 5xed my money! End of story! It was fine!"

[benoau]

> They succeeded in spite of their tech choices.

Or those choices just don't matter, it's fundamentally just "tabs vs spaces".

[pdimitar]

As much as an enthusiast dev like myself hates it -- this is innately true, way too often.

I am 46 y/o and still excited to code and solve problems with code and I still have trouble to admit to myself sometimes that people make dozens of millions with PHP and the tech hardly matters when you can throw bodies at the problem (and when that throwing of bodies at the problem actually solves it, of course).

[georgemcbay]

> I still have trouble to admit to myself sometimes that people make dozens of millions with PHP

Or many billions. eg. Facebook was originally written in PHP.

As a 52 y/o who cares deeply about software development as an art I don't have trouble admitting that the tech hardly matters relative to the economics, that was obvious to me very early in my career.

I have just never really cared because there has always been a path where you can have a decent career being paid to work on and with good technology in spite of the fact that the technology wasn't important to the economics.

I do fear that the rapid adoption of LLMs will probably cause the path I took to narrow considerably. There will likely be less companies willing to pay people to work on elegant technology when they are all competing against endless code generation machines (and this is assuming software companies can exist at all in this future). But at my age that's more of a concern for younger people than me.

[pdimitar]

I hear you on the worry, I have the same (and probably so do most devs even).

But IMO the endless churning of code will slow down, if it has not already. Quantity does not equal quality as we know, it even erodes it. There are already consulting companies that are "vibe-code fixers".

I am also not sure it's about "elegant" code. What we might call elegant has multiple measurable axii f.ex. well-isolated effectful code layer so you can easily static-code-check it, domains and enforcement of boundaries between them, bespoke linting to enforce business processes and standing code discipline, and many others.

[groundzeros2015]

Apply this reasoning to any other industry. Yes the average person is not the judge of the quality of a doctor or engineer. That doesn’t invalidate it. You want a doctor who cares about medicine , not whatever will accomplish a business goal.

[azeirah]

Eh, the rendering of Claude Code is genuinely such a mess. I have quit claude code over it because when used as a terminal in PHPStorm it sometimes gets so bad that it becomes hard to use.

This isn't a minor nitpick, it's a pretty major UX issue.

Not saying it's like a massive business downside because I'm just one of a few users, maybe this affects their bottom line a little bit, but probably not by much.

Regardless, switching to pi has been a nice breath of fresh air. It just renders well and smoothly and handles terminal resizes well, which is especially important when used in a terminal window in PHPStorm.

[lucumo]

> when used as a terminal in PHPStorm

Truthfully, the terminal in Jetbrains IDEs just isn't that great. It's gotten a lot better with their rewrites (yes, plural) of the last years, especially on Windows, but it can still be pretty dodgy.

[jamienicol]

That may be so but Claude code certainly has rendering glitches in other terminals too.

[vips7L]

You don’t have to use these “tools”.

[azeirah]

Indeed, and I said I stopped using the tool in the comment I made.

[tripleee]

If they don't matter why isn't GTA6 being built in React?

Tabs vs spaces makes no tradeoffs. Tech choices do

[chippiewill]

The choices were clearly (far) less important than having the best model and a good product that was way ahead of the competition.

However, that's not the same as the technology choices not mattering at all. As others have mentioned the product is buggy, and it appears Anthropic are struggling to continue to release new features within the existing architecture.

That's also not to say that Anthropic made bad choices - there's always going to be a tension between building quickly to capture the market now vs moving slower and building something more maintainable in the long-term.

[troupo]

A TUI outputting nothing but text shouldn't consume 70 GB RAM and yet there they were just half a year ago: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987

They couldn't even fix flickering in their TUI and their new renderer is complete garbage.

They succeeded despite their tech.

[enraged_camel]

>> They succeeded in spite of their tech choices.

It is rarely the case that technology choice is the make-or-break when it comes to whether a product is successful and achieves widespread adoption. Some choices are less ideal than others, but at the end of the day if you manage to make something that people want, the rest won't matter much.

[anamexis]

What do you mean in spite of their tech choices? When have the tech choices ever been an issue in the lifespan of Claude Code? From where I sit, it seems like their tech choices enabled them to create an industry-defining product.

[dnautics]

for about half a year claude code had this obnoxious flicker problem. i almost quit and went to codex over it.

[tripleee]

I mean people are using Claude Code because of their underlying LLM - they'll put up with Claude Code. There's no other real option to get Opus at a reasonably affordable price without CC.

Most people would choose to swim a lap through a pool of pee to get a billion dollars at the end. The pool of pee itself wasn't the once in a lifetime opportunity (for most).

Sorry, I'm bad at analogies.

[anamexis]

I may not be the standard case, but I use Claude Code over Codex, OpenCode, Amp, etc primarily because of the UX, not the models or pricing.

[nozzlegear]

> When have the tech choices ever been an issue in the lifespan of Claude Code?

This is just blatantly ignoring all of the glaring issues Claude Code has had over its lifespan.

[solumunus]

I think the point is that people still continued to use it above everything else regardless.

[troupo]

Because there's no legal way to use Claude Code on subscription otherwise

[solumunus]

Exactly. Their tech choices were not an issue because other things mattered more to users.

[troupo]

Yes. "People don't use alternatives not because they literally aren't allowed to, but because other things matter more"