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The Claude Code Leak

200 points by mergesort 6mo ago

riteshkew1001 6mo ago
[flagged]
tylerloveamber 6mo ago
The five-layer permission system discussion is interesting from a governance angle. Most small teams deploying Claude Code have no idea those permission layers exist — they approved the tool based on the marketing page, not the actual trust model. The practical question for any CEO: if your developer's machine is running an agent with filesystem access, do you know what it can touch? The leaked code shows the answer is more nuanced than "it only touches what you tell it to." Wrote a non-technical breakdown of what this means for AI tool policy (specifically the autonomous permissions mode and memory system that were hidden behind feature flags): https://www.aipolicydesk.com/blog/claude-code-leak-what-ceo-should-do https://www.aipolicydesk.com/blog/claude-code-leak-what-ceo-...
anematode 6mo ago
> But then the clean room implementations started showing up. People had taken Anthropic’s source code and rewritten Claude Code from scratch in other languages like Python and Rust. Seems like the phrase "clean room" is the new "nonplussed"... how does this make any sense?
- recursive 6mo ago
  I think it means you write a spec from the implementation. Then you write a new implementation from the spec. You might go so far as to do the second part in a "clean" room.
  - roywiggins 6mo ago
    right. that's not what people are doing here though, at all
  - john_strinlai 6mo ago
    in a typical clean-room design, the person writing the new implementation is not supposed to have any knowledge of the original, they should only have knowledge of the specification. if one person writes the spec from the implementation, and then also writes the new implementation, it is not clean-room design.
    - post_below 6mo ago
      I believe the argument is that LLMs are stateless. So if the session writing the code isn't the same session that wrote the spec, it's effectively a clean room implementation. There are other details of course (is the old code in the training data?) but I'm not trying to weigh in on the argument one way or the other.
  - m132 6mo ago
    Heh, the original being entirely vibed had me thinking of an interesting problem: if you used the same model to generate a specification, then reset the state and passed that specification back to it for implementation, the resulting code would by design be very close to the original. With enough luck (or engineering), you could even get the same exact files in some cases. Does this still count as clean-room? Or what if the model wasn't the same exact one, but one trained the same way on the same input material, which Anthropic never owned? This is going to be a decade of very interesting, and probably often hypocritical lawsuits.
- mergesort 6mo ago
  Heya, post author here. I think I was just wrong about this assertion. I got into a discussion with a copyright lawyer over on Bluesky[^1] after I wrote this and came away reasonably convinced that this wouldn’t be a valid example of a clean room implementation. [^1]: https://bsky.app/profile/mergesort.me/post/3mihhaliils2y https://bsky.app/profile/mergesort.me/post/3mihhaliils2y
- aeternum 6mo ago
  The most fitting method would be to be to train an LLM on the Claude Code source-code (among other data). Then use Anthropic's own argument that LLM output is original work and thus not subject to copyright.
twelfthnight 6mo ago
Seems equally valid to come out of this with the takeaway that code quality _does_ matter, because poor coding practices are what led to the leak. Sure, the weights are where the real value lives, but if the quality is so lax they leak their whole codebase, maybe they are just lucky they didn’t leak customer data or the model weights? If that did happen, the entire business might evaporate overnight.
- jamiemallers 6mo ago
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- Andrei_dev 6mo ago
  I look at other people's code a lot. The security issues are always boring, that's the thing. API keys sitting in the client bundle, auth middleware missing half the routes. Not clever exploits, just nobody actually reading what the AI spit out. Actually wait, it's worse than that. The product works, demo looks great. Then someone opens the network tab and ... yeah. "Quality doesn't matter" really just means nothing caught fire yet.
leduyquang753 6mo ago
> Many software developers have argued that working like a pack of hyenas and shipping hundreds of commits a day without reading your code is an unsustainable way to build valuable software, but this leak suggests that maybe this isn’t true — bad code can build well-regarded products. The product hasn't been around long enough to decide whether such an approach is "sustainable". It is currently in a hype state and needs more time for that hype to die down and the true value to show up, as well as to see whether it becomes the 9th circle of hell to keep in working order.
- mergesort 6mo ago
  Hey there, author of the post here. I actually agree with this! That is in fact why I used the word maybe — my comment really was meant to be more speculative than definitive.
  - 59nadir 6mo ago
    I think one thing that goes unmentioned is that maybe code quality is really not that important for trivial things, because they can be trivially reproduced if need be. I would argue Claude Code is exactly such a project; coding agents are incredibly simple and rewriting CC wouldn't be much of a problem. Non-trivial things tend to be much more sensitive to code quality in my experience, and will by necessity be kept around for longer and thus be much more sensitive to maintenance issues.
    - rakel_rakel 6mo ago
      > maybe code quality is really not that important for trivial things I hear this narrative being pushed quite a bit, and it makes my spidey senses tingle every time. Secure programs are a subset of correct programs, and to write and maintain correct programs you need to have a quality mindset. A 0-day doesn't care if it's in a part of your computer you consider trivial or not.
      - 59nadir 6mo ago
thaumaturgy 6mo ago
I wonder what happened to the person that wrote "Coding as Creative Expression" (https://build.ms/2022/5/21/coding-as-creative-expression/ https://build.ms/2022/5/21/coding-as-creative-expression/)? I'm not (just) being glib. That earlier article displays some introspection and thoughtful consideration of an old debate. The writing style is clearly personal, human. Today's post is not so much. It has LLM fingerprints on it. It's longer, there are more words. But it doesn't strike me as having the same thoughtful consideration in it. I would venture to guess that the author tried to come up with some new angles on the news of the Claude Code leak, because it's a hot topic, and jotted some notes, and then let an LLM flesh it out. Writing styles of course change over time, but looking at these two posts side by side, the difference is stark.
- mergesort 6mo ago
  Hey there, author of the post here! I actually wrote this piece myself on my phone while I was out for a walk this morning. It was initially meant to be a quick note more than a full blog post —- whereas Coding As A Creative Expression took me a couple of days to write. I made a commitment to write more this year and put my thoughts out quicker than I used to, so that’s likely the primary reason it’s not as deep of a piece of writing as the post you’re referencing. But I do want to note that this wasn’t written using AI, it just wasn’t intended to be as rich of a post. The reason it came out longer is that I’ve honestly been thinking about these ideas for a while, and there is so much to say about this subject. I didn’t have any particular intention of hopping on a news cycle, but once I started writing the juices were flowing and I found myself coming up with five separate but interrelated thoughts around this story that I thought were worth sharing.
  - tpoacher 6mo ago
    Reminds me of the classic Mark Twain quote: "Apologies, I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one."
    - adzm 6mo ago
      > I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one. First known use in English comes from a 1658 translation of Blaise Pascal in 1657 > Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. translated to > I had not made this longer then the rest, but that I had not the leisure to make it shorter then it is. (note the archaic then) This was a popular piece of wit at the time. Mark Twain wrote something similar a hundred years later > You'll have to excuse my lengthiness - the reason I dread writing letters is because I am so apt to get to slinging wisdom & forget to let up. Thus much precious time is lost. But it's still quite different. There is a great article about this one on quoteinvestigator! https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
pregseahorses 6mo ago
They just said this was an April Fools joke.
- gfosco 6mo ago
  No you fell for someone elses joke.
- dodu_ 6mo ago
  jokesonthemiwasonlypretending.png
panavm 6mo ago
[flagged]
grey-area 6mo ago
Points from the article. 1. The code is garbage and this means the end of software. Now try maintaining it. 2. Code doesn’t matter (the same point restated). No, we shouldn’t accept garbage code that breaks e.g. login as an acceptable cost of business. 3. It’s about product market fit. OK, but what happens after product market fit when your code is hot garbage that nobody understands? 4. Anthropic can’t defend the copyright of their leaked code. This I agree with and they are hoist by their own petard. Would anyone want the garbage though? 5. This leak doesn’t matter I agree with the author but for different reasons - the value is the models, which are incredibly expensive to train, not the badly written scaffold surrounding it. We also should not mistake current market value for use value. Unlike the author who seems to have fully signed up for the LLM hype train I don’t see this as meaning code is dead, it’s an illustration of where fully relying on generative AI will take you - to a garbage unmaintainable mess which must be a nightmare to work with for humans or LLMs.
- tipiirai 6mo ago
  What exactly makes you say that "the author who seems to have fully signed up for the LLM hype train"? I feel the author is just stating the obvious: code quality has very little to do with whether a product succeeds
  - grey-area 6mo ago
    OK, but what happens after product market fit when your code is hot garbage that nobody understands?
    - tipiirai 6mo ago
      This is a different question, but obviously, a code that "nobody understands" is a terrible situation
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  I'm a little disappointed that a bunch of engineers with unlimited access to Opus didn't do a better job.
deleted 6mo ago
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himata4113 6mo ago
I personally found it really amusing how they weaponized the legal system to DMCA all the claude code source code repositories. Code ingested into the model is not copyrightable, but produced code apparently is when by legal definition computer generated code can not be copyrighted and that's one of their primary arguments in legal cases.
- yeahforsureman 6mo ago
  I guess you'd be assuming that both the original CC code and its ports are computer/AI-generated? As a lawyer, though, I'd still maintain that you wouldn't need much original human input in the CC code to kind of ruin that theory. The threshold for copyright protection isn't that high, really.
  - Aloisius 6mo ago
    The copyright office has indicated that AI generated elements lacking human contributions to the expression (rather than input) would still not be copyrightable even if some human authored elements are made to the expression as well. Seems like it would be a nightmare to provide evidence of what parts of a half a million line codebase were written by humans if no one bothered to track it.
    - himata4113 6mo ago
      They have publically and proudly stated that vast amount of claude code was entirely vibe coded so they've already lost that argument.
- kristopolous 6mo ago
  I did an interesting spin to avoid it: generated Claude abstracted as a set of PRD style architectural instructions so you can do your claude-code inspired program effortlessly. There's even a GUI called claudia for a piecemeal extraction with a PRD. https://github.com/kristopolous/Claudette https://github.com/kristopolous/Claudette I've got a web, rust and tkinter version (for fun) right now just making sure this approach works. The answer is... Mostly... Enjoy
jeremie_strand 6mo ago
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michaelashley29 6mo ago
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slopinthebag 6mo ago
Claude Code proves you don't need quality code — you just need hundreds of billions of dollars to produce a best-in-class LLM and then use your legal team to force the extreamly subsidised usage of it through your own agent harness. Or in other words, shitty software + massive moat = users. Seriously, if Anthropic were like oAI and let you use their subscription plans with any agent harness, how many users would CC instantly start bleeding? They're #39 in terminal bench and they get beaten by a harness that provides a single tool: tmux. You can literally get better results by giving Opus 4.6 only a tmux session and having it do everything with bash commands. It seems premature to make sweeping claims about code quality, especially since the main reason to desire a well architected codebase is for development over the long haul.
komali2 6mo ago
> bad code can build well-regarded products. Yes, exactly. Products. It seems like me and all the engineers I've known always have this established dichotomy: engineers, who want to write good code and to think a lot about user needs, and project managers/ executives/sales people, who want to make the non-negative numbers on accounting documents larger. The truth is that to write "good software," you do need to take care, review code, not single-shot vibe code and not let LLMs run rampant. The other truth is that good software is not necessary good product; the converse is also true: bad product doesn't necessarily mean bad software. However there's not really a correlation, as this article points out: terrible software can be great product! In fact if writing terrible software lets you shit out more features, more quickly, you'll probably come ahead in business world than someone carefully writing good software but releasing more slowly. That's because the priorities and incentives in business world are often in contradiction to priorities and incentives in human world. I think this is hard to grasp for those of us who have been taught our whole lives that money is a good scorekeeper for quality and efficacy. In reality it's absolutely not. Money is Disney bucks recording who's doing Disney World in the most optimal way. Outside of Disney World, your optimal in-park behavior is often suboptimal for out-of-park needs. The problem is we've mistaken Disney World for all of reality, or, let Walt Disney enclose our globe within the boundaries of his park. > The object which labor produces confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer.
kstenerud 6mo ago
> It should serve as a warning to developers that the code doesn’t seem to matter, even in a product built for developers. Code doesn't matter IN THE EARLY DAYS. This is similar to what I've observed over 25 years in the industry. In a startup, the code doesn't really matter; the market fit does. But as time goes on your codebase has to mature, or else you end up using more and more resources on maintenance rather than innovation.
- trhway 6mo ago
  alternatively the code can go the way of "fast fashion" and even "3d-print your garments in the morning according to your feelings and weather and recycle at the end of the day". If dealing with a functionality that is splittable into microfeatures/microservices, then anything that you need right now can potentially be vibe-coded, even on the fly (and deleted afterwards). Single-use code. >But as time goes on your codebase has to mature, or else you end up using more and more resources on maintenance rather than innovation. tremendous resource sink in enterprise software. Solving it, even if making it just avoidable - may be Anthropic goes that way and leads the others - would be a huge revolution.
  - otabdeveloper4 6mo ago
    > microfeatures/microservices Have you seen the code generated by AI? These things converge on the "1 million lines to make an API call" pattern. They're a lot of things, but certainly not "micro".
  - ezst 6mo ago
    I can totally wrap my head around that, and it's an interesting thought experiment, though: - building functionalities as components that are swappable on a whim requires a level of careful thought, abstraction and architecture that essentially is the exact opposite to ai slop - in this day and age we still don't make software for the sake of it, and who's financing it doesn't generally require such levels of functional flexibility (the physical world commandeering the coding isn't nearly as volatile as to justify that) - this comes loaded with the implication that "stuff needs to work": if you are developing software that manages inventory, orders, resources, ... you just can't take the chance to corrupt your customers data or disrupt their business processes. Shipping faster than you can test and with no accountability and no oversight is a solution to a problem I've personally never encountered in the wild
Finbarr 6mo ago
Who cares that the code is garbage? As the models get bigger and more powerful it will be trivial to fully refactor the whole codebase. It’s coming sooner than you think.
uduni 6mo ago
" The real value in the AI ecosystem isn’t the model or the harness — it’s the integration of both working seamlessly together. " Wut? The value in the ecosystem is the model. Harnesses are simple. Great models work nearly identically in every harness
- steve_adams_86 6mo ago
  Harnesses are simple (kind of? Some certainly aren't, but I'd agree that they can be simple) but they deliver a ton of value. They have a significant ROI. I agree that good models have more value because a harness can't magically make a bad model good, but there's a lot that would be inordinately difficult without a proper harness. Keeping models on rails is still important, if not essential. Great models might behave similarly in the same harness, but I suppose the value prop is that they wouldn't behave as well on the same task without a good harness.
  - uduni 6mo ago
    Sure... A good harness can be built in 1 day tho. A good model is 1000x more sophisticated
    - steve_adams_86 6mo ago
      Okay, fair. I was thinking in the context of actually using the tools, but yes, in the bigger picture the model is worth far more.
- Alifatisk 6mo ago
  I wouldn’t say harnesses is simple. They do a lot of things that we aren’t thinking of. I learned that a good harnesses is as valuable as the model. But obviously the model is what carries the whole thing. I tried to build my own harness once. The amount of work that is required is incredible. From how external memory is managed per session to the techniques to save on the context window, for example, you do not want the llm to read in whole files, instead you give it the capability to read chunks from offsets, but then what should stay in context and what should be pruned. After that you have to start designing the think - plan - generate - evaluation pipeline. A learning moment for me here was to split up when the llm is evaluating the work, because same lllm who did the work should not evaluate itself, it introduces a bias. Then you realize you need subagents too and statt wondering how their context will be handled (maybe return a summarized version to the main llm?). And then you have to start thinking about integration with mcp servers and how the llm should invoke things like tools, prompts and resources from each mcp. I learned llms, especially the smaller ones tend to hiccup and return malformed json format. At some point I started wondering about just throwing everything and just look at PydanticAi or Langchain or Langgraph or Microsoft Autogen to operate everything between the llm and mcps. Its quite difficult to make something like this work well, especially for long horizontal tasks.
boomlinde 6mo ago
How likely is it that the broken release workflow that produced the leak was Claude's own work?
krisgenre 6mo ago
Reminds me of a question that I asked couple of years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176689
r0x0r007 6mo ago
I dont understand why so many people have the need to emphasize the code vs product battle. There is no battle. Coding/developing/software engineering is a skill, that just like any other skill has certain requirements and best practices that have to be followed in order to make a quality, maintainable and adaptable application that can stand the test of time from the software perspective. Product, features, marketing bla bla that is entrepreneurship part, and is not related to software, other than directing the software requirements,but not beacuse product people think about requirements, but instead just because they come naturally from the required features they envision.Just because programmers can write code doesnt mean they can ship good products.Just because a plumber can lay pipes doesnt mean he can run his own company or invent a new way of laying pipes. But I will tell you that a bad plumber who lays pipes and doesnt know how to connect them, bend them or shield them will surely have inferior product/service in the long term. And by the way, success of a company is measured over time, we will see where claude code will be in 10 years time when the hype dips a little, then we can say yeah the code was bad but everyone loved it and uses it still. I mean they leaked entire code online and this guy says yeah code was bad but who cares, what world are we living in? The fact that anything got leaked is a serious breach of best practices and security also at this point, something a company that used to work for DoD(W) shouldnt be doing, it can even be considered a national threat at this point. I know mistakes happen, I do them all the time, but then again the 'best' companies should be almost immune to mistakes cause stakes are high.But of course, move fast and break things is more important.Am I wrong?
- deleted 6mo ago
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- mewpmewp2 6mo ago
  On the other hand, consider if they took their time to make sure that quality is super good, did not mainly vibe code it, then they would have never become as popular as quickly as they did and would have been outcompeted by other llm providers. They only got so popular because they released Claude Code so quickly it was the most productive thing for everyone to use at that time. And frankly at that point Claude Code as software doesn't matter anymore. It is about their models, they could throw it away, rewrite from scratch, etc, it wouldn't be a big deal. Claude Code as a harness was never likely going to be for 10 years, because there would be so many of these harnesses, all different, the direction may change, etc. As I understand someone internally quickly vibecoded for themselves only as a productivity tool, and then they realized internally how productive it can be, they decided to release it and people found it so productive they got hugely popular now thanks to that while otherwise would have been eaten out by OpenAI. Also if requirements for this had to came from product it would have never even happened in the first place. As it was engineer trying to optimize their own workflow. The only reason they decided to hide source code is to delay competitors imo and it wasn't related to security or anything, but by now OpenCode etc are objectively better tools anyway.
ValveFan6969 6mo ago
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shailesh-1403 6mo ago
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piker 6mo ago
> The success of Claude Code and Cursor at the higher end of the market shows that even the people pickiest about their software (developers) will use your software regardless of how good the code is. Seems wrong. Devs will whine, moan and nitpick about even free software but they can understand failure modes, navigate around bugs and file issues on GitHub. The quality bar is 10-100x amongst non-techno-savvy folks and enterprise users that are paying for your software. They’re far more “picky”.
hbarka 6mo ago
OP should expand on #1, why he thinks it’s garbage. Claude Code is the REPL harness Anthropic built, can read, write, edit, bash. Pi, Gemini, Codex do the same, but they are not hinted as garbage. Where’s the beef?
MrDresden 6mo ago
And this is why so much software today runs extremely hot. It's creators clearly care not for the efficiency of how it is built, which translates directly into how it runs. This blog post is effectively being apologetic about the fact that this is alright, since at least they got product market fit. Except Anthropic is never going to go back and clean up the mess once (if) they become profitable. I doubt anyone will like how things will be in 5 years time if this trend of releasing badly engineered spaghetti continues.
- mergesort 6mo ago
  Heya, post author here. I would say I’m not trying to be apologetic for the idea that software quality is diminishing, especially cause I became an indie developer because I care about quality. When I say “it doesn’t matter” I mean more in an existential sense, and that people don’t seem to care. On the other hand people should do things because they care, which is why I personally still review the code that goes into my apps and spend the time to refactor and improve the stability and foundation rather than slopping like there’s no tomorrow. Maybe I’m growing cynical but I understand why a business doesn’t care (at least until it comes back to bite them — which may take longer than some have assumed). And most of what you read about the subject is ultimately being driven by business needs of the desire of businesses.
Grisu_FTP 6mo ago
Afaik you can run Claude Code locally but every single demo i see uses it exclusively with apis, so are the local models already good enough to be worth it or is the only reasonable use for claude code with cloud models?
- JoshuaDavid 6mo ago
  Claude Code's main advantage is that it's the only TOS-compliant way to access subscription Claude tokens, which cost about 10% as much as pay-as-you-go Claude API tokens.
  - Grisu_FTP 6mo ago
    Well to be honest, even 5% would probably be too much for me (even tho i dont know the pricing of tokens or consumption of tokens) I would just want to test around a bit locally, maybe let it do its thing over a weekend just to see the result and then stop it again
- fredmendoza 6mo ago
  honestly for most coding tasks a smaller model gets it done. qwen3-32b on an a100 80gb handles single-repo work just fine — and if you're not convinced, you can test the same prompt against a 405B on a 2×B200 with literally a few button clicks and see for yourself. no infrastructure changes, no new setup, just pick a different GPU from the strip. that's actually why i built SeqPU.com — been at it for about a year. T4 16GB all the way up to 2×B200 384GB, billed by the second so idle costs nothing. test cheap, scale up only if you need to. i'd love to show you how it works and set you up with some free credits — just reply here.
jiusanzhou 6mo ago
The copyright angle is the most underrated part of this story. Anthropic built their models on other people's code under the fair use argument, but the moment their own code leaks they reach for DMCA takedowns. You can't have it both ways. The clean room reimplementations are the natural consequence of the legal framework they themselves advocated for.
- dgellow 6mo ago
  That doesn’t apply here. Claude code is what leaked, not the models. Anthropic definitely owns Claude code copyright and can DMCA without it being contradictory
  - david_allison 6mo ago
    What if it's used for training data? It seems like there's no penalty for training on copyrighted materials.
    - roysting 6mo ago
      Something that was meant to remain secret made public, is not the same thing as whether something public is public. If anything, this is a question of whether you owe royalties to the owner of IP you consumed in your life since it became part of and trained your mind, identity, and outputs too. According to IP owners ever since things were digitized, you technically own nothing and simply paid for an authorization to use any given IP for the duration that the IP owner authorized you to use it and you continue to pay, so pay your monthly meat-AI bill to pay for all the IP your mind has been trained on.
      - Daviey 6mo ago
        How do you align your views with what Meta did? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-over-81-7tb-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-authors-say/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
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gtsop 6mo ago
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ptnpzwqd 6mo ago
I feel the conclusions here are a bit thin. Code quality tends to have an impact on more than just aesthetics - and Claude Code certainly feels like a buggy mess from an end user's perspective. Of course people still use Claude Code, but that is certainly because of the underlying models first and foremost. Most products don't have such a moat and would not nearly see as much tolerance from end users. If the Max subscriptions could be used with other harnesses, I am sure Anthropic would have to compete harder on the quality of the harness (to be fair, most AI based tooling seems pretty alpha these days, but eventually things will stabilize). Polish is not everything, clearly, but it is a factor, and I feel Claude Code is maybe the worst example to use here, as it doesn't at all generalize to most other products.
CrzyLngPwd 6mo ago
99.9999% of consumers never give code a single thought. Most corporations never give code a single thought. In the race to market, quality always suffers, and with such high stakes, it should surprise no one that AI companies are vibe-coding their own slop.
sakopov 6mo ago
In my opinion, the “code is garbage” argument is a moot point. Anthropic is in the business of removing humans from the SDLC. As long as their models can understand and update the code they generate it can remain garbage. They’re not optimizing for human comprehension of the output. They don’t even want you looking at it. And eventually the models will get good enough that you won’t have to.
- boomlinde 6mo ago
  It doesn't seem like they're optimizing for stable, working software either, nor, apparently, a stable, working release workflow.
  - sakopov 6mo ago
    LOL, very true.
ggrab 6mo ago
I don't think it's vibe coded garbage. Sure, the 3000-line print.ts is terrible, but there's some good patterns in there that were definitely prompted in by some experienced engineers -- the feature flag setup, the `..I_VERIFIED_THIS_IS_NOT_PATH_OR_CODE` funny type hints, the overall structure. Just the usual signs this started as a PoC but quickly evolved into something much bigger. The codebase is a really interesting read.
- jeremie_strand 6mo ago
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s99850 6mo ago
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rustystump 6mo ago
I think this misses the target. First, the twitter quote is standard toxic clapback nonsense. Gambling makes billions and does not add any value. Even facebook can argue it adds more value than gambling so this one is a dud. People use claud code because of claud the model and not claud the harness. Cursor or a hacked up agent loop using opus or whatever are about as good. The magic is in the model not the harness here. This isnt to say the hardness is doesnt do anything. The other bit this misses is that yes the product matters more then the code, and if the product burns battery/ram/etc doing nothing because the ai has crappy code or maybe something leaks or has a security issue, then that impacts the product.
sunilkumarai 6mo ago
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moezd 6mo ago
Code quality matters when it becomes the code you have to maintain after six months. I'm honestly surprised by how some features of Claude Code seem to be held together with gum and duct tape. That being said, if you're just beginning and looking for your market fit, or pitching to investors with a flashy demo, it doesn't need to be an architectural miracle, in fact it will waste your time.
- motbus3 6mo ago
  It only holds because (1) people are inclined to accept failures as pain of using something cutting edge and (2) you kinda don't know what is failing anymore. Extra one (3) We are getting super lenient with major failures and having a services that has only one 9 on reliability charts as norm.
- mergesort 6mo ago
  Heya, post author here. I just want to say that I actually agree with your surprise. In the piece what I’m trying to articulate is not that this can go on forever, but that I’m genuinely surprised we’ve made it a year and they continue to ship at a rapid clip and the product is still reasonably good. > I’ve had to question the value of code a lot over the last couple of years, and this leak continues to reinforce the notion that I’ve vastly overestimated it my entire career. Now we could be moments away from hitting any of the rules described on https://how.complexsystems.fail https://how.complexsystems.fail, but if you’d asked me a year ago how long it would take to get there with people working this way I would have definitely taken the under. That difference in what I believed and what I see with my own two eyes is what has me questioning my priors, because my calibration seems to need readjustment (maybe large or maybe small) for the world of software we’re in right now.
miki123211 6mo ago
> So of course the first thing people did was point and laugh. This just validates my theory that open-sourcing old code that people have sentimental attachments for, and that you won't ever make any money off of, again is actually a terrible idea. Everything about this leak is a long list of arguments why you shouldn't ever open source anything. We, the developer community, have really dropped the ball here.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- tmoravec 6mo ago
  Why? Reddit is full of bug fixes and improved forks. Seems like it's Anthropic that's dropping the ball with it's takedown requests instead of engaging with the community.
hyperlambda 6mo ago
[flagged]
greyman 6mo ago
From a moral perspective, I would argue that this is still theft of IP, even if it's a "clean room reimplementation". The code carries valuable information about what works and what doesn't — knowledge that Anthropic had to discover through real work and iteration. It's the same as a Chinese factory duplicating a product: they skipped the entire R&D phase and saved time and money.
- lesostep 6mo ago
  following this reasoning, wouldn't it mean that everything that Claude generates is a theft of IP? It was taught on massive code bases that carried valuable information about what works
motbus3 6mo ago
I don't know how many years of software engineering told us that new projects hastily done needs to be redone hastily later.
redhale 6mo ago
I think the argument here ignores a critical fact: a huge factor in Claude Code's popularity is the Claude Max plans. These plans give you potentially thousands of dollars of tokens for a capped $200. Speaking for myself, I long for the day I can dump the comparatively garbage experience of Claude Code for something more enjoyable and OSS like OpenCode. But the fact is that it is simply not economically viable to do so. So the PMF is not really for Claude Code alone -- it is for Claude Code + Claude Max.
kykat 6mo ago
Saying that code quality doesn't matter is simply false, if people enjoyed Claude code so much, anthropic wouldn't have to block direct API access to users. Their "product market fit" is the LLM model itself, not the harness. The harness is completely replaceable in my opinion, it's just that Claude is the cheapest way to access the models.

200 points by mergesort 6mo ago

[flagged]

The five-layer permission system discussion is interesting from a governance angle. Most small teams deploying Claude Code have no idea those permission layers exist — they approved the tool based on the marketing page, not the actual trust model. The practical question for any CEO: if your developer's machine is running an agent with filesystem access, do you know what it can touch? The leaked code shows the answer is more nuanced than "it only touches what you tell it to." Wrote a non-technical breakdown of what this means for AI tool policy (specifically the autonomous permissions mode and memory system that were hidden behind feature flags): https://www.aipolicydesk.com/blog/claude-code-leak-what-ceo-should-do https://www.aipolicydesk.com/blog/claude-code-leak-what-ceo-...

anematode 6mo ago

> But then the clean room implementations started showing up. People had taken Anthropic’s source code and rewritten Claude Code from scratch in other languages like Python and Rust. Seems like the phrase "clean room" is the new "nonplussed"... how does this make any sense?

recursive 6mo ago
I think it means you write a spec from the implementation. Then you write a new implementation from the spec. You might go so far as to do the second part in a "clean" room.
- roywiggins 6mo ago
  right. that's not what people are doing here though, at all
- john_strinlai 6mo ago
  in a typical clean-room design, the person writing the new implementation is not supposed to have any knowledge of the original, they should only have knowledge of the specification. if one person writes the spec from the implementation, and then also writes the new implementation, it is not clean-room design.
  - post_below 6mo ago
    I believe the argument is that LLMs are stateless. So if the session writing the code isn't the same session that wrote the spec, it's effectively a clean room implementation. There are other details of course (is the old code in the training data?) but I'm not trying to weigh in on the argument one way or the other.
- m132 6mo ago
  Heh, the original being entirely vibed had me thinking of an interesting problem: if you used the same model to generate a specification, then reset the state and passed that specification back to it for implementation, the resulting code would by design be very close to the original. With enough luck (or engineering), you could even get the same exact files in some cases. Does this still count as clean-room? Or what if the model wasn't the same exact one, but one trained the same way on the same input material, which Anthropic never owned? This is going to be a decade of very interesting, and probably often hypocritical lawsuits.
mergesort 6mo ago
Heya, post author here. I think I was just wrong about this assertion. I got into a discussion with a copyright lawyer over on Bluesky[^1] after I wrote this and came away reasonably convinced that this wouldn’t be a valid example of a clean room implementation. [^1]: https://bsky.app/profile/mergesort.me/post/3mihhaliils2y https://bsky.app/profile/mergesort.me/post/3mihhaliils2y
aeternum 6mo ago
The most fitting method would be to be to train an LLM on the Claude Code source-code (among other data). Then use Anthropic's own argument that LLM output is original work and thus not subject to copyright.

twelfthnight 6mo ago

Seems equally valid to come out of this with the takeaway that code quality _does_ matter, because poor coding practices are what led to the leak. Sure, the weights are where the real value lives, but if the quality is so lax they leak their whole codebase, maybe they are just lucky they didn’t leak customer data or the model weights? If that did happen, the entire business might evaporate overnight.

jamiemallers 6mo ago
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Andrei_dev 6mo ago
I look at other people's code a lot. The security issues are always boring, that's the thing. API keys sitting in the client bundle, auth middleware missing half the routes. Not clever exploits, just nobody actually reading what the AI spit out. Actually wait, it's worse than that. The product works, demo looks great. Then someone opens the network tab and ... yeah. "Quality doesn't matter" really just means nothing caught fire yet.

leduyquang753 6mo ago

> Many software developers have argued that working like a pack of hyenas and shipping hundreds of commits a day without reading your code is an unsustainable way to build valuable software, but this leak suggests that maybe this isn’t true — bad code can build well-regarded products. The product hasn't been around long enough to decide whether such an approach is "sustainable". It is currently in a hype state and needs more time for that hype to die down and the true value to show up, as well as to see whether it becomes the 9th circle of hell to keep in working order.

mergesort 6mo ago
Hey there, author of the post here. I actually agree with this! That is in fact why I used the word maybe — my comment really was meant to be more speculative than definitive.
- 59nadir 6mo ago
  I think one thing that goes unmentioned is that maybe code quality is really not that important for trivial things, because they can be trivially reproduced if need be. I would argue Claude Code is exactly such a project; coding agents are incredibly simple and rewriting CC wouldn't be much of a problem. Non-trivial things tend to be much more sensitive to code quality in my experience, and will by necessity be kept around for longer and thus be much more sensitive to maintenance issues.
  - rakel_rakel 6mo ago
    > maybe code quality is really not that important for trivial things I hear this narrative being pushed quite a bit, and it makes my spidey senses tingle every time. Secure programs are a subset of correct programs, and to write and maintain correct programs you need to have a quality mindset. A 0-day doesn't care if it's in a part of your computer you consider trivial or not.
    - 59nadir 6mo ago

thaumaturgy 6mo ago

I wonder what happened to the person that wrote "Coding as Creative Expression" (https://build.ms/2022/5/21/coding-as-creative-expression/ https://build.ms/2022/5/21/coding-as-creative-expression/)? I'm not (just) being glib. That earlier article displays some introspection and thoughtful consideration of an old debate. The writing style is clearly personal, human. Today's post is not so much. It has LLM fingerprints on it. It's longer, there are more words. But it doesn't strike me as having the same thoughtful consideration in it. I would venture to guess that the author tried to come up with some new angles on the news of the Claude Code leak, because it's a hot topic, and jotted some notes, and then let an LLM flesh it out. Writing styles of course change over time, but looking at these two posts side by side, the difference is stark.

mergesort 6mo ago
Hey there, author of the post here! I actually wrote this piece myself on my phone while I was out for a walk this morning. It was initially meant to be a quick note more than a full blog post —- whereas Coding As A Creative Expression took me a couple of days to write. I made a commitment to write more this year and put my thoughts out quicker than I used to, so that’s likely the primary reason it’s not as deep of a piece of writing as the post you’re referencing. But I do want to note that this wasn’t written using AI, it just wasn’t intended to be as rich of a post. The reason it came out longer is that I’ve honestly been thinking about these ideas for a while, and there is so much to say about this subject. I didn’t have any particular intention of hopping on a news cycle, but once I started writing the juices were flowing and I found myself coming up with five separate but interrelated thoughts around this story that I thought were worth sharing.
- tpoacher 6mo ago
  Reminds me of the classic Mark Twain quote: "Apologies, I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one."
  - adzm 6mo ago
    > I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one. First known use in English comes from a 1658 translation of Blaise Pascal in 1657 > Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. translated to > I had not made this longer then the rest, but that I had not the leisure to make it shorter then it is. (note the archaic then) This was a popular piece of wit at the time. Mark Twain wrote something similar a hundred years later > You'll have to excuse my lengthiness - the reason I dread writing letters is because I am so apt to get to slinging wisdom & forget to let up. Thus much precious time is lost. But it's still quite different. There is a great article about this one on quoteinvestigator! https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

pregseahorses 6mo ago

They just said this was an April Fools joke.

gfosco 6mo ago
No you fell for someone elses joke.
dodu_ 6mo ago
jokesonthemiwasonlypretending.png

panavm 6mo ago

[flagged]

grey-area 6mo ago

Points from the article. 1. The code is garbage and this means the end of software. Now try maintaining it. 2. Code doesn’t matter (the same point restated). No, we shouldn’t accept garbage code that breaks e.g. login as an acceptable cost of business. 3. It’s about product market fit. OK, but what happens after product market fit when your code is hot garbage that nobody understands? 4. Anthropic can’t defend the copyright of their leaked code. This I agree with and they are hoist by their own petard. Would anyone want the garbage though? 5. This leak doesn’t matter I agree with the author but for different reasons - the value is the models, which are incredibly expensive to train, not the badly written scaffold surrounding it. We also should not mistake current market value for use value. Unlike the author who seems to have fully signed up for the LLM hype train I don’t see this as meaning code is dead, it’s an illustration of where fully relying on generative AI will take you - to a garbage unmaintainable mess which must be a nightmare to work with for humans or LLMs.

tipiirai 6mo ago
What exactly makes you say that "the author who seems to have fully signed up for the LLM hype train"? I feel the author is just stating the obvious: code quality has very little to do with whether a product succeeds
- grey-area 6mo ago
  OK, but what happens after product market fit when your code is hot garbage that nobody understands?
  - tipiirai 6mo ago
    This is a different question, but obviously, a code that "nobody understands" is a terrible situation
operatingthetan 6mo ago
I'm a little disappointed that a bunch of engineers with unlimited access to Opus didn't do a better job.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

himata4113 6mo ago

I personally found it really amusing how they weaponized the legal system to DMCA all the claude code source code repositories. Code ingested into the model is not copyrightable, but produced code apparently is when by legal definition computer generated code can not be copyrighted and that's one of their primary arguments in legal cases.

yeahforsureman 6mo ago
I guess you'd be assuming that both the original CC code and its ports are computer/AI-generated? As a lawyer, though, I'd still maintain that you wouldn't need much original human input in the CC code to kind of ruin that theory. The threshold for copyright protection isn't that high, really.
- Aloisius 6mo ago
  The copyright office has indicated that AI generated elements lacking human contributions to the expression (rather than input) would still not be copyrightable even if some human authored elements are made to the expression as well. Seems like it would be a nightmare to provide evidence of what parts of a half a million line codebase were written by humans if no one bothered to track it.
  - himata4113 6mo ago
    They have publically and proudly stated that vast amount of claude code was entirely vibe coded so they've already lost that argument.
kristopolous 6mo ago
I did an interesting spin to avoid it: generated Claude abstracted as a set of PRD style architectural instructions so you can do your claude-code inspired program effortlessly. There's even a GUI called claudia for a piecemeal extraction with a PRD. https://github.com/kristopolous/Claudette https://github.com/kristopolous/Claudette I've got a web, rust and tkinter version (for fun) right now just making sure this approach works. The answer is... Mostly... Enjoy

jeremie_strand 6mo ago

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michaelashley29 6mo ago

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slopinthebag 6mo ago

Claude Code proves you don't need quality code — you just need hundreds of billions of dollars to produce a best-in-class LLM and then use your legal team to force the extreamly subsidised usage of it through your own agent harness. Or in other words, shitty software + massive moat = users. Seriously, if Anthropic were like oAI and let you use their subscription plans with any agent harness, how many users would CC instantly start bleeding? They're #39 in terminal bench and they get beaten by a harness that provides a single tool: tmux. You can literally get better results by giving Opus 4.6 only a tmux session and having it do everything with bash commands. It seems premature to make sweeping claims about code quality, especially since the main reason to desire a well architected codebase is for development over the long haul.

komali2 6mo ago

> bad code can build well-regarded products. Yes, exactly. Products. It seems like me and all the engineers I've known always have this established dichotomy: engineers, who want to write good code and to think a lot about user needs, and project managers/ executives/sales people, who want to make the non-negative numbers on accounting documents larger. The truth is that to write "good software," you do need to take care, review code, not single-shot vibe code and not let LLMs run rampant. The other truth is that good software is not necessary good product; the converse is also true: bad product doesn't necessarily mean bad software. However there's not really a correlation, as this article points out: terrible software can be great product! In fact if writing terrible software lets you shit out more features, more quickly, you'll probably come ahead in business world than someone carefully writing good software but releasing more slowly. That's because the priorities and incentives in business world are often in contradiction to priorities and incentives in human world. I think this is hard to grasp for those of us who have been taught our whole lives that money is a good scorekeeper for quality and efficacy. In reality it's absolutely not. Money is Disney bucks recording who's doing Disney World in the most optimal way. Outside of Disney World, your optimal in-park behavior is often suboptimal for out-of-park needs. The problem is we've mistaken Disney World for all of reality, or, let Walt Disney enclose our globe within the boundaries of his park. > The object which labor produces confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer.

kstenerud 6mo ago

> It should serve as a warning to developers that the code doesn’t seem to matter, even in a product built for developers. Code doesn't matter IN THE EARLY DAYS. This is similar to what I've observed over 25 years in the industry. In a startup, the code doesn't really matter; the market fit does. But as time goes on your codebase has to mature, or else you end up using more and more resources on maintenance rather than innovation.

trhway 6mo ago
alternatively the code can go the way of "fast fashion" and even "3d-print your garments in the morning according to your feelings and weather and recycle at the end of the day". If dealing with a functionality that is splittable into microfeatures/microservices, then anything that you need right now can potentially be vibe-coded, even on the fly (and deleted afterwards). Single-use code. >But as time goes on your codebase has to mature, or else you end up using more and more resources on maintenance rather than innovation. tremendous resource sink in enterprise software. Solving it, even if making it just avoidable - may be Anthropic goes that way and leads the others - would be a huge revolution.
- otabdeveloper4 6mo ago
  > microfeatures/microservices Have you seen the code generated by AI? These things converge on the "1 million lines to make an API call" pattern. They're a lot of things, but certainly not "micro".
- ezst 6mo ago
  I can totally wrap my head around that, and it's an interesting thought experiment, though: - building functionalities as components that are swappable on a whim requires a level of careful thought, abstraction and architecture that essentially is the exact opposite to ai slop - in this day and age we still don't make software for the sake of it, and who's financing it doesn't generally require such levels of functional flexibility (the physical world commandeering the coding isn't nearly as volatile as to justify that) - this comes loaded with the implication that "stuff needs to work": if you are developing software that manages inventory, orders, resources, ... you just can't take the chance to corrupt your customers data or disrupt their business processes. Shipping faster than you can test and with no accountability and no oversight is a solution to a problem I've personally never encountered in the wild

Finbarr 6mo ago

Who cares that the code is garbage? As the models get bigger and more powerful it will be trivial to fully refactor the whole codebase. It’s coming sooner than you think.

uduni 6mo ago

" The real value in the AI ecosystem isn’t the model or the harness — it’s the integration of both working seamlessly together. " Wut? The value in the ecosystem is the model. Harnesses are simple. Great models work nearly identically in every harness

steve_adams_86 6mo ago
Harnesses are simple (kind of? Some certainly aren't, but I'd agree that they can be simple) but they deliver a ton of value. They have a significant ROI. I agree that good models have more value because a harness can't magically make a bad model good, but there's a lot that would be inordinately difficult without a proper harness. Keeping models on rails is still important, if not essential. Great models might behave similarly in the same harness, but I suppose the value prop is that they wouldn't behave as well on the same task without a good harness.
- uduni 6mo ago
  Sure... A good harness can be built in 1 day tho. A good model is 1000x more sophisticated
  - steve_adams_86 6mo ago
    Okay, fair. I was thinking in the context of actually using the tools, but yes, in the bigger picture the model is worth far more.
Alifatisk 6mo ago
I wouldn’t say harnesses is simple. They do a lot of things that we aren’t thinking of. I learned that a good harnesses is as valuable as the model. But obviously the model is what carries the whole thing. I tried to build my own harness once. The amount of work that is required is incredible. From how external memory is managed per session to the techniques to save on the context window, for example, you do not want the llm to read in whole files, instead you give it the capability to read chunks from offsets, but then what should stay in context and what should be pruned. After that you have to start designing the think - plan - generate - evaluation pipeline. A learning moment for me here was to split up when the llm is evaluating the work, because same lllm who did the work should not evaluate itself, it introduces a bias. Then you realize you need subagents too and statt wondering how their context will be handled (maybe return a summarized version to the main llm?). And then you have to start thinking about integration with mcp servers and how the llm should invoke things like tools, prompts and resources from each mcp. I learned llms, especially the smaller ones tend to hiccup and return malformed json format. At some point I started wondering about just throwing everything and just look at PydanticAi or Langchain or Langgraph or Microsoft Autogen to operate everything between the llm and mcps. Its quite difficult to make something like this work well, especially for long horizontal tasks.

boomlinde 6mo ago

How likely is it that the broken release workflow that produced the leak was Claude's own work?

krisgenre 6mo ago

Reminds me of a question that I asked couple of years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176689

r0x0r007 6mo ago

I dont understand why so many people have the need to emphasize the code vs product battle. There is no battle. Coding/developing/software engineering is a skill, that just like any other skill has certain requirements and best practices that have to be followed in order to make a quality, maintainable and adaptable application that can stand the test of time from the software perspective. Product, features, marketing bla bla that is entrepreneurship part, and is not related to software, other than directing the software requirements,but not beacuse product people think about requirements, but instead just because they come naturally from the required features they envision.Just because programmers can write code doesnt mean they can ship good products.Just because a plumber can lay pipes doesnt mean he can run his own company or invent a new way of laying pipes. But I will tell you that a bad plumber who lays pipes and doesnt know how to connect them, bend them or shield them will surely have inferior product/service in the long term. And by the way, success of a company is measured over time, we will see where claude code will be in 10 years time when the hype dips a little, then we can say yeah the code was bad but everyone loved it and uses it still. I mean they leaked entire code online and this guy says yeah code was bad but who cares, what world are we living in? The fact that anything got leaked is a serious breach of best practices and security also at this point, something a company that used to work for DoD(W) shouldnt be doing, it can even be considered a national threat at this point. I know mistakes happen, I do them all the time, but then again the 'best' companies should be almost immune to mistakes cause stakes are high.But of course, move fast and break things is more important.Am I wrong?

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
mewpmewp2 6mo ago
On the other hand, consider if they took their time to make sure that quality is super good, did not mainly vibe code it, then they would have never become as popular as quickly as they did and would have been outcompeted by other llm providers. They only got so popular because they released Claude Code so quickly it was the most productive thing for everyone to use at that time. And frankly at that point Claude Code as software doesn't matter anymore. It is about their models, they could throw it away, rewrite from scratch, etc, it wouldn't be a big deal. Claude Code as a harness was never likely going to be for 10 years, because there would be so many of these harnesses, all different, the direction may change, etc. As I understand someone internally quickly vibecoded for themselves only as a productivity tool, and then they realized internally how productive it can be, they decided to release it and people found it so productive they got hugely popular now thanks to that while otherwise would have been eaten out by OpenAI. Also if requirements for this had to came from product it would have never even happened in the first place. As it was engineer trying to optimize their own workflow. The only reason they decided to hide source code is to delay competitors imo and it wasn't related to security or anything, but by now OpenCode etc are objectively better tools anyway.

ValveFan6969 6mo ago

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shailesh-1403 6mo ago

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piker 6mo ago

> The success of Claude Code and Cursor at the higher end of the market shows that even the people pickiest about their software (developers) will use your software regardless of how good the code is. Seems wrong. Devs will whine, moan and nitpick about even free software but they can understand failure modes, navigate around bugs and file issues on GitHub. The quality bar is 10-100x amongst non-techno-savvy folks and enterprise users that are paying for your software. They’re far more “picky”.

hbarka 6mo ago

OP should expand on #1, why he thinks it’s garbage. Claude Code is the REPL harness Anthropic built, can read, write, edit, bash. Pi, Gemini, Codex do the same, but they are not hinted as garbage. Where’s the beef?

MrDresden 6mo ago

And this is why so much software today runs extremely hot. It's creators clearly care not for the efficiency of how it is built, which translates directly into how it runs. This blog post is effectively being apologetic about the fact that this is alright, since at least they got product market fit. Except Anthropic is never going to go back and clean up the mess once (if) they become profitable. I doubt anyone will like how things will be in 5 years time if this trend of releasing badly engineered spaghetti continues.

mergesort 6mo ago
Heya, post author here. I would say I’m not trying to be apologetic for the idea that software quality is diminishing, especially cause I became an indie developer because I care about quality. When I say “it doesn’t matter” I mean more in an existential sense, and that people don’t seem to care. On the other hand people should do things because they care, which is why I personally still review the code that goes into my apps and spend the time to refactor and improve the stability and foundation rather than slopping like there’s no tomorrow. Maybe I’m growing cynical but I understand why a business doesn’t care (at least until it comes back to bite them — which may take longer than some have assumed). And most of what you read about the subject is ultimately being driven by business needs of the desire of businesses.

Grisu_FTP 6mo ago

Afaik you can run Claude Code locally but every single demo i see uses it exclusively with apis, so are the local models already good enough to be worth it or is the only reasonable use for claude code with cloud models?

JoshuaDavid 6mo ago
Claude Code's main advantage is that it's the only TOS-compliant way to access subscription Claude tokens, which cost about 10% as much as pay-as-you-go Claude API tokens.
- Grisu_FTP 6mo ago
  Well to be honest, even 5% would probably be too much for me (even tho i dont know the pricing of tokens or consumption of tokens) I would just want to test around a bit locally, maybe let it do its thing over a weekend just to see the result and then stop it again
fredmendoza 6mo ago
honestly for most coding tasks a smaller model gets it done. qwen3-32b on an a100 80gb handles single-repo work just fine — and if you're not convinced, you can test the same prompt against a 405B on a 2×B200 with literally a few button clicks and see for yourself. no infrastructure changes, no new setup, just pick a different GPU from the strip. that's actually why i built SeqPU.com — been at it for about a year. T4 16GB all the way up to 2×B200 384GB, billed by the second so idle costs nothing. test cheap, scale up only if you need to. i'd love to show you how it works and set you up with some free credits — just reply here.

jiusanzhou 6mo ago

The copyright angle is the most underrated part of this story. Anthropic built their models on other people's code under the fair use argument, but the moment their own code leaks they reach for DMCA takedowns. You can't have it both ways. The clean room reimplementations are the natural consequence of the legal framework they themselves advocated for.

dgellow 6mo ago
That doesn’t apply here. Claude code is what leaked, not the models. Anthropic definitely owns Claude code copyright and can DMCA without it being contradictory
- david_allison 6mo ago
  What if it's used for training data? It seems like there's no penalty for training on copyrighted materials.
  - roysting 6mo ago
    Something that was meant to remain secret made public, is not the same thing as whether something public is public. If anything, this is a question of whether you owe royalties to the owner of IP you consumed in your life since it became part of and trained your mind, identity, and outputs too. According to IP owners ever since things were digitized, you technically own nothing and simply paid for an authorization to use any given IP for the duration that the IP owner authorized you to use it and you continue to pay, so pay your monthly meat-AI bill to pay for all the IP your mind has been trained on.
    - Daviey 6mo ago
      How do you align your views with what Meta did? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-over-81-7tb-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-authors-say/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
- 6mo ago

gtsop 6mo ago

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ptnpzwqd 6mo ago

I feel the conclusions here are a bit thin. Code quality tends to have an impact on more than just aesthetics - and Claude Code certainly feels like a buggy mess from an end user's perspective. Of course people still use Claude Code, but that is certainly because of the underlying models first and foremost. Most products don't have such a moat and would not nearly see as much tolerance from end users. If the Max subscriptions could be used with other harnesses, I am sure Anthropic would have to compete harder on the quality of the harness (to be fair, most AI based tooling seems pretty alpha these days, but eventually things will stabilize). Polish is not everything, clearly, but it is a factor, and I feel Claude Code is maybe the worst example to use here, as it doesn't at all generalize to most other products.

CrzyLngPwd 6mo ago

99.9999% of consumers never give code a single thought. Most corporations never give code a single thought. In the race to market, quality always suffers, and with such high stakes, it should surprise no one that AI companies are vibe-coding their own slop.

sakopov 6mo ago

In my opinion, the “code is garbage” argument is a moot point. Anthropic is in the business of removing humans from the SDLC. As long as their models can understand and update the code they generate it can remain garbage. They’re not optimizing for human comprehension of the output. They don’t even want you looking at it. And eventually the models will get good enough that you won’t have to.

boomlinde 6mo ago
It doesn't seem like they're optimizing for stable, working software either, nor, apparently, a stable, working release workflow.
- sakopov 6mo ago
  LOL, very true.

ggrab 6mo ago

I don't think it's vibe coded garbage. Sure, the 3000-line print.ts is terrible, but there's some good patterns in there that were definitely prompted in by some experienced engineers -- the feature flag setup, the `..I_VERIFIED_THIS_IS_NOT_PATH_OR_CODE` funny type hints, the overall structure. Just the usual signs this started as a PoC but quickly evolved into something much bigger. The codebase is a really interesting read.

jeremie_strand 6mo ago
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s99850 6mo ago

[flagged]

rustystump 6mo ago

I think this misses the target. First, the twitter quote is standard toxic clapback nonsense. Gambling makes billions and does not add any value. Even facebook can argue it adds more value than gambling so this one is a dud. People use claud code because of claud the model and not claud the harness. Cursor or a hacked up agent loop using opus or whatever are about as good. The magic is in the model not the harness here. This isnt to say the hardness is doesnt do anything. The other bit this misses is that yes the product matters more then the code, and if the product burns battery/ram/etc doing nothing because the ai has crappy code or maybe something leaks or has a security issue, then that impacts the product.

sunilkumarai 6mo ago

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moezd 6mo ago

Code quality matters when it becomes the code you have to maintain after six months. I'm honestly surprised by how some features of Claude Code seem to be held together with gum and duct tape. That being said, if you're just beginning and looking for your market fit, or pitching to investors with a flashy demo, it doesn't need to be an architectural miracle, in fact it will waste your time.

motbus3 6mo ago
It only holds because (1) people are inclined to accept failures as pain of using something cutting edge and (2) you kinda don't know what is failing anymore. Extra one (3) We are getting super lenient with major failures and having a services that has only one 9 on reliability charts as norm.
mergesort 6mo ago
Heya, post author here. I just want to say that I actually agree with your surprise. In the piece what I’m trying to articulate is not that this can go on forever, but that I’m genuinely surprised we’ve made it a year and they continue to ship at a rapid clip and the product is still reasonably good. > I’ve had to question the value of code a lot over the last couple of years, and this leak continues to reinforce the notion that I’ve vastly overestimated it my entire career. Now we could be moments away from hitting any of the rules described on https://how.complexsystems.fail https://how.complexsystems.fail, but if you’d asked me a year ago how long it would take to get there with people working this way I would have definitely taken the under. That difference in what I believed and what I see with my own two eyes is what has me questioning my priors, because my calibration seems to need readjustment (maybe large or maybe small) for the world of software we’re in right now.

miki123211 6mo ago

> So of course the first thing people did was point and laugh. This just validates my theory that open-sourcing old code that people have sentimental attachments for, and that you won't ever make any money off of, again is actually a terrible idea. Everything about this leak is a long list of arguments why you shouldn't ever open source anything. We, the developer community, have really dropped the ball here.

deleted 6mo ago
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tmoravec 6mo ago
Why? Reddit is full of bug fixes and improved forks. Seems like it's Anthropic that's dropping the ball with it's takedown requests instead of engaging with the community.

hyperlambda 6mo ago

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greyman 6mo ago

From a moral perspective, I would argue that this is still theft of IP, even if it's a "clean room reimplementation". The code carries valuable information about what works and what doesn't — knowledge that Anthropic had to discover through real work and iteration. It's the same as a Chinese factory duplicating a product: they skipped the entire R&D phase and saved time and money.

lesostep 6mo ago
following this reasoning, wouldn't it mean that everything that Claude generates is a theft of IP? It was taught on massive code bases that carried valuable information about what works

motbus3 6mo ago

I don't know how many years of software engineering told us that new projects hastily done needs to be redone hastily later.

redhale 6mo ago

I think the argument here ignores a critical fact: a huge factor in Claude Code's popularity is the Claude Max plans. These plans give you potentially thousands of dollars of tokens for a capped $200. Speaking for myself, I long for the day I can dump the comparatively garbage experience of Claude Code for something more enjoyable and OSS like OpenCode. But the fact is that it is simply not economically viable to do so. So the PMF is not really for Claude Code alone -- it is for Claude Code + Claude Max.

kykat 6mo ago

Saying that code quality doesn't matter is simply false, if people enjoyed Claude code so much, anthropic wouldn't have to block direct API access to users. Their "product market fit" is the LLM model itself, not the harness. The harness is completely replaceable in my opinion, it's just that Claude is the cheapest way to access the models.