I have little doubt where things are going, but the irony of the way they communicate versus the quality of their actual product is palpable.
Claude Code (the product, not the underlying model) has been one of the buggiest, least polished products I have ever used. And it's not exactly rocket science to begin with. Maybe they should try writing slightly less than 100% of their code with AI?
More generally, Anthropic's reliability track record for a company which claims to have solved coding is astonishingly poor. Just look at their status page - https://status.claude.com/ - multiple severe incidents, every day. And that's to say nothing of the constant stream of bugs for simple behavior in the desktop app, Claude Code, their various IDE integrations, the tools they offer in the API, and so on.
Their models are so good that they make dealing with the rest all worth it. But if I were a non-research engineer at Anthropic, I wouldn't strut around gloating. I'd hide my head in a paper bag.
I find the GitHub issue experience particularly hellish: search for my issue -> there it is! -> only comment "Found 3 possible duplicate" Generated with Claude Code -> go to start.
I am constantly amazed how developers went hard for claude-code when there were and are so many better implementations of the same idea.
It's also a tool that has a ton of telemetry, doesn't take advantage of the OS sandbox, and has so many tiny little patch updates that my company has become overworked trying to manage this.
Its worst feature (to me at least), is the, "CLAUDE.md"s sprinkled all over, everywhere in our repository. It's impossible to know when or if one of them gets read, and what random stale effect, when it does decide to read it, has now been triggered. Yes, I know, I'm responsible for keeping them up to date and they should be part of any PR, but claude itself doesn't always even know it needs to update any of them, because it decided to ignore the parent CLAUDE.md file.
Sometimes the agent (any agent, not just Claude — cursor, codex) would miss a rule or skill that is listed in AGENTS.md or Claude.md and I'm like "why did you miss this skill, it's in this file" and it's like "oh! I didn't see it there. Next time, reference the skill or AGENTS.md and I'll pick it up!"
Like, isn't the whole point of those files to not have to constantly reference them??
"Coding" is solved in the same way that "writing English language" is solved by LLMs. Given ideas, AI can generate acceptable output. It's not writing the next "Ulysses," though, and it's definitely not coming up with authentically creative ideas.
But the days of needing to learn esoteric syntax in order to write code are probably numbered.
OK, but seriously... if Anthropic is on the "best" path, aside from somehow nuking all AI research labs, an IPO would be the most socially responsible thing that they could do. Right?
That's a bummer. I was looking forward to testing this, but that seems pretty limiting.
My current solution uses Tailscale with Termius on iOS. It's a pretty robust solution so far, except for the actual difficulty of reading/working on a mobile screen. But for the most part, input controls work.
My one gripe with Termius is that I can't put text directly into stdin using the default iOS voice-to-text feature baked into the keyboard.
I’ve been doing this for a while [1], but ultimately settled on a building a thin transport layer for Telegram to accept and return media, and persistent channels, vastly improved messaging UX, etc. and ended up turning this into a ‘claw with a heartbeat and SOUL [2].
I really enjoyed reading both posts. Thanks for sharing!
I, like many others, have written my own "claw" implementation, but it's stagnated a bit. I use it through Slack, but the idea of journaling with it is compelling. Especially when combined with the recent "two sentence" journaling article[1] that floated through HN not too long ago.
Great posts! So far [2] is the only "claw" that has caught my interest, mostly because it isn't trying to do everything itself in some bespoke, NIH way.
I've been using email and Cloudeflare email router. You don't get the direct feedback of a terminal, but it's much easier to read what's happening in html formatted email.
It also feels kind of nice to just fire off an email and let it do it's thing.
Oooh, now this is a very interesting idea. I live in my inbox and keep it quite tidy. Email is the perfect place to fire-and-forget ideas and then come back to a full response.
Do you have a blog outlining how you set it up? I'm curious to learn more.
Exactly my experience, I know they vibe code features and that’s fine but it looks like they don’t do proper testing which is surprising to me because all you need bunch of cheap interns to some decent enough testing
No there is a wide gap between good and bad testers. Great testers are worth their weight in gold and delight in ruining programmer's days all day long.
IMO not a good place to skimp and a GREAT place to spend for talent.
> Great testers are worth their weight in gold and delight in ruining programmer's days all day long.
Site note: all the great testers I've know when my employers had separate QA departments all ended up becoming programmers, either by studying on the side or through in-house mentorship. By all second hand accounts they've become great programmers too.
So true. My first job was in QA. Involuntarily, because I applied for a dev role, but they only had an opening for QA. I took the job because of the shiny company name on my resume. Totally changed my perspective of quality and finding issues. Even though I liked the job, it has some negative vibes because you are always the guy bringing bad news / critizing others peoples work (more or less).
Also some developers couldn't react professionally to me finding bugs in their code. One dev team lead called me "person non grata" when coming over to their desk. I took it with pride.
Eventually I transitioned to develoment because I did not see any career path or me in QA (team lead positions were filled with people doing the job for 20+ years).
They bring down production because the version string was changed incorrectly to add an extra date. That would have been picked up in even the most basic testing since the app couldn't even start.
You jest but I was flabbergasted when doing some AI backed feature that the fix was adding a "The result you send back MUST be accurate." to the already pretty clear prompt.
First of all /remote-control in the terminal just printed a long url. Even though they advertise we can control it from the mobile app (apparently it should show a QR code but doesn't). I fire up the mobile app but the session is nowhere to be seen. I try typing the long random URL in the mobile browser, but it simply throws me to the app, but not the session. I read random reddit threads and they say the session will be under "Code", not "Chats", but for that you have to connect github to the Claude app (??, I just want to connect to the terminal Claude on my PC, not github). Ok I do it.
Now even though the session is idle on the pc, the app shows it as working... I try tapping the stop button, nothing happens. I also can't type anything into it. Ok I try starting a prompt on the pc. It starts the work on the PC, but on the mobile app I get a permission dialog... Where I can deny or allow the thing that actually already started on the pc because I already gave permission for that on the PC. And many more. Super buggy.
I wonder if they let Claude write the tests for their new features... That's a huge pitfall. You can think it works and Claude assures you all is fine but when you start it everything falls apart because there are lots of tests but none actually test the actual things.
I'm willing to bet most of their libraries are definitely vibe coded. I'm using the claude-agent-sdk and there are quite a few bugs and some weird design decisions. And looking through the actual python code it's definitely not what I would classify 'best practice'. Bunch of imports in functions, switching on strings instead of enums, etc.
I had to downgrade to an earlier release because an update introduced a regression where they weren't handling all of their own event types.
A few weeks ago the github integration was completely broken on the claude website for multiple days. It's very clear they vibe code everything and while it's laudable that they eat their own dogfood, it really projects a very amateurish image about their infrastructure and implementation quality.
I think they are betting that any of this code is transient and not worth too much effort because once Opus 5 is traimed, they can just ask it to refactor and fix everything and improve code quality enough so that things don't fall apart while adding more features, and when opus 5.5 comes out it will be able to clean up after opus 5. And so on. They don't expect these codebase to be long lived and worth the time investment.
In theory, comments on Hacker News should advance discussion and meet a certain quality bar lest they be downvoted to make room for the ones that meet the criteria. I am not sure if this ever was true in practice, it certainly seems to have waned in the years I have been a reader of this forum (see one of the many pelican on a bike comments on any AI model release thread), but I'd expect some people still try to vote with this in mind.
Being sarcastic doesn't lower the bar for a comment to meet to not get downvoted, so I wouldn't go thinking people miss the sarcasm without first considering whether the comment adds to the discussion when wondering why a comment is downvoted.
I only understood it after reading some of co_king_5’s other comments. This is Poe’s law in action. I know several people who converted into AI coding cultists and they say the same things but seriously. Curiously none of them were coders before AI.
I'm willing to bet you don't full-on YOLO vibecode like the lead Claude Code developer, running 10 Claude Code sessions in parallel to push 259 pull requests that modify >40k lines of code in a month [0]? There is zero chance any of that code was rigorously reviewed.
I use Claude Code almost every day [1], and when used properly (i.e. with manual oversight), it's an amazing productivity booster. The issue is when it's used to produce far more code than can be rigorously reviewed.
> - You can't interrupt Claude (you press stop and he keeps going!)
This is normal behavior on desktop sometimes its in the middle of something? I also assume there's some latency
> - At best it stops but just keeps spinning
Latency issues then?
> - It can get stuck in plan mode
I've had this happen from the desktop, and using Claude Code from mobile before remote control, I assume this has nothing to do with remote control but a partial outage of sorts with Claude Code sometimes?
I don't work for Anthropic, just basing off my anecdotal experience.
On top of that is something they should have had from earlier times. My biggest pain point is to not to be able to continue from my phone. I just use a service to pipe telegram to any cc session in the dev machine. This is the number 1 reason why I got excited by openclaw in the first place but its overkill to have it just to control cc
This is my general experience with the claude app, I don't know what they're smoking over at anthropic but their ability to touch mobile arch inappropriately with AI is reaching critical levels.
We’ve been building in this space for a while, and the issues listed here are exactly the hard parts: session connectivity, reconnection logic, multi-session UX, and keeping state in-sync across devices. Especially when it comes to long running tasks and the edge cases that show up in real use.
Right now:
- You can't interrupt Claude (you press stop and he keeps going!)
- At best it stops but just keeps spinning
- The UI disconnects intermittently
- It disconnects if you switch to other parts of Claude
- It can get stuck in plan mode
- Introspection is poor
- You see XML in the output instead of things like buttons
- One session at a time
- Sessions at times don't load
- Everytime you navigate away from Code you need to wait for your session to reappear
I'm sure I'm missing a few things.