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It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work. If anything, it’s the exact op

It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work. If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.

aleksandrm 5mo ago
Do we know if the original code was vibe coded? It's like chicken and an egg dilemma.
- cube00 5mo ago
  It's not a chicken and egg dilemma, the model can be used independently of Claude to write code, the heavy lifting is still done on their servers.
steveBK123 5mo ago
I'd imagine the AI engineers on million dollar TC are not vibe coding the models though, which is the actual sauce.
shimman 5mo ago
Yes that plus having tens of billions of gulf money certainly helps you subsidize your moronic failures with money that isn't yours while you continue, and fail to, achieve profitability in any time horizon within a single lifespan.
- tock 5mo ago
  Huh what moronic failure did Anthropic do? Every Claude Code user I know loves it.
  - moritzwarhier 5mo ago
    I don't know if the comment was referring to this, but recently, people have been posting stuff about them requiring their new hire Jared Sumner, author of the Bun runtime, to first and foremost fix memory leaks that caused very high memory consumption for claude's CLI. The original source was them posting about the matter on X I think. And at first glance, none of it was about complex runtime optimizations not present in Node, it was all "standard" closure-related JS/TS memory leak debugging (which can be a nightmare). I don't have a link at hand because threads about it were mostly on Xitter. But I'm sure there are also more accessible retros about the posts on regular websites (HN threads, too).
    - tock 5mo ago
      Ah I believe codex has similar issues. Terrible code quality but goes to show it doesn't really matter in the end.
      - AstroBen 5mo ago
        > it doesn't really matter in the end if you have one of the top models in a disruptive new product category where everyone else is sprinting also, sure..
        0x457 5mo ago
        Code quality never really mattered to users of the software. You can have the most <whatever metric you care about> code and still have zero users or have high user frustration from users that you do have. Code quality only matters in maintainability to developers. IMO it's a very subjective metric
        AstroBen 5mo ago
        It's not subjective at all. It's not art. Code quality = less bugs long term. Code quality = faster iteration and easier maintenance. If things are bad enough it becomes borderline impossible to add features. Users absolutely care about these things.
  - Forgeties79 5mo ago
    There’s a sample group issue here beyond the obvious limitations of your personal experience. If they didn’t love it, they likely left it for another LLM. If they have issues with LLM’s writ large, they’re going to dislike and avoid all of them regardless. In the current market, most people using one LLM are likely going to have a positive view of it. Very little is forcing you to stick with one you dislike aside from corporate mandates.
  - cyclopeanutopia 5mo ago
    I've used and hate it, it's garbage.
  - blks 5mo ago
    Recently there was a bug where CC would consume day/week/month quota in just a few hours, or hundreds of dollars in API costs in a few prompts.
  - dghlsakjg 5mo ago
    The people who don’t love it probably stopped using it. You don’t have to go far on this site to find someone that doesn’t like Claude code. If you want an example of something moronic, look at the ram usage of Claude code. It can use gigabytes of memory to work with a few megabytes of text.
  - layer8 5mo ago
    I don’t know about moronic, but: https://github.com/ctoth/claude-failures https://github.com/ctoth/claude-failures https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796
  - adrian_b 5mo ago
    There is right now another HN thread where a lot of users hate Claude Code. To be fair, their complaints are about very recent changes that break their workflow, while previously they were quite content with it.
- nextos 5mo ago
  Also Claude owes its popularity mostly to the excellent model running behind the scenes. The tooling can be hacky and of questionable quality yet, with such a model, things can still work out pretty well. The moat is their training and fine-tuning for common programming languages.
  - enraged_camel 5mo ago
    >> Also Claude owes its popularity mostly to the excellent model running behind the scenes. It's a bit of both. Claude Code was the tool that made Anthropic's developer mindshare explode. Yes, the models are good, but before CC they were mostly just available via multiplexers like Cursor and Copilot, via the relatively expensive API.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- ahepp 5mo ago
  There have certainly been periods of irrational exuberance in the tech industry, but there are also many companies that were criticized for being unprofitable which are now, as far as I can tell, quite profitable. Amazon, Uber, I'm sure many more. I'm curious what the basis is to say that Anthropic could never achieve profitability? Are the numbers that bad?
- nh23423fefe 5mo ago
  your prediction is going to be wrong, even with all those caveats
  - Forgeties79 5mo ago
    Investors are getting antsy and are going to start demanding AI companies start producing real returns. Anthropic et al. better figure it out sooner rather than later because this game they’re all playing where they want all of us to use basically beta-release tools (very generous in some cases) to discover the “real value” of these tools while they attempt to reduce their burn with unsustainable subscription prices can’t go on forever.
  - shimman 5mo ago
    If my prediction is wrong these should be trillion dollar companies yesterday with what their liars proclaim, until then we know that Anthropic has only made $5billion total revenue to data due to the Pentagon lawsuits and that required $20billion. Can't wait to see how much public money they need going forward! Hopefully our progeny don't die in the subsequent climate crisis before they can unleash true shareholder value.
  - coffeefirst 5mo ago
    Maybe. Maybe not. But if this party is sustainable, what’s the deal with the rate limits that everyone is going on about?
operatingthetan 5mo ago
What I'm missing so far is how they produced such awful code with the same product I'm using, which definitely would have called out some of those issues. Perhaps the problem is getting multiple vibe-coders synced up when working on a large repo.
- Schiendelman 5mo ago
  I suspect a lot of it is just older, before Opus 4.5+ got good at calling out issues.
tedd4u 5mo ago
Still, it's probably true that Claude Code (etc) will be more successful working on clean, well-structured code, just like human coders are. So short-term, maybe not such a big deal, but long-term I think it's still an unresolved issue.
- camdenreslink 5mo ago
  I imagine it is way more affordable in terms of tokens to implement a feature in a well organized code base, rather than a hacky mess of a codebase that is the result of 30 band-aid fixes stacked on top of each other.
andrenotgiant 5mo ago
> you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code which has always been true
- spoiler 5mo ago
  Yes, and to add, in case it's not obvious: in my experience the maintenance, mental (and emotional costs, call me sensitive) cost of bad code compounds exponentially the more hacks you throw at it
  - hypeatei 5mo ago
    Now with AI, you're not only dealing with maintenance and mental overhead, but also the overhead of the Anthropic subscription (or whatever AI company) to deal with this spaghetti. Some may decide that's an okay tradeoff, but personally it seems insane to delegate a majority of development work to a blackbox, cloud-hosted LLM that can be rug pulled from underneath of you at any moment (and you're unable to hold it accountable if it screws up)
    - fragmede 5mo ago
      Call me naive, but I don't believe that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and ChatGPT.com and Claude.ai are going to be hard down and never come back. Same as Gmail, which is an entirely different corporation. I mean, they could, but it doesn't seem insane to use Gmail for my email, and that's way more important to my life functioning than this new AI thing.
      - paulryanrogers 5mo ago
        Email is deterministic and portable. Export to a standard format and import somewhere else.
  - babelfish 5mo ago
    Sure, for humans. Not sure they'll be the primary readers of code going forward
kypro 5mo ago
Hardly. Claude Code is basically just a wrapper around an LLM with a CLI. Obviously it does some fairly smart stuff under the hood, but it's not exactly comparable to a large software project. But to your point, that doesn't mean you can't vibe code some poorly built product and sell it. But people have always been able to sell poorly built software projects. They can just do it a bit quicker now.
- operatingthetan 5mo ago
  >Hardly. Claude Code is basically just a wrapper around an LLM with a CLI. I don't know why people keep acting like harnesses are all the same but we know they aren't because people have swapped them out with the same models and receive vastly different results in code quality and token use.
noosphr 5mo ago
I don't think anyone who used Claude code on the terminal had anything good to say about it. It was people using it through vs code that had a good time.
- sbysb 5mo ago
  I have used Claude Code in the terminal to the tune of ~20m tokens in the last month and I have very little to complain about. There are definitely quirks that are annoying (as all software has, including vs code or jetbrains IDEs) but broadly speaking it does what it says on the tin ime
- mwigdahl 5mo ago
  I prefer using it via the terminal. Might be anchoring bias, but I have had issues with slash commands not registering and hooks not working in the plugin.
ozgrakkurt 5mo ago
This is a really wrong perspective on software. Short term monkey style coding does not produce products. You might get money but that is not what it is about. This is similar to retarded builders in Turkey saying “wow, I can make the same building, sell for the same price, but spend way less” and then millions of people becoming victim when there is an earthquake. This is not how responsible people should think about things in society
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  > This is a really wrong perspective on software. Short term monkey style coding does not produce products. You might get money but that is not what it is about You're not alone in thinking that, but unfortunately I think it's a minority opinion. The only thing most people and most businesses care about is money. And frankly not even longterm, sustainable money. Most companies seem happy to extract short term profits, pay out the executives with big bonuses, then rot until they collapse
- matheusmoreira 5mo ago
  Nobody rewards responsibility though. It's all about making number go up.
  - cube00 5mo ago
    ...go up as fast as possible.
- azan_ 5mo ago
  > This is a really wrong perspective on software. Short term monkey style coding does not produce products. You might get money but that is not what it is about. Getting money is 100% what it is about and Claude Code is great product.
  - esafak 5mo ago
    It's very buggy. Just look at the ticket tracker. How can you say it is great; are you a light, nontechnical user?
bitwize 5mo ago
Value to customer. Literally the only thing that matters.
- AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
  Value isn't a one-shot, though. Value sustained over time is what matters. Well, if unmaintainable code gets in the way of the "sustained over time" part, then that is still a real problem.
  - bluefirebrand 5mo ago
    Businesses no longer seem to care about "value sustained over time" They only seem to operate as "extract as much value as possible in a short amount of time and exit with your bag", these days
hombre_fatal 5mo ago
Also, many of the complaints seem more like giddy joy than anything. The negative emotion regex, for example, is only used for a log/telemetry metric. Sampling "wtf?" along would probably be enough. Why would you use an agent for that? I don't see how a vibe-coded app is freed from the same trade-offs that apply to a fast-moving human-coded one. Especially since a human is still driving it, thus they will take the same shortcuts they did before: instead of a formal planning phase, they'll just yolo it with the agent. Instead of cleaning up technical debt, they want to fix specific issues that are easy to review, not touch 10 files to do a refactor that's hard to review. The highest priority issues are bugs and new integrations, not tech debt, just like it always was. This is really just a reminder of how little upside there is to coding in the open.
- kennywinker 5mo ago
  I think the thing is that people expect one of the largest companies in the world to have well written code. Claude’s source code is fine for a 1-3 person team. It’s atrocious for a flagship product from a company valued over $380 BILLION. Like if that’s the best ai coding can do given infinite money? Yeah, the emperor has no clothes. If it’s not the best that can be done, then what kinda clowns are running the show over there?
  - slopinthebag 5mo ago
    Yes, you would expect a company paying millions in TC to the best software developers on the planet could produce a product that is best in class, and you would get code quality for free. Except it's regularly beaten in benchmarks and user validation by open source agents, some built by a single person (pi), with horrible code quality leading to all sorts of bad UX and buggy behaviour. Either they're massively overpaying some scrubs to underperform with the new paradigm, or they are squeezing every last drop out of vibe coding and this is the result.
  - hombre_fatal 5mo ago
    I just think this is the nature of all software, and it was wrong to assume AI fundamentally changes it. Seems like you're also under the impression that privately developed software should be immaculate if the company is worth enough billions, but you'd be wrong about that too.
jasonmp85 5mo ago
[dead]
acedTrex 5mo ago
Its a buggy pos though, "popular and successful" have never been indicators of quality in any sense.
- anthonypasq 5mo ago
  ok, well if youd like to trade in 14billion dollars of revenue for better quality feel free.
- remus 5mo ago
  I think this is a pretty interesting comment because it gets to the heart of differing views on what quality means. For you, non-buggy software is important. You could also reasonably take a more business centered approach, where having some number of paying customers is an indicator of quality (you've built something people are willing to pay for!) Personally I lean towards the second camp, the bugs are annoying but there is a good sprinkling of magic in the product which overall makes it something I really enjoy using. All that is to say, I don't think there is a straightforward definition of quality that everyone is going to agree on.
  - esafak 5mo ago
    What do I care if Anthropic makes money? Do you think Oracle makes money because they have a quality product?
bcrosby95 5mo ago
Bad code works fine until it doesn't. In my experience, with humans, doing the right thing is worth it over doing the bad thing if your time horizon is a few months. Once you're in years, absolutely do the right thing, you're actually throwing time away if you don't. And I don't mean "big refactor", I mean at-change-time, when you think "this change feels like an icky hack." For LLMs, I don't really know. I only have a couple years experience at that.
- peder 5mo ago
  But tech debt with vibe coding is fixed by just throwing more magic at it. The cost of tech debt has never been lower.
- tokioyoyo 5mo ago
  If you make a working and functional bad code, and put it on maintenance mode, it can keep churning for decades with no major issues. Everything depends on context. Most code written by humans is indeed, garbage.
  - lucketone 5mo ago
    I define maintenance mode as: given over to different team, so not my problem anymore.
  - bsder 5mo ago
    > Most code written by humans is indeed, garbage. I think that this is the problem, actually. It's similar to writing. Most people suck at writing so badly that the LLM/AI writing is almost always better when writing is "output". Code is similar. Most programmers suck at programming so badly that LLM/AI production IS better than 90+% (possibly 99%+). Remember, a huge number of programmers couldn't pass FizzBuzz. So, if you demand "output", Claude is probably better than most of your (especially enterprise) programming team. The problem is that the Claude usage flood is simply identifying the fact that things that work do so because there is a competent human somewhere in the review pipeline who has been rejecting the vast majority of "output" from your programming team. And he is now overwhelmed.
roughly 5mo ago
You can send a submarine down to crushing depths while violating all the traditional rules about "good" engineering, too.
- datameta 5mo ago
  Right, and often the tested depth isnt maximum. So you slowly acclimate to worse and worse code practices if the effort needed to undo it is the same as doing.
  - tedmiston 5mo ago
    sure, but undo isn't the only path to a newer better version of the code it's easy to see how the product (claude code) could be abstracted to spec form and then a future version built from that without inheriting previous iterations tech debt
  - roughly 5mo ago
    > if the effort needed to undo it is the same as doing. That’s the rub, yes - as long as your failures are nice and gradual and proportional to the changes you’re making, everything’s fine.
slopinthebag 5mo ago
Yes, just get hundreds of billions of dollars in investments to build a leading product, and then use your massive legal team to force the usage of your highly subsidised and marketed subscription plan through your vibe coded software. This is excellent evidence that code doesn't matter.
- azan_ 5mo ago
  > Yes, just get hundreds of billions of dollars in investments to build a leading product, and then use your massive legal team to force the usage of your highly subsidised and marketed subscription plan through your vibe coded software. What? Your comment makes absolutely zero sense. Legal team forces people to use Claude Code?
  - zozbot234 5mo ago
    Claude Code is the only coding harness you're allowed to use with fixed-price subscriptions as opposed to PAYGO API access. There's also rumors that the subscriptions are heavily subsidized compared to API, or at least cross-subsidized to the effect that the heaviest users of Claude Code (controlling for subscription level) end up paying vastly lower unit prices for their token use. These restrictions are enforced legally.
- senordevnyc 5mo ago
  I know this isn't your point, but Anthropic has raised about $70 billion, not "hundreds of billions". And they don't need a massive legal team to declare that you can't use their software subscription with other people's software.
tombert 5mo ago
I suspect if people saw the handwritten code of many, many, many products that they used every day they would be shocked. I've worked at BigCos and startups, and a lot of the terrible code that makes it to production was shocking when I first started. This isn't a dig at anyone, I've certainly shipped my share of bad code as well. Deadlines, despite my wishes sometimes, continue to exist. Sometimes you have to ship a hack to make a customer or manager happy, and then replacing those hacks with better code just never happens. For that matter, the first draft of nearly anything I write is usually not great. I might just be stupid, but I doubt I'm unique; when I've written nice, beautiful, optimized code, it's usually a second or third draft, because ultimately I don't think I fully understand the problem and the assumptions I am allowed to make until I've finished the first draft. Usually for my personal projects, my first dozen or so commits will be pretty messy, and then I'll have cleanup branches that I merge to make the code less terrible. This isn't inherently bad, but a lot of the time I am simply not given time to do a second or third draft of the code, because, again, deadlines, so my initial "just get it working" draft is what ships into production. I don't love it, and I kind of dread of some of the code with my name attached to it at BigCo ever gets leaked, but that's just how it is in the corporate world sometimes.
- cassianoleal 5mo ago
  This is the product that's claiming "coding is a solved problem" though. I get a junior developer or a team of developers with varying levels of experience and a lot of pressure to deliver producing crummy code, but not the very tool that's supposed to be the state-of-the-art coder.
  - tombert 5mo ago
    Sure, but as I stated, even "professional" code is pretty bad a lot of the time. If it's able to generate code that's as good as professional code, then maybe it is solved. I don't actually think it's a solved problem, I'm saying that the fact that it generates terrible code doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have parity with humans.
    - 5mo ago
thwarted 5mo ago
> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code. We already knew that. This is a matter of people who didn't know that or didn't want to acknowledge that thinking they now have proof that it doesn't matter for creating a crazy popular & successful product, as if it's a gotcha on those who advocate for good practices. When your goal is to create something successful that you can cash out, good practices and quality are/were never a concern. This is the basis for YAGNI, move-fast-and-break-things, and worse-is-better. We've know this since at least betamax-vs-VHS (although maybe the WiB VHS cultural knowledge is forgotten these days).
- MBCook 5mo ago
  VHS was not worse is better. It’s better is better.
  - toomuchtodo 5mo ago
    Betamax was arguably better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war
    - mbreese 5mo ago
      Arguably better quality, but at the cost of being shorter. In the great trade off of time, size, and quality, I think VHS chose a better combination.
      - a96 5mo ago
        Importantly, it was so short that it was inadequate. Go beats no go every time.
    - SoftTalker 5mo ago
      Not in ways that the market cared about.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
AstroBen 5mo ago
99.999999% of products can't get away with what Anthropic is able to - this is a one in a billion disruptive product with minimal competition, and its success so far is mostly due to Claude the model, not the agent harness
thesz 5mo ago
This product rides a hype wave. This is why it is crazy popular and successful. The situation there is akin to Viaweb - Viaweb also rode hype wave and code situation was awful as well (see PG's stories about fixing bugs during customer's issue reproduction theater). What did Viaweb's buyer do? They rewrote thing in C++. If history rhymes, then buyer of Anthropic would do something close to "rewrite it in C++" to the current Claude Code implementation.
- nkohari 5mo ago
  I don't disagree with your general premise that eventually it'll just be rewritten, but I have to push back on the idea that Anthropic will be acquired. Their most recent valuation was $380B, and even if they wanted to be acquired (which I doubt) essentially no company has the necessary capital.
  - edschofield 5mo ago
    Any company worth more could (in principle) acquire it with a share swap [1]. Even a smaller company could buy it with an LBO [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_swap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_swap [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout
    - fragmede 5mo ago
      Or debt financed, or any other financal black magic schemes.
  - tedmiston 5mo ago
    > ... but I have to push back on the idea that Anthropic will be acquired. Their most recent valuation was $380B, and even if they wanted to be acquired (which I doubt) essentially no company has the necessary capital. isn't that pretty much why anthropic and openai are racing to IPO?
  - thesz 5mo ago
    It is hard to find market shares of Viaweb and Yahoo at the time of Viaweb's purchase, the best I've found is that Viaweb was bought for 1/4 of Yahoo's net revenue at the time ($49M price/$203 net revenue in 1998). Viaweb was not profitable at the time of purchase, but it had about four people and quite modest hardware costs. While there are no companies with $1.5 trillions (4*$380B) of net revenue, the difference is that Anthropic is cash net-negative, has more than 4 people in staff (none of them are hungry artists like PG) and hardware use spendings, I think, are astronomical. They are cash net-negative because of hardware needed to train models. There should be more than one company able to offer good purchase terms to Anthropic's owners. I also think that Anthropic, just like OpenAI and most of other LLM companies and companies' departments, ride "test set leakage," hoping general public and investors do not understand. Their models do not generalize well, being unable to generate working code in Haskell [1] at the very least. [1] https://haskellforall.com/2026/03/a-sufficiently-detailed-spec-is-code https://haskellforall.com/2026/03/a-sufficiently-detailed-sp... PG's Viaweb had an awful code as a liability. Anthropic's Claude Code has an awful implementation (code) and produces awful code, with more liability than code written by human.
conductr 5mo ago
It kind of reminds me of grammar police type personalities. They are so hung up on the fact it reads “ugly” they can’t see the message; this code powers a rapidly growing $400B company. They admit refactoring is easy, but fail to realize they probably know that too and it’s just not a priority yet.
- therobots927 5mo ago
  The underlying model powers the valuation. Not the front end
  - ath3nd 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - conductr 5mo ago
    I think that's another point of why this is not a priority to keep clean
- blks 5mo ago
  They won’t stay 400B for long, and Claude Code will have no effect on that.
- tedmiston 5mo ago
  > And as for the critics, tell me I don't get it > Everybody can tell you how to do it, they never did it > —jay-z
blks 5mo ago
It basically shifting work to future people. This mess will stop working and will introduce unsolvable obscure bugs one day, and someone actually will have to look at it. It already costed many developers months and hundreds of dollars worth of tokens because of a bug. There will be more.
aenis 5mo ago
This, 100x. I do M&As at my company - as a cto. I have seen lots of successful companies' codebases, and literally none of them elegant. Including very profitable companies with good, loved products. The only good code I know is in the open source domain and in the demoscene. The commercial code is mostly crap - and still makes money.
- jnpnj 5mo ago
  This kinda puts it in words, most of us naturally expected 2025- LLMs to be able to generate OSS / demo / high craft code. Not messy commercial one.
pron 5mo ago
1. "Vibe coding" is a spectrum of how much human supervision (and/or scaffolding in the form of human-written tests and/or specs) is involved. 2. The problem with "bad code" has nothing to do with the short-term success of the product but with the ability to evolve it successfully over time. In other words, it's about long-term success, not short-term success. 3. Perhaps most importantly, Claude Code is a fairly simple product at its core, and almost all its value comes from the model, not from its own code (and the same is true on the cost side). Claude Code is relatively a low stakes product. This means that the problems caused by bad code matter less in this instance, and they're managed further by Claude Code not being at the extreme "vibey" end of the spectrum. So AI aside, Claude Code is proof that if you pour years and many billions into a product, it can be a success even if the code in the narrow and small UI layer isn't great.
- eloisant 5mo ago
  The very definition of "vibe coding" is using AI to write software and not even look at the code it produces.
  - tovej 5mo ago
    People use two definitions. There's this definition of LLM generation + "no thorough review or testing" And there's the more normative one: just LLM generation.[1][2][3] "Not even looking at it" is very difficult as part of a definition. What if you look at it once? Or just glance at it? Is it now no longer vibe coding? What if I read a diff every ten commits? Or look at the code when something breaks? At which point is it no longer vibe coding according to this narrower definition? [1] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/vibe-coding https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/vibe-co... [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vibe%20coding https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vibe%20coding [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding
    - fragmede 5mo ago
      If you do not know the code at all, and are going off of "vibes", it's vibecoding. If you can get a deep sense of what is going on in the code based off of looking at a diff every ten commits, then that's not vibe coding (I, myself, are unable to get a sense from that little of a look). If you actually look at the code and understand it and you'd stand by it, then it's not vibecode. If you had an LLM shit it out in 20 minutes and you don't really know what going on, it's vibecode. Which, to me, is not derogatory. I have a bunch of stuff I've vibecoded and a bunch of stuff that I've actually read the code and fixed it, either by hand or with LLM assistance. And ofc, all the code that was written by me prior to ChatGPT's launch.
rustystump 5mo ago
I think it is crazy popular for the model and not the crappy vibe code.
yakattak 5mo ago
Honestly for such a powerful tool, it’s pretty damn janky. Permissions don’t always work, hitting escape doesn’t always register correctly, the formatting breaks on its own to name a few of the issues i’ve had. It’s popular and successful but it’s got lots of thorns
leptons 5mo ago
>. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code. The product is also a bit wonky and doesn't always provide the benefits it's hyped for. It often doesn't even produce any result for me, just keeps me waiting and waiting... and nothing happens, which is what I expect from a vibe coded app.
kristopolous 5mo ago
devaluing craftsmanship is fundamentally insulting.
quater321 5mo ago
I read this posts and I wonder how many people are thisdelusional or dishonest. I am programmer for 40 years and in most companies 90% of coders are so called stack overflow coders or google coders. Every coder who is honest will admit it and AI is already better than those 90%.FAR better. At least most influencer coder start to admit the fact that the code is actually awesome, if you know what you are doing. I am more of a code reviewer and I plan the implementation, what is far more exciting than writing the code itself. I have the feeling most feel the way I do but there are still those stack ovwerflow coders who are afraid to lose their jobs. And they will.
themafia 5mo ago
The model is the product. It shows that you can have a garbage front end if people perceive value in your back end. It also means that any competitor that improves on this part of the experience is going to eat your lunch.
is_true 5mo ago
There's also a business incentive for code produced by LLM companies to be hard to maintain. So you keep needing them in the future.
rafaelmn 5mo ago
TBH Claude Code is surprisingly shit to use given the technical resources and the amount of money behind it. Looking past the bugs and missing features, it's so obvious it's not built by people who care about the product from a developer/craftsman perspective. It's missing all the signs of polish/care, it feels like someone shipped an internal PoC to prod and kept hacking on it. And now they are just tacking on features to sell more buzzwords and internal prototypes. Classic user facing/commercial software story. But we (the dev community) are kind of spoiled, because we have a lot of great developer tools that come from people passionate about their work, skilled at what they do and take pride in what they put out. I don't count myself among one of those people but I have benefited from their work throughout my career and have gotten used to it in my tooling. All that being said Opus is hands down the best coding model for me (and I'm actively trying all of them) and I'll tolerate it as long as I can get it to do what I need, even with the warts and annoyances.
- crooked-v 5mo ago
  The most obvious sign to me from the start that somebody wasn't really paying attention to how the Claude app(s) work is that on iOS, you have to leave the app active the entire time a response is streaming or it will error out.
  - glhaynes 5mo ago
    I never saw that bug, I don't think, but there was one where it had to start the response before you switched away. That's thankfully been fixed for a few weeks.
  - oblio 5mo ago
    Don't worry, the Gemini website does the same, at least on Firefox mobile. You switch apps and you lose the response AND the prompt. Normally some software devs should be fired for that.
  - johanyc 5mo ago
    That has never happened to me. Did you try that a long while ago? I only had that issue with Gemini
tristramb 5mo ago
Yes, that is how Facebook, Yahoo and many other companies started out. But they rewrote their code when it became to big to be maintainable. The problem with shoddy code is not necessarily that it doesn't work but that it becomes impossible to change.
- Bengalilol 5mo ago
  Makes me stare at mid nineties After Effects’ core rendering engine
- tedmiston 5mo ago
  ehh, as long as the overall starting architecture is decent, it's not hard to do tiny refactors across components claude code, the app, is also not some radically complex concept (even if the codebase today is complicated) but hey, that's why people do version breaking rewrites
prmph 5mo ago
You can, but: - Good code is what enables you to be able to build very complex software without an unreasonable number of bugs. - Good code is what enables you to be responsive to changing customer needs and times. Whether you view that as valuable is another matter though. I guess it is a business decision. There have been plenty of business that have gone bust though by neglecting that. Good code is for your own sanity, the machine does not care.
f-serif 5mo ago
Not AI but perfect example is Cloudflare. They have implemented public suffix list (to check if a domain is valid) 10 different times in 10 different ways. In one place, they have even embedded the list in frontend (pages custom domain). You report issues, they fix that one service, their own stuff isn't even aware that it exists in other places.
- dd8601fn 5mo ago
  Meta has four different implementations of the same page to create a “page” for your business… which is required to be able to advertise on any of their services. Each one is broken, doesn’t have working error handling, and prevents you from giving them money. They all exist to insert the same record somewhere. Lost revenue, and they seem to have no idea. Amazons flagship ios app has had at least three highly visible bugs, for years. They’re like thorns in my eye sockets, every time I use it. They don’t care. These companies are working with BILLIONS of dollars in engineering resources, unlimited AI resources, and with massive revenue effects for small changes. Sometimes the world just doesn’t make sense.
  - f-serif 5mo ago
    It's just lazy engineering. They get assigned a task, they must implement it or fix it to keep their job. Proper implantation takes more knowledge, more research and more brain pressure. AI could play a big rule here. Husky (git hook) but AI. It will score lazy engineering. You lazy implement enough times, you loose your job.
    - dd8601fn 5mo ago
      I just can’t wrap my head around it. Maybe there’s a reason Netflix makes you click on the ONE user profile on the account, repeatedly, even if it feels like sheer stupidity to their users. At least it’s not costing them revenue, directly. Amazons ios app not properly handling state change after checkout, for years? Probably not directly costing them millions. Only second order disengagement. But Walmart keeps pushing a thing you don’t want, because you looked at it once? Amazon solved this. It’s not a major fix, and it’s using a valuable slot that costs them money. Walmart just doesn’t fix it. Meta refusing to take people’s advertising dollars because ALL of their page creation pages have unhandled breaking flows in them? That’s lost money for no reason at all. And you’re telling me they don’t realize how janky it is to try to maintain four implementations of that? Apple App Store Connect and Ads platform? Don’t get me started. Again, all with unlimited pools of the smartest people on earth, unlimited AI, and a billion people testing for them…
somesortofthing 5mo ago
"Wildly successful but unpolished product first-to-market with a new technology gets dethroned by a competitor with superior execution" is a story as old as tech.
dheera 5mo ago
> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code. That was always the case. Landlords still want rent, the IRS still has figurative guns. Shipping shit code to please these folks and keep the company alive will always win over code quality, unless the system can be edited to financially incentivize code quality. The current loss function on society is literally "ship shit now and pay your taxes and rent".
dijit 5mo ago
I found that to be true years ago when I spooled the source of the Twitch leaks. To me it said, clearly: nobody cares about your code quality other than your ability to ship interesting features. It was incredibly eye-opening to me, I went in expecting different lessons honestly.
BearOso 5mo ago
It's also crazy more expensive to run than we thought. That doesn't bode well when their loss-leader period is over and they need to start making money.
bccdee 5mo ago
One truism about coding agents is that they struggle to work with bad code. Code quality matters as much as always, the experts say, and AI agents (left unfettered) produce bad code at an unprecedented rate. That's why good practices matter so much! If you use specs and test it like so and blah blah blah, that makes it all sustainable. And if anyone knows how to do it right, presumably it's Anthropic. This codebase has existed for maybe 18 months, written by THE experts on agentic coding. If it is already unintelligible, that bodes poorly for how much it is possible to "accelerate" coding without taking on substantial technical debt.
- tedmiston 5mo ago
  i think you are conflating anthropic (the startup) with claude code (the leaked source of one of said startup's products) i.e., the claude code codebase doesn't need to be good right now [^1] — so i don't think the assumption that this is an exemplary product / artifact of expert agentic coding actually holds up here specifically [^1]: the startup graveyard is full of dead startups with good code
  - bccdee 5mo ago
    I'm not taking a "zero technical debt" stance. Every successful startup eventually ends up treating their 1.0 codebase as a legacy burden. That's the cost of doing business, but it is a real cost. If Anthropic could have kept their code quality high with a few clever tricks and a few extra tokens, surely they would have. So I take this whole episode as confirmation that code which is subject to high-velocity low-supervision work by agents decays quickly even under ideal circumstances.
larodi 5mo ago
It is amazing how much malice did author put into proving the world is stupid, and only few still stand guard of reason.
dadrian 5mo ago
Except for the part where it's constantly having quality and reliability issues, even independent of the server-side infrastructure (OOMs on long running tasks, etc).
awkward 5mo ago
Code quality is a tactical concern and products live or die on strategy. I wouldn't recommend neglecting tactics if your strategy doesn't put you on the good side of a generational bubble though.
pavel_lishin 5mo ago
> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code. A lot of dollars fix a lot of mistakes.
HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago
It helps if the product is so revolutionary that people are willing to overlook bugs. Could you imagine a more mundane product with a TUI that flickered all the time where this wouldn't be a showstopper? I believe the bug is fixed now, but it seems crazy that it persisted so long given how obvious the cause was (clear before update). How many more bugs are in CC? As of a few weeks ago there were 5000 or so open issues against it on github. The success is undeniable, but whether this vibe-coded level of quality is acceptable for more general use cases isn't something you can infer from that.
cineticdaffodil 5mo ago
While beeing in the center of a hype vortex which basically suspends market physics. But all that bad code eats serverfarms that are going to cost double when the bubble starts deflating.
stefan_ 5mo ago
We are all using Claude despite Claude Code. The day ChudCorp releases a superior model Chud, we are all gone in an instant. There is no moat.
CyberDildonics 5mo ago
There is already lots of popular software that is violates any concept of good software. Facebook messenger, instagram, twitter, minecraft, balena etcher, the original ethereum wallet, almost anything that uses electron...
i_love_retros 5mo ago
I think you're all fucking crazy. Or maybe I am? I can literally see my teams codebase becoming an unmaintainable nightmare in front of my eyes each day. I use copilot and Claude code and I frequently have to throw away their massively verbose and ridiculously complex code and engage my withering brain to come up with the correct solution that is 80% less code. I probably get to the solution in the same time when all is said and done. Honestly what is going on. What are we doing here?
- gitaarik 5mo ago
  Sounds very similar to my experience with colleagues before AI. It just goes even faster now.
  - i_love_retros 5mo ago
    But before AI it was possible to keep things in check because pull requests were manageable in both size and frequency. Now we have people passing figma screen shots to copilot and Claude and putting up single shot pull requests that have what used to be 5 jira stories all in one. It's impossible to keep any semblance of consistency and correctness in the codebase. Its also exhausting for the people that actually care.
    - gitaarik 5mo ago
      The Pull Requests were maybe manageable, but the backlog wasn't ;). AI does help with that. And the tools that require more stability you can still spend more time on and review the code.
      - i_love_retros 5mo ago
        I'm guessing you're a manager and don't write much code or take interest in software quality
- bakugo 5mo ago
  > What are we doing here? Trying to get rich quick. That's all this really is. When your goal is to just make as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time, code quality doesn't matter because not only will your product not be relevant long enough for maintainability to become a problem, your users likely aren't using it because it's good anyway, they're using it because of the marketing and hype around it. Claude Code is the Bored Ape Yacht Club of the current era. Burn money on marketing, build hype, inflate the valuation, then run with the bag. After they go public and the reality that current prices aren't even remotely profitable sets in, the entire scheme will collapse, and in a few years we'll all be looking back at this whole thing and laughing about how crazy people went over it, while going crazy for whatever the newest techbro hype scheme is.
6thbit 5mo ago
It works, it is popular, sure. Claude's code may be barely old enough to have suffered through its true long-term maintainability problems. They probably also haven't had a lot of rotation/attrition in their staff.
mhh__ 5mo ago
Because or in spite of? Claude code works because of Claude being good and network effects. Agentic coding tools are maybe the dumbest code ever for the level of popularity they have.
neonstatic 5mo ago
My understanding of OP was not a claim that "vibe coding doesn't work", but that the way Anthropic does it doesn't work. He seems to be specifically criticizing the "hands off the actual code, human" approach and advocating for keeping the human in the loop.
somekindaguy 5mo ago
The traditional rules of good code are heuristics that are practical for human developers. A different set of heuristics will emerge for agentic development.
HerbManic 5mo ago
It is always amazing at how crap some code can be and yet still function, usually to the total bemusement of the coder. "It shouldn't work but it does?!" When I used to contract code for some game engine stuff back in the 2000's early 2010's, that was essentially my working standard. Essentially gave a boiler plate terms of my work. I will make it work, I will get it done quickly, it will run fast BUT you will incur a lot of technical debt in doing so. In a games engine it isn't a big deal, you are essentially just pushing pixels around a screen in a sand-boxed system. "Yeah, the decompression system does some odd things with memory addresses but it is quick and plays nice with your streaming system. Just don't change the overall mapping too much and it should ship ok.". "In this level of your game, I have this explicit exception code that prevents that streaming system from booting out too much necessary data. Don't change this unless you want a headache" I shudder to think of what that style of code would do in a work environment with serious consequences. I suspect we will find out a lot more of this in the decades to come.
pizzly 5mo ago
In the end what really matters to most people is does it work. How it is built or works means nothing to them nor should it.
manquer 5mo ago
Vibe coding in my opinion is analogous to say borrowing on a credit card to gamble on a startup. Occasionally, in IRL you hear the feel good story how Fred smith gambled the last $5,000 to save FedEx and so on, but most people with that mindset end up crashing out. Vibe coding a product runs the risk of acquiring too much tech debt before project is successful. Product Market Fit is very hard, you need to keep enough room for pivots. Changes in direction will always accumulate debt, even when tech is well written. It is far more difficult when you accumulate debt quickly. The counterpoint being that procrastinating and over-engineering prematurely or building lot of unrelated tooling and loosing focus can also bring the product down quickly or never let it start . Being able to vibe code POCs etc is a great tool if done in a controlled limited well defined way. Just as borrowing cash on your credit card is not always bad, it just usually is.
- sharadov 5mo ago
  Maybe vibe coding gets so good that we completely trash what was written and build from zero. I've seen that with badly written code as well, easier to rewrite than fix the un-goldly mess.
  - manquer 5mo ago
    Yes, if you know what you want exactly it is not difficult to rewrite. Writing is the easiest part of coding. The challenge is knowing exactly what is needed. No matter how bad the code, it is never easy to justify a rewrite . In a large and old enough code base, documentation is always incomplete or incorrect, the code becomes is the spec. Tens or hundreds of thousands of hours would have been expended in making it "work". A refactor inevitably breaks things, because no single person can fully understand everything. There is a reason why it is a well know principle don't fix what is not broken. Same reasons why we still have banking or aviation systems still running mainframe and COBOL from 70s. A rewrite requires the same or likely more number of hours of testing and adoption in a typically much shorter span of time in ironing out the issues [1]. Few organizations either private or public have the appetite to go through the pain and if its money facing or public facing component it is even harder to get buy-in from leadership or the users of app even. --- [1] During the original deployment the issues(bugs or feature gaps) would have been incrementally solved over many years or decades even. During the rewrite you don't have 10-20 years, so you not only have to expend the same or more number of hours you will have to do it much quicker as well.
Izkata 5mo ago
The impression I got from that thread is its quality is dropping, with weird bugs popping up. And I'm pretty sure I remember they announced at one point they switched to that, so the vibe coding had a human-written codebase to start with. So that sounds to me like it is evidence vibe coding doesn't work well long term.
croes 5mo ago
That’s nothing new. Countless Excel-Solutions are popular and successful but the Macro behind bad. Bad code doesn’t not work, unfortunately it works.
TacticalCoder 5mo ago
> It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work. It's not a proof vibe-coding doesn't work. It's a proof it's shitty, rube-goldberg, crappy code. It doesn't mean there aren't other shitty products out there (the heavy turds Microsoft produced throughout the years do comes to mind for example). But when you've got a project upvoted here recently complaining that people do run into issue while quickly cut/pasting from Claude Code CLI to, say, Bash to test something because of Unicode characters in Claude Code CLI's output... And when you realize that it's because what Claude Code CLI shows you in the TUI is not the output of the model because there's an entire headless browser rendering the model's output to a webpage, which is then converted to text (and changing at that moment ASCII chars for Unicode ones), you realize that some serious level of fucktardery is ongoing. It's normal that at times people aren't going full agentic and shall want to cut/paste what they see. I'm not the one complaining: I saw a project complaining about it and people are affected by that terribly dumb ASCII-to-Unicode conversion of characters. When you can produce turds by the kilometer, a near infinity of turd is going to be produced. We're not saying it's not working: I pay an Anthropic subscription and use it daily... We're saying it's a piece-of-shit of a codebase. Shit that works is still shit. If anyone from Anthropic is reading: STOP FUCKING CHANGING THE CHARACTERS THAT YOUR MODEL DOES OUTPUT. (now of course it's just one issue out of thousands, but it'd be a nice one to fix)
lmm 5mo ago
It's always been the case that you could make something that sort of worked for a while with terrible code. The problem was that your product would have random regressions all the time (which theirs does!) and as a result no serious buyers would pay for it.
socketcluster 5mo ago
I'm skeptical of the whole thing, it almost seems like a marketing campaign to encourage developers to use more tokens. My experience as a software engineer, including with Claude Code itself, is that the more code you have, the more bugs there are. It quickly turns into a game of Whac-a-Mole where you fix 1 bug and 2 new bugs appear. Looking at the functionality of Claude code. There is no way it requires 500k lines of code as claimed. It would make it very difficult to debug... Though it seems they have a team of 10 people which is a lot for a CLI wrapper. It's more likely that somebody ran the real code through an agent to intentionally obfuscate it into a more complicated form before they leaked it. This is trivial to do with LLMs. You can take any short function of a couple of lines and turn it into a function hundreds of lines long which does the exact same thing. It's actually a great way to obfuscate code in the AI era because LLMs are good at creating complexity and not good at reducing it. I've done tests where I ask Claude to turn a simple 1 line function which adds two numbers together into a 100 line function and when I asked it to simplify it down, it couldn't reduce it back to its original simple form after multiple attempts. I had to explicitly tell it what the original form of the function was for it to clean up properly. This approach doesn't scale to a whole codebase. Imagine doing this to an entire codebase, it would take more time for you to read and understand each function to tell the LLM how to clean it up than just re-generating the entire app from scratch. The problem with large amounts of code is not only that it's harder to maintain and extend, it's often less performant. While LLMs can allow us to get more out of bad code, they will allow us to get even more value out of the equivalent good code when it comes to maintainability, reliability and efficiency.
- VectorLock 5mo ago
  >I've done tests where I ask Claude to turn a simple 1 line function which adds two numbers together into a 100 line function and when I asked it to simplify it down, it couldn't reduce it back to its original simple form after multiple attempts. "Claude write a one-way function. Wait, no, not like that!"
pieterk 5mo ago
It's funny how so many of us took this unironically at first. I stopped using Claude Code a few weeks ago, and realized why I am still glad to use https://pi.dev https://pi.dev. I don't miss any of the mess. Bring back Opus 4.5 I would say
- pieterk 5mo ago
  I guess I meant pre-4.5. Claude Code peaked at or before November 2025 IMHO.
bakugo 5mo ago
The idea that marketing and hype are more important for success than the quality of the product is not new, and has existed for longer than either of us have been alive. That does not mean your well-marketed and highly-hyped product is good.
21asdffdsa12 5mo ago
You have a operation that tries to establish market-dominance- by quality and scaling. Quality is expensive when it comes to token consumption. Scaling is expensive due to parallel service to users requiring tons of data center on standby. I would expect a gradient of code quality. As in- the hotpaths that consume the most resources are still maintained strictly in "only human code" with rigorous eye on quality and savings. Everything else.. can be vibecoded at least in theory.. I would expect that difference to also appear in the language and code used. The inner core written in C++, the outter user-glue-code in C#, TS, etc. If dogfood is all you eat, squandering shareholder resources, you might open yourself up to liability.
benterix 5mo ago
> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code. It shows that given enough hype and fomo you can convince many people to do this tool to build various types of things while the quality of this code suffers. It's the opposite of how non-vibecoding companies and individuals are using LLMs to improve the quality of the code.
roland35 5mo ago
I don't think it's bad code that's necessarily the problem - it's bad architecture and systems which will bite you! Often bad code can be easily replaced if it's easy to refactor. Of course, bad business can ruin it all. I wrote a beautiful and reliable distributed rust agent, but was later laid off due to the company doing poorly.
JambalayaJimbo 5mo ago
Claude Code allows subsidized access to Anthropic's models! The product quality doesn't really matter, which is an argument FOR vibe coding sure, but only in cases where software quality does not matter. You cannot extrapolate from Claude Code that software quality does not matter in all cases.
cagatayk 5mo ago
Code agents built by tech companies have very different cost functions than the users of those tools. For engineers working on Claude Code, tokens are practically free, unlike you and me. They probably count on tackling increasing complexity of a grotesquely large code base with better models. It ends up being a race, where you build something ugly that makes money directly (subscriptions) and indirectly (hype -> investors throwing money at you), you use that money to hire people, who build scarier/better models, which you then use (and this is the new thing) to directly improve the ugly thing more, hoping to make it less ugly and better at making money faster than you are spending it. It sounds exhausting to me, but it probably feels exhilarating to the people in the middle of it.

aleksandrm 5mo ago

Do we know if the original code was vibe coded? It's like chicken and an egg dilemma.

cube00 5mo ago
It's not a chicken and egg dilemma, the model can be used independently of Claude to write code, the heavy lifting is still done on their servers.

steveBK123 5mo ago

I'd imagine the AI engineers on million dollar TC are not vibe coding the models though, which is the actual sauce.

shimman 5mo ago

Yes that plus having tens of billions of gulf money certainly helps you subsidize your moronic failures with money that isn't yours while you continue, and fail to, achieve profitability in any time horizon within a single lifespan.

tock 5mo ago
Huh what moronic failure did Anthropic do? Every Claude Code user I know loves it.
- moritzwarhier 5mo ago
  I don't know if the comment was referring to this, but recently, people have been posting stuff about them requiring their new hire Jared Sumner, author of the Bun runtime, to first and foremost fix memory leaks that caused very high memory consumption for claude's CLI. The original source was them posting about the matter on X I think. And at first glance, none of it was about complex runtime optimizations not present in Node, it was all "standard" closure-related JS/TS memory leak debugging (which can be a nightmare). I don't have a link at hand because threads about it were mostly on Xitter. But I'm sure there are also more accessible retros about the posts on regular websites (HN threads, too).
  - tock 5mo ago
    Ah I believe codex has similar issues. Terrible code quality but goes to show it doesn't really matter in the end.
    - AstroBen 5mo ago
      > it doesn't really matter in the end if you have one of the top models in a disruptive new product category where everyone else is sprinting also, sure..
      - 0x457 5mo ago
        Code quality never really mattered to users of the software. You can have the most <whatever metric you care about> code and still have zero users or have high user frustration from users that you do have. Code quality only matters in maintainability to developers. IMO it's a very subjective metric
        AstroBen 5mo ago
        It's not subjective at all. It's not art. Code quality = less bugs long term. Code quality = faster iteration and easier maintenance. If things are bad enough it becomes borderline impossible to add features. Users absolutely care about these things.
- Forgeties79 5mo ago
  There’s a sample group issue here beyond the obvious limitations of your personal experience. If they didn’t love it, they likely left it for another LLM. If they have issues with LLM’s writ large, they’re going to dislike and avoid all of them regardless. In the current market, most people using one LLM are likely going to have a positive view of it. Very little is forcing you to stick with one you dislike aside from corporate mandates.
- cyclopeanutopia 5mo ago
  I've used and hate it, it's garbage.
- blks 5mo ago
  Recently there was a bug where CC would consume day/week/month quota in just a few hours, or hundreds of dollars in API costs in a few prompts.
- dghlsakjg 5mo ago
  The people who don’t love it probably stopped using it. You don’t have to go far on this site to find someone that doesn’t like Claude code. If you want an example of something moronic, look at the ram usage of Claude code. It can use gigabytes of memory to work with a few megabytes of text.
- layer8 5mo ago
  I don’t know about moronic, but: https://github.com/ctoth/claude-failures https://github.com/ctoth/claude-failures https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796
- adrian_b 5mo ago
  There is right now another HN thread where a lot of users hate Claude Code. To be fair, their complaints are about very recent changes that break their workflow, while previously they were quite content with it.
nextos 5mo ago
Also Claude owes its popularity mostly to the excellent model running behind the scenes. The tooling can be hacky and of questionable quality yet, with such a model, things can still work out pretty well. The moat is their training and fine-tuning for common programming languages.
- enraged_camel 5mo ago
  >> Also Claude owes its popularity mostly to the excellent model running behind the scenes. It's a bit of both. Claude Code was the tool that made Anthropic's developer mindshare explode. Yes, the models are good, but before CC they were mostly just available via multiplexers like Cursor and Copilot, via the relatively expensive API.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
ahepp 5mo ago
There have certainly been periods of irrational exuberance in the tech industry, but there are also many companies that were criticized for being unprofitable which are now, as far as I can tell, quite profitable. Amazon, Uber, I'm sure many more. I'm curious what the basis is to say that Anthropic could never achieve profitability? Are the numbers that bad?
nh23423fefe 5mo ago
your prediction is going to be wrong, even with all those caveats
- Forgeties79 5mo ago
  Investors are getting antsy and are going to start demanding AI companies start producing real returns. Anthropic et al. better figure it out sooner rather than later because this game they’re all playing where they want all of us to use basically beta-release tools (very generous in some cases) to discover the “real value” of these tools while they attempt to reduce their burn with unsustainable subscription prices can’t go on forever.
- shimman 5mo ago
  If my prediction is wrong these should be trillion dollar companies yesterday with what their liars proclaim, until then we know that Anthropic has only made $5billion total revenue to data due to the Pentagon lawsuits and that required $20billion. Can't wait to see how much public money they need going forward! Hopefully our progeny don't die in the subsequent climate crisis before they can unleash true shareholder value.
- coffeefirst 5mo ago
  Maybe. Maybe not. But if this party is sustainable, what’s the deal with the rate limits that everyone is going on about?

operatingthetan 5mo ago

What I'm missing so far is how they produced such awful code with the same product I'm using, which definitely would have called out some of those issues. Perhaps the problem is getting multiple vibe-coders synced up when working on a large repo.

Schiendelman 5mo ago
I suspect a lot of it is just older, before Opus 4.5+ got good at calling out issues.

tedd4u 5mo ago

Still, it's probably true that Claude Code (etc) will be more successful working on clean, well-structured code, just like human coders are. So short-term, maybe not such a big deal, but long-term I think it's still an unresolved issue.

camdenreslink 5mo ago
I imagine it is way more affordable in terms of tokens to implement a feature in a well organized code base, rather than a hacky mess of a codebase that is the result of 30 band-aid fixes stacked on top of each other.

andrenotgiant 5mo ago

> you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code which has always been true

spoiler 5mo ago
Yes, and to add, in case it's not obvious: in my experience the maintenance, mental (and emotional costs, call me sensitive) cost of bad code compounds exponentially the more hacks you throw at it
- hypeatei 5mo ago
  Now with AI, you're not only dealing with maintenance and mental overhead, but also the overhead of the Anthropic subscription (or whatever AI company) to deal with this spaghetti. Some may decide that's an okay tradeoff, but personally it seems insane to delegate a majority of development work to a blackbox, cloud-hosted LLM that can be rug pulled from underneath of you at any moment (and you're unable to hold it accountable if it screws up)
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    Call me naive, but I don't believe that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and ChatGPT.com and Claude.ai are going to be hard down and never come back. Same as Gmail, which is an entirely different corporation. I mean, they could, but it doesn't seem insane to use Gmail for my email, and that's way more important to my life functioning than this new AI thing.
    - paulryanrogers 5mo ago
      Email is deterministic and portable. Export to a standard format and import somewhere else.
- babelfish 5mo ago
  Sure, for humans. Not sure they'll be the primary readers of code going forward

kypro 5mo ago

Hardly. Claude Code is basically just a wrapper around an LLM with a CLI. Obviously it does some fairly smart stuff under the hood, but it's not exactly comparable to a large software project. But to your point, that doesn't mean you can't vibe code some poorly built product and sell it. But people have always been able to sell poorly built software projects. They can just do it a bit quicker now.

operatingthetan 5mo ago
>Hardly. Claude Code is basically just a wrapper around an LLM with a CLI. I don't know why people keep acting like harnesses are all the same but we know they aren't because people have swapped them out with the same models and receive vastly different results in code quality and token use.

noosphr 5mo ago

I don't think anyone who used Claude code on the terminal had anything good to say about it. It was people using it through vs code that had a good time.

sbysb 5mo ago
I have used Claude Code in the terminal to the tune of ~20m tokens in the last month and I have very little to complain about. There are definitely quirks that are annoying (as all software has, including vs code or jetbrains IDEs) but broadly speaking it does what it says on the tin ime
mwigdahl 5mo ago
I prefer using it via the terminal. Might be anchoring bias, but I have had issues with slash commands not registering and hooks not working in the plugin.

ozgrakkurt 5mo ago

This is a really wrong perspective on software. Short term monkey style coding does not produce products. You might get money but that is not what it is about. This is similar to retarded builders in Turkey saying “wow, I can make the same building, sell for the same price, but spend way less” and then millions of people becoming victim when there is an earthquake. This is not how responsible people should think about things in society

bluefirebrand 5mo ago
> This is a really wrong perspective on software. Short term monkey style coding does not produce products. You might get money but that is not what it is about You're not alone in thinking that, but unfortunately I think it's a minority opinion. The only thing most people and most businesses care about is money. And frankly not even longterm, sustainable money. Most companies seem happy to extract short term profits, pay out the executives with big bonuses, then rot until they collapse
matheusmoreira 5mo ago
Nobody rewards responsibility though. It's all about making number go up.
- cube00 5mo ago
  ...go up as fast as possible.
azan_ 5mo ago
> This is a really wrong perspective on software. Short term monkey style coding does not produce products. You might get money but that is not what it is about. Getting money is 100% what it is about and Claude Code is great product.
- esafak 5mo ago
  It's very buggy. Just look at the ticket tracker. How can you say it is great; are you a light, nontechnical user?

bitwize 5mo ago

Value to customer. Literally the only thing that matters.

AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
Value isn't a one-shot, though. Value sustained over time is what matters. Well, if unmaintainable code gets in the way of the "sustained over time" part, then that is still a real problem.
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  Businesses no longer seem to care about "value sustained over time" They only seem to operate as "extract as much value as possible in a short amount of time and exit with your bag", these days

hombre_fatal 5mo ago

Also, many of the complaints seem more like giddy joy than anything. The negative emotion regex, for example, is only used for a log/telemetry metric. Sampling "wtf?" along would probably be enough. Why would you use an agent for that? I don't see how a vibe-coded app is freed from the same trade-offs that apply to a fast-moving human-coded one. Especially since a human is still driving it, thus they will take the same shortcuts they did before: instead of a formal planning phase, they'll just yolo it with the agent. Instead of cleaning up technical debt, they want to fix specific issues that are easy to review, not touch 10 files to do a refactor that's hard to review. The highest priority issues are bugs and new integrations, not tech debt, just like it always was. This is really just a reminder of how little upside there is to coding in the open.

kennywinker 5mo ago
I think the thing is that people expect one of the largest companies in the world to have well written code. Claude’s source code is fine for a 1-3 person team. It’s atrocious for a flagship product from a company valued over $380 BILLION. Like if that’s the best ai coding can do given infinite money? Yeah, the emperor has no clothes. If it’s not the best that can be done, then what kinda clowns are running the show over there?
- slopinthebag 5mo ago
  Yes, you would expect a company paying millions in TC to the best software developers on the planet could produce a product that is best in class, and you would get code quality for free. Except it's regularly beaten in benchmarks and user validation by open source agents, some built by a single person (pi), with horrible code quality leading to all sorts of bad UX and buggy behaviour. Either they're massively overpaying some scrubs to underperform with the new paradigm, or they are squeezing every last drop out of vibe coding and this is the result.
- hombre_fatal 5mo ago
  I just think this is the nature of all software, and it was wrong to assume AI fundamentally changes it. Seems like you're also under the impression that privately developed software should be immaculate if the company is worth enough billions, but you'd be wrong about that too.

jasonmp85 5mo ago

[dead]

acedTrex 5mo ago

Its a buggy pos though, "popular and successful" have never been indicators of quality in any sense.

anthonypasq 5mo ago
ok, well if youd like to trade in 14billion dollars of revenue for better quality feel free.
remus 5mo ago
I think this is a pretty interesting comment because it gets to the heart of differing views on what quality means. For you, non-buggy software is important. You could also reasonably take a more business centered approach, where having some number of paying customers is an indicator of quality (you've built something people are willing to pay for!) Personally I lean towards the second camp, the bugs are annoying but there is a good sprinkling of magic in the product which overall makes it something I really enjoy using. All that is to say, I don't think there is a straightforward definition of quality that everyone is going to agree on.
- esafak 5mo ago
  What do I care if Anthropic makes money? Do you think Oracle makes money because they have a quality product?

bcrosby95 5mo ago

Bad code works fine until it doesn't. In my experience, with humans, doing the right thing is worth it over doing the bad thing if your time horizon is a few months. Once you're in years, absolutely do the right thing, you're actually throwing time away if you don't. And I don't mean "big refactor", I mean at-change-time, when you think "this change feels like an icky hack." For LLMs, I don't really know. I only have a couple years experience at that.

peder 5mo ago
But tech debt with vibe coding is fixed by just throwing more magic at it. The cost of tech debt has never been lower.
tokioyoyo 5mo ago
If you make a working and functional bad code, and put it on maintenance mode, it can keep churning for decades with no major issues. Everything depends on context. Most code written by humans is indeed, garbage.
- lucketone 5mo ago
  I define maintenance mode as: given over to different team, so not my problem anymore.
- bsder 5mo ago
  > Most code written by humans is indeed, garbage. I think that this is the problem, actually. It's similar to writing. Most people suck at writing so badly that the LLM/AI writing is almost always better when writing is "output". Code is similar. Most programmers suck at programming so badly that LLM/AI production IS better than 90+% (possibly 99%+). Remember, a huge number of programmers couldn't pass FizzBuzz. So, if you demand "output", Claude is probably better than most of your (especially enterprise) programming team. The problem is that the Claude usage flood is simply identifying the fact that things that work do so because there is a competent human somewhere in the review pipeline who has been rejecting the vast majority of "output" from your programming team. And he is now overwhelmed.

roughly 5mo ago

You can send a submarine down to crushing depths while violating all the traditional rules about "good" engineering, too.

datameta 5mo ago
Right, and often the tested depth isnt maximum. So you slowly acclimate to worse and worse code practices if the effort needed to undo it is the same as doing.
- tedmiston 5mo ago
  sure, but undo isn't the only path to a newer better version of the code it's easy to see how the product (claude code) could be abstracted to spec form and then a future version built from that without inheriting previous iterations tech debt
- roughly 5mo ago
  > if the effort needed to undo it is the same as doing. That’s the rub, yes - as long as your failures are nice and gradual and proportional to the changes you’re making, everything’s fine.

slopinthebag 5mo ago

Yes, just get hundreds of billions of dollars in investments to build a leading product, and then use your massive legal team to force the usage of your highly subsidised and marketed subscription plan through your vibe coded software. This is excellent evidence that code doesn't matter.

azan_ 5mo ago
> Yes, just get hundreds of billions of dollars in investments to build a leading product, and then use your massive legal team to force the usage of your highly subsidised and marketed subscription plan through your vibe coded software. What? Your comment makes absolutely zero sense. Legal team forces people to use Claude Code?
- zozbot234 5mo ago
  Claude Code is the only coding harness you're allowed to use with fixed-price subscriptions as opposed to PAYGO API access. There's also rumors that the subscriptions are heavily subsidized compared to API, or at least cross-subsidized to the effect that the heaviest users of Claude Code (controlling for subscription level) end up paying vastly lower unit prices for their token use. These restrictions are enforced legally.
senordevnyc 5mo ago
I know this isn't your point, but Anthropic has raised about $70 billion, not "hundreds of billions". And they don't need a massive legal team to declare that you can't use their software subscription with other people's software.

tombert 5mo ago

I suspect if people saw the handwritten code of many, many, many products that they used every day they would be shocked. I've worked at BigCos and startups, and a lot of the terrible code that makes it to production was shocking when I first started. This isn't a dig at anyone, I've certainly shipped my share of bad code as well. Deadlines, despite my wishes sometimes, continue to exist. Sometimes you have to ship a hack to make a customer or manager happy, and then replacing those hacks with better code just never happens. For that matter, the first draft of nearly anything I write is usually not great. I might just be stupid, but I doubt I'm unique; when I've written nice, beautiful, optimized code, it's usually a second or third draft, because ultimately I don't think I fully understand the problem and the assumptions I am allowed to make until I've finished the first draft. Usually for my personal projects, my first dozen or so commits will be pretty messy, and then I'll have cleanup branches that I merge to make the code less terrible. This isn't inherently bad, but a lot of the time I am simply not given time to do a second or third draft of the code, because, again, deadlines, so my initial "just get it working" draft is what ships into production. I don't love it, and I kind of dread of some of the code with my name attached to it at BigCo ever gets leaked, but that's just how it is in the corporate world sometimes.

cassianoleal 5mo ago
This is the product that's claiming "coding is a solved problem" though. I get a junior developer or a team of developers with varying levels of experience and a lot of pressure to deliver producing crummy code, but not the very tool that's supposed to be the state-of-the-art coder.
- tombert 5mo ago
  Sure, but as I stated, even "professional" code is pretty bad a lot of the time. If it's able to generate code that's as good as professional code, then maybe it is solved. I don't actually think it's a solved problem, I'm saying that the fact that it generates terrible code doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have parity with humans.
  - 5mo ago

thwarted 5mo ago

> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code. We already knew that. This is a matter of people who didn't know that or didn't want to acknowledge that thinking they now have proof that it doesn't matter for creating a crazy popular & successful product, as if it's a gotcha on those who advocate for good practices. When your goal is to create something successful that you can cash out, good practices and quality are/were never a concern. This is the basis for YAGNI, move-fast-and-break-things, and worse-is-better. We've know this since at least betamax-vs-VHS (although maybe the WiB VHS cultural knowledge is forgotten these days).

MBCook 5mo ago
VHS was not worse is better. It’s better is better.
- toomuchtodo 5mo ago
  Betamax was arguably better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war
  - mbreese 5mo ago
    Arguably better quality, but at the cost of being shorter. In the great trade off of time, size, and quality, I think VHS chose a better combination.
    - a96 5mo ago
      Importantly, it was so short that it was inadequate. Go beats no go every time.
  - SoftTalker 5mo ago
    Not in ways that the market cared about.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]

AstroBen 5mo ago

99.999999% of products can't get away with what Anthropic is able to - this is a one in a billion disruptive product with minimal competition, and its success so far is mostly due to Claude the model, not the agent harness

thesz 5mo ago

This product rides a hype wave. This is why it is crazy popular and successful. The situation there is akin to Viaweb - Viaweb also rode hype wave and code situation was awful as well (see PG's stories about fixing bugs during customer's issue reproduction theater). What did Viaweb's buyer do? They rewrote thing in C++. If history rhymes, then buyer of Anthropic would do something close to "rewrite it in C++" to the current Claude Code implementation.

nkohari 5mo ago
I don't disagree with your general premise that eventually it'll just be rewritten, but I have to push back on the idea that Anthropic will be acquired. Their most recent valuation was $380B, and even if they wanted to be acquired (which I doubt) essentially no company has the necessary capital.
- edschofield 5mo ago
  Any company worth more could (in principle) acquire it with a share swap [1]. Even a smaller company could buy it with an LBO [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_swap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_swap [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    Or debt financed, or any other financal black magic schemes.
- tedmiston 5mo ago
  > ... but I have to push back on the idea that Anthropic will be acquired. Their most recent valuation was $380B, and even if they wanted to be acquired (which I doubt) essentially no company has the necessary capital. isn't that pretty much why anthropic and openai are racing to IPO?
- thesz 5mo ago
  It is hard to find market shares of Viaweb and Yahoo at the time of Viaweb's purchase, the best I've found is that Viaweb was bought for 1/4 of Yahoo's net revenue at the time ($49M price/$203 net revenue in 1998). Viaweb was not profitable at the time of purchase, but it had about four people and quite modest hardware costs. While there are no companies with $1.5 trillions (4*$380B) of net revenue, the difference is that Anthropic is cash net-negative, has more than 4 people in staff (none of them are hungry artists like PG) and hardware use spendings, I think, are astronomical. They are cash net-negative because of hardware needed to train models. There should be more than one company able to offer good purchase terms to Anthropic's owners. I also think that Anthropic, just like OpenAI and most of other LLM companies and companies' departments, ride "test set leakage," hoping general public and investors do not understand. Their models do not generalize well, being unable to generate working code in Haskell [1] at the very least. [1] https://haskellforall.com/2026/03/a-sufficiently-detailed-spec-is-code https://haskellforall.com/2026/03/a-sufficiently-detailed-sp... PG's Viaweb had an awful code as a liability. Anthropic's Claude Code has an awful implementation (code) and produces awful code, with more liability than code written by human.

conductr 5mo ago

It kind of reminds me of grammar police type personalities. They are so hung up on the fact it reads “ugly” they can’t see the message; this code powers a rapidly growing $400B company. They admit refactoring is easy, but fail to realize they probably know that too and it’s just not a priority yet.

therobots927 5mo ago
The underlying model powers the valuation. Not the front end
- ath3nd 5mo ago
  [dead]
- conductr 5mo ago
  I think that's another point of why this is not a priority to keep clean
blks 5mo ago
They won’t stay 400B for long, and Claude Code will have no effect on that.
tedmiston 5mo ago
> And as for the critics, tell me I don't get it > Everybody can tell you how to do it, they never did it > —jay-z

blks 5mo ago

It basically shifting work to future people. This mess will stop working and will introduce unsolvable obscure bugs one day, and someone actually will have to look at it. It already costed many developers months and hundreds of dollars worth of tokens because of a bug. There will be more.

aenis 5mo ago

This, 100x. I do M&As at my company - as a cto. I have seen lots of successful companies' codebases, and literally none of them elegant. Including very profitable companies with good, loved products. The only good code I know is in the open source domain and in the demoscene. The commercial code is mostly crap - and still makes money.

jnpnj 5mo ago
This kinda puts it in words, most of us naturally expected 2025- LLMs to be able to generate OSS / demo / high craft code. Not messy commercial one.

pron 5mo ago

1. "Vibe coding" is a spectrum of how much human supervision (and/or scaffolding in the form of human-written tests and/or specs) is involved. 2. The problem with "bad code" has nothing to do with the short-term success of the product but with the ability to evolve it successfully over time. In other words, it's about long-term success, not short-term success. 3. Perhaps most importantly, Claude Code is a fairly simple product at its core, and almost all its value comes from the model, not from its own code (and the same is true on the cost side). Claude Code is relatively a low stakes product. This means that the problems caused by bad code matter less in this instance, and they're managed further by Claude Code not being at the extreme "vibey" end of the spectrum. So AI aside, Claude Code is proof that if you pour years and many billions into a product, it can be a success even if the code in the narrow and small UI layer isn't great.

eloisant 5mo ago
The very definition of "vibe coding" is using AI to write software and not even look at the code it produces.
- tovej 5mo ago
  People use two definitions. There's this definition of LLM generation + "no thorough review or testing" And there's the more normative one: just LLM generation.[1][2][3] "Not even looking at it" is very difficult as part of a definition. What if you look at it once? Or just glance at it? Is it now no longer vibe coding? What if I read a diff every ten commits? Or look at the code when something breaks? At which point is it no longer vibe coding according to this narrower definition? [1] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/vibe-coding https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/vibe-co... [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vibe%20coding https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vibe%20coding [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    If you do not know the code at all, and are going off of "vibes", it's vibecoding. If you can get a deep sense of what is going on in the code based off of looking at a diff every ten commits, then that's not vibe coding (I, myself, are unable to get a sense from that little of a look). If you actually look at the code and understand it and you'd stand by it, then it's not vibecode. If you had an LLM shit it out in 20 minutes and you don't really know what going on, it's vibecode. Which, to me, is not derogatory. I have a bunch of stuff I've vibecoded and a bunch of stuff that I've actually read the code and fixed it, either by hand or with LLM assistance. And ofc, all the code that was written by me prior to ChatGPT's launch.

rustystump 5mo ago

I think it is crazy popular for the model and not the crappy vibe code.

yakattak 5mo ago

Honestly for such a powerful tool, it’s pretty damn janky. Permissions don’t always work, hitting escape doesn’t always register correctly, the formatting breaks on its own to name a few of the issues i’ve had. It’s popular and successful but it’s got lots of thorns

leptons 5mo ago

>. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code. The product is also a bit wonky and doesn't always provide the benefits it's hyped for. It often doesn't even produce any result for me, just keeps me waiting and waiting... and nothing happens, which is what I expect from a vibe coded app.

kristopolous 5mo ago

devaluing craftsmanship is fundamentally insulting.

quater321 5mo ago

I read this posts and I wonder how many people are thisdelusional or dishonest. I am programmer for 40 years and in most companies 90% of coders are so called stack overflow coders or google coders. Every coder who is honest will admit it and AI is already better than those 90%.FAR better. At least most influencer coder start to admit the fact that the code is actually awesome, if you know what you are doing. I am more of a code reviewer and I plan the implementation, what is far more exciting than writing the code itself. I have the feeling most feel the way I do but there are still those stack ovwerflow coders who are afraid to lose their jobs. And they will.

themafia 5mo ago

The model is the product. It shows that you can have a garbage front end if people perceive value in your back end. It also means that any competitor that improves on this part of the experience is going to eat your lunch.

is_true 5mo ago

There's also a business incentive for code produced by LLM companies to be hard to maintain. So you keep needing them in the future.

rafaelmn 5mo ago

TBH Claude Code is surprisingly shit to use given the technical resources and the amount of money behind it. Looking past the bugs and missing features, it's so obvious it's not built by people who care about the product from a developer/craftsman perspective. It's missing all the signs of polish/care, it feels like someone shipped an internal PoC to prod and kept hacking on it. And now they are just tacking on features to sell more buzzwords and internal prototypes. Classic user facing/commercial software story. But we (the dev community) are kind of spoiled, because we have a lot of great developer tools that come from people passionate about their work, skilled at what they do and take pride in what they put out. I don't count myself among one of those people but I have benefited from their work throughout my career and have gotten used to it in my tooling. All that being said Opus is hands down the best coding model for me (and I'm actively trying all of them) and I'll tolerate it as long as I can get it to do what I need, even with the warts and annoyances.

crooked-v 5mo ago
The most obvious sign to me from the start that somebody wasn't really paying attention to how the Claude app(s) work is that on iOS, you have to leave the app active the entire time a response is streaming or it will error out.
- glhaynes 5mo ago
  I never saw that bug, I don't think, but there was one where it had to start the response before you switched away. That's thankfully been fixed for a few weeks.
- oblio 5mo ago
  Don't worry, the Gemini website does the same, at least on Firefox mobile. You switch apps and you lose the response AND the prompt. Normally some software devs should be fired for that.
- johanyc 5mo ago
  That has never happened to me. Did you try that a long while ago? I only had that issue with Gemini

tristramb 5mo ago

Yes, that is how Facebook, Yahoo and many other companies started out. But they rewrote their code when it became to big to be maintainable. The problem with shoddy code is not necessarily that it doesn't work but that it becomes impossible to change.

Bengalilol 5mo ago
Makes me stare at mid nineties After Effects’ core rendering engine
tedmiston 5mo ago
ehh, as long as the overall starting architecture is decent, it's not hard to do tiny refactors across components claude code, the app, is also not some radically complex concept (even if the codebase today is complicated) but hey, that's why people do version breaking rewrites

prmph 5mo ago

You can, but: - Good code is what enables you to be able to build very complex software without an unreasonable number of bugs. - Good code is what enables you to be responsive to changing customer needs and times. Whether you view that as valuable is another matter though. I guess it is a business decision. There have been plenty of business that have gone bust though by neglecting that. Good code is for your own sanity, the machine does not care.

f-serif 5mo ago

Not AI but perfect example is Cloudflare. They have implemented public suffix list (to check if a domain is valid) 10 different times in 10 different ways. In one place, they have even embedded the list in frontend (pages custom domain). You report issues, they fix that one service, their own stuff isn't even aware that it exists in other places.

dd8601fn 5mo ago
Meta has four different implementations of the same page to create a “page” for your business… which is required to be able to advertise on any of their services. Each one is broken, doesn’t have working error handling, and prevents you from giving them money. They all exist to insert the same record somewhere. Lost revenue, and they seem to have no idea. Amazons flagship ios app has had at least three highly visible bugs, for years. They’re like thorns in my eye sockets, every time I use it. They don’t care. These companies are working with BILLIONS of dollars in engineering resources, unlimited AI resources, and with massive revenue effects for small changes. Sometimes the world just doesn’t make sense.
- f-serif 5mo ago
  It's just lazy engineering. They get assigned a task, they must implement it or fix it to keep their job. Proper implantation takes more knowledge, more research and more brain pressure. AI could play a big rule here. Husky (git hook) but AI. It will score lazy engineering. You lazy implement enough times, you loose your job.
  - dd8601fn 5mo ago
    I just can’t wrap my head around it. Maybe there’s a reason Netflix makes you click on the ONE user profile on the account, repeatedly, even if it feels like sheer stupidity to their users. At least it’s not costing them revenue, directly. Amazons ios app not properly handling state change after checkout, for years? Probably not directly costing them millions. Only second order disengagement. But Walmart keeps pushing a thing you don’t want, because you looked at it once? Amazon solved this. It’s not a major fix, and it’s using a valuable slot that costs them money. Walmart just doesn’t fix it. Meta refusing to take people’s advertising dollars because ALL of their page creation pages have unhandled breaking flows in them? That’s lost money for no reason at all. And you’re telling me they don’t realize how janky it is to try to maintain four implementations of that? Apple App Store Connect and Ads platform? Don’t get me started. Again, all with unlimited pools of the smartest people on earth, unlimited AI, and a billion people testing for them…

somesortofthing 5mo ago

"Wildly successful but unpolished product first-to-market with a new technology gets dethroned by a competitor with superior execution" is a story as old as tech.

dheera 5mo ago

> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code. That was always the case. Landlords still want rent, the IRS still has figurative guns. Shipping shit code to please these folks and keep the company alive will always win over code quality, unless the system can be edited to financially incentivize code quality. The current loss function on society is literally "ship shit now and pay your taxes and rent".

dijit 5mo ago

I found that to be true years ago when I spooled the source of the Twitch leaks. To me it said, clearly: nobody cares about your code quality other than your ability to ship interesting features. It was incredibly eye-opening to me, I went in expecting different lessons honestly.

BearOso 5mo ago

It's also crazy more expensive to run than we thought. That doesn't bode well when their loss-leader period is over and they need to start making money.

bccdee 5mo ago

One truism about coding agents is that they struggle to work with bad code. Code quality matters as much as always, the experts say, and AI agents (left unfettered) produce bad code at an unprecedented rate. That's why good practices matter so much! If you use specs and test it like so and blah blah blah, that makes it all sustainable. And if anyone knows how to do it right, presumably it's Anthropic. This codebase has existed for maybe 18 months, written by THE experts on agentic coding. If it is already unintelligible, that bodes poorly for how much it is possible to "accelerate" coding without taking on substantial technical debt.

tedmiston 5mo ago
i think you are conflating anthropic (the startup) with claude code (the leaked source of one of said startup's products) i.e., the claude code codebase doesn't need to be good right now [^1] — so i don't think the assumption that this is an exemplary product / artifact of expert agentic coding actually holds up here specifically [^1]: the startup graveyard is full of dead startups with good code
- bccdee 5mo ago
  I'm not taking a "zero technical debt" stance. Every successful startup eventually ends up treating their 1.0 codebase as a legacy burden. That's the cost of doing business, but it is a real cost. If Anthropic could have kept their code quality high with a few clever tricks and a few extra tokens, surely they would have. So I take this whole episode as confirmation that code which is subject to high-velocity low-supervision work by agents decays quickly even under ideal circumstances.

larodi 5mo ago

It is amazing how much malice did author put into proving the world is stupid, and only few still stand guard of reason.

dadrian 5mo ago

Except for the part where it's constantly having quality and reliability issues, even independent of the server-side infrastructure (OOMs on long running tasks, etc).

awkward 5mo ago

Code quality is a tactical concern and products live or die on strategy. I wouldn't recommend neglecting tactics if your strategy doesn't put you on the good side of a generational bubble though.

pavel_lishin 5mo ago

> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code. A lot of dollars fix a lot of mistakes.

HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago

It helps if the product is so revolutionary that people are willing to overlook bugs. Could you imagine a more mundane product with a TUI that flickered all the time where this wouldn't be a showstopper? I believe the bug is fixed now, but it seems crazy that it persisted so long given how obvious the cause was (clear before update). How many more bugs are in CC? As of a few weeks ago there were 5000 or so open issues against it on github. The success is undeniable, but whether this vibe-coded level of quality is acceptable for more general use cases isn't something you can infer from that.

cineticdaffodil 5mo ago

While beeing in the center of a hype vortex which basically suspends market physics. But all that bad code eats serverfarms that are going to cost double when the bubble starts deflating.

stefan_ 5mo ago

We are all using Claude despite Claude Code. The day ChudCorp releases a superior model Chud, we are all gone in an instant. There is no moat.

CyberDildonics 5mo ago

There is already lots of popular software that is violates any concept of good software. Facebook messenger, instagram, twitter, minecraft, balena etcher, the original ethereum wallet, almost anything that uses electron...

i_love_retros 5mo ago

I think you're all fucking crazy. Or maybe I am? I can literally see my teams codebase becoming an unmaintainable nightmare in front of my eyes each day. I use copilot and Claude code and I frequently have to throw away their massively verbose and ridiculously complex code and engage my withering brain to come up with the correct solution that is 80% less code. I probably get to the solution in the same time when all is said and done. Honestly what is going on. What are we doing here?

gitaarik 5mo ago
Sounds very similar to my experience with colleagues before AI. It just goes even faster now.
- i_love_retros 5mo ago
  But before AI it was possible to keep things in check because pull requests were manageable in both size and frequency. Now we have people passing figma screen shots to copilot and Claude and putting up single shot pull requests that have what used to be 5 jira stories all in one. It's impossible to keep any semblance of consistency and correctness in the codebase. Its also exhausting for the people that actually care.
  - gitaarik 5mo ago
    The Pull Requests were maybe manageable, but the backlog wasn't ;). AI does help with that. And the tools that require more stability you can still spend more time on and review the code.
    - i_love_retros 5mo ago
      I'm guessing you're a manager and don't write much code or take interest in software quality
bakugo 5mo ago
> What are we doing here? Trying to get rich quick. That's all this really is. When your goal is to just make as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time, code quality doesn't matter because not only will your product not be relevant long enough for maintainability to become a problem, your users likely aren't using it because it's good anyway, they're using it because of the marketing and hype around it. Claude Code is the Bored Ape Yacht Club of the current era. Burn money on marketing, build hype, inflate the valuation, then run with the bag. After they go public and the reality that current prices aren't even remotely profitable sets in, the entire scheme will collapse, and in a few years we'll all be looking back at this whole thing and laughing about how crazy people went over it, while going crazy for whatever the newest techbro hype scheme is.

6thbit 5mo ago

It works, it is popular, sure. Claude's code may be barely old enough to have suffered through its true long-term maintainability problems. They probably also haven't had a lot of rotation/attrition in their staff.

mhh__ 5mo ago

Because or in spite of? Claude code works because of Claude being good and network effects. Agentic coding tools are maybe the dumbest code ever for the level of popularity they have.

neonstatic 5mo ago

My understanding of OP was not a claim that "vibe coding doesn't work", but that the way Anthropic does it doesn't work. He seems to be specifically criticizing the "hands off the actual code, human" approach and advocating for keeping the human in the loop.

somekindaguy 5mo ago

The traditional rules of good code are heuristics that are practical for human developers. A different set of heuristics will emerge for agentic development.

HerbManic 5mo ago

It is always amazing at how crap some code can be and yet still function, usually to the total bemusement of the coder. "It shouldn't work but it does?!" When I used to contract code for some game engine stuff back in the 2000's early 2010's, that was essentially my working standard. Essentially gave a boiler plate terms of my work. I will make it work, I will get it done quickly, it will run fast BUT you will incur a lot of technical debt in doing so. In a games engine it isn't a big deal, you are essentially just pushing pixels around a screen in a sand-boxed system. "Yeah, the decompression system does some odd things with memory addresses but it is quick and plays nice with your streaming system. Just don't change the overall mapping too much and it should ship ok.". "In this level of your game, I have this explicit exception code that prevents that streaming system from booting out too much necessary data. Don't change this unless you want a headache" I shudder to think of what that style of code would do in a work environment with serious consequences. I suspect we will find out a lot more of this in the decades to come.

pizzly 5mo ago

In the end what really matters to most people is does it work. How it is built or works means nothing to them nor should it.

manquer 5mo ago

Vibe coding in my opinion is analogous to say borrowing on a credit card to gamble on a startup. Occasionally, in IRL you hear the feel good story how Fred smith gambled the last $5,000 to save FedEx and so on, but most people with that mindset end up crashing out. Vibe coding a product runs the risk of acquiring too much tech debt before project is successful. Product Market Fit is very hard, you need to keep enough room for pivots. Changes in direction will always accumulate debt, even when tech is well written. It is far more difficult when you accumulate debt quickly. The counterpoint being that procrastinating and over-engineering prematurely or building lot of unrelated tooling and loosing focus can also bring the product down quickly or never let it start . Being able to vibe code POCs etc is a great tool if done in a controlled limited well defined way. Just as borrowing cash on your credit card is not always bad, it just usually is.

sharadov 5mo ago
Maybe vibe coding gets so good that we completely trash what was written and build from zero. I've seen that with badly written code as well, easier to rewrite than fix the un-goldly mess.
- manquer 5mo ago
  Yes, if you know what you want exactly it is not difficult to rewrite. Writing is the easiest part of coding. The challenge is knowing exactly what is needed. No matter how bad the code, it is never easy to justify a rewrite . In a large and old enough code base, documentation is always incomplete or incorrect, the code becomes is the spec. Tens or hundreds of thousands of hours would have been expended in making it "work". A refactor inevitably breaks things, because no single person can fully understand everything. There is a reason why it is a well know principle don't fix what is not broken. Same reasons why we still have banking or aviation systems still running mainframe and COBOL from 70s. A rewrite requires the same or likely more number of hours of testing and adoption in a typically much shorter span of time in ironing out the issues [1]. Few organizations either private or public have the appetite to go through the pain and if its money facing or public facing component it is even harder to get buy-in from leadership or the users of app even. --- [1] During the original deployment the issues(bugs or feature gaps) would have been incrementally solved over many years or decades even. During the rewrite you don't have 10-20 years, so you not only have to expend the same or more number of hours you will have to do it much quicker as well.

Izkata 5mo ago

The impression I got from that thread is its quality is dropping, with weird bugs popping up. And I'm pretty sure I remember they announced at one point they switched to that, so the vibe coding had a human-written codebase to start with. So that sounds to me like it is evidence vibe coding doesn't work well long term.

croes 5mo ago

That’s nothing new. Countless Excel-Solutions are popular and successful but the Macro behind bad. Bad code doesn’t not work, unfortunately it works.

TacticalCoder 5mo ago

> It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work. It's not a proof vibe-coding doesn't work. It's a proof it's shitty, rube-goldberg, crappy code. It doesn't mean there aren't other shitty products out there (the heavy turds Microsoft produced throughout the years do comes to mind for example). But when you've got a project upvoted here recently complaining that people do run into issue while quickly cut/pasting from Claude Code CLI to, say, Bash to test something because of Unicode characters in Claude Code CLI's output... And when you realize that it's because what Claude Code CLI shows you in the TUI is not the output of the model because there's an entire headless browser rendering the model's output to a webpage, which is then converted to text (and changing at that moment ASCII chars for Unicode ones), you realize that some serious level of fucktardery is ongoing. It's normal that at times people aren't going full agentic and shall want to cut/paste what they see. I'm not the one complaining: I saw a project complaining about it and people are affected by that terribly dumb ASCII-to-Unicode conversion of characters. When you can produce turds by the kilometer, a near infinity of turd is going to be produced. We're not saying it's not working: I pay an Anthropic subscription and use it daily... We're saying it's a piece-of-shit of a codebase. Shit that works is still shit. If anyone from Anthropic is reading: STOP FUCKING CHANGING THE CHARACTERS THAT YOUR MODEL DOES OUTPUT. (now of course it's just one issue out of thousands, but it'd be a nice one to fix)

lmm 5mo ago

It's always been the case that you could make something that sort of worked for a while with terrible code. The problem was that your product would have random regressions all the time (which theirs does!) and as a result no serious buyers would pay for it.

socketcluster 5mo ago

I'm skeptical of the whole thing, it almost seems like a marketing campaign to encourage developers to use more tokens. My experience as a software engineer, including with Claude Code itself, is that the more code you have, the more bugs there are. It quickly turns into a game of Whac-a-Mole where you fix 1 bug and 2 new bugs appear. Looking at the functionality of Claude code. There is no way it requires 500k lines of code as claimed. It would make it very difficult to debug... Though it seems they have a team of 10 people which is a lot for a CLI wrapper. It's more likely that somebody ran the real code through an agent to intentionally obfuscate it into a more complicated form before they leaked it. This is trivial to do with LLMs. You can take any short function of a couple of lines and turn it into a function hundreds of lines long which does the exact same thing. It's actually a great way to obfuscate code in the AI era because LLMs are good at creating complexity and not good at reducing it. I've done tests where I ask Claude to turn a simple 1 line function which adds two numbers together into a 100 line function and when I asked it to simplify it down, it couldn't reduce it back to its original simple form after multiple attempts. I had to explicitly tell it what the original form of the function was for it to clean up properly. This approach doesn't scale to a whole codebase. Imagine doing this to an entire codebase, it would take more time for you to read and understand each function to tell the LLM how to clean it up than just re-generating the entire app from scratch. The problem with large amounts of code is not only that it's harder to maintain and extend, it's often less performant. While LLMs can allow us to get more out of bad code, they will allow us to get even more value out of the equivalent good code when it comes to maintainability, reliability and efficiency.

VectorLock 5mo ago
>I've done tests where I ask Claude to turn a simple 1 line function which adds two numbers together into a 100 line function and when I asked it to simplify it down, it couldn't reduce it back to its original simple form after multiple attempts. "Claude write a one-way function. Wait, no, not like that!"

pieterk 5mo ago

It's funny how so many of us took this unironically at first. I stopped using Claude Code a few weeks ago, and realized why I am still glad to use https://pi.dev https://pi.dev. I don't miss any of the mess. Bring back Opus 4.5 I would say

pieterk 5mo ago
I guess I meant pre-4.5. Claude Code peaked at or before November 2025 IMHO.

bakugo 5mo ago

The idea that marketing and hype are more important for success than the quality of the product is not new, and has existed for longer than either of us have been alive. That does not mean your well-marketed and highly-hyped product is good.

21asdffdsa12 5mo ago

You have a operation that tries to establish market-dominance- by quality and scaling. Quality is expensive when it comes to token consumption. Scaling is expensive due to parallel service to users requiring tons of data center on standby. I would expect a gradient of code quality. As in- the hotpaths that consume the most resources are still maintained strictly in "only human code" with rigorous eye on quality and savings. Everything else.. can be vibecoded at least in theory.. I would expect that difference to also appear in the language and code used. The inner core written in C++, the outter user-glue-code in C#, TS, etc. If dogfood is all you eat, squandering shareholder resources, you might open yourself up to liability.

benterix 5mo ago

> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code. It shows that given enough hype and fomo you can convince many people to do this tool to build various types of things while the quality of this code suffers. It's the opposite of how non-vibecoding companies and individuals are using LLMs to improve the quality of the code.

roland35 5mo ago

I don't think it's bad code that's necessarily the problem - it's bad architecture and systems which will bite you! Often bad code can be easily replaced if it's easy to refactor. Of course, bad business can ruin it all. I wrote a beautiful and reliable distributed rust agent, but was later laid off due to the company doing poorly.

JambalayaJimbo 5mo ago

Claude Code allows subsidized access to Anthropic's models! The product quality doesn't really matter, which is an argument FOR vibe coding sure, but only in cases where software quality does not matter. You cannot extrapolate from Claude Code that software quality does not matter in all cases.

cagatayk 5mo ago

Code agents built by tech companies have very different cost functions than the users of those tools. For engineers working on Claude Code, tokens are practically free, unlike you and me. They probably count on tackling increasing complexity of a grotesquely large code base with better models. It ends up being a race, where you build something ugly that makes money directly (subscriptions) and indirectly (hype -> investors throwing money at you), you use that money to hire people, who build scarier/better models, which you then use (and this is the new thing) to directly improve the ugly thing more, hoping to make it less ugly and better at making money faster than you are spending it. It sounds exhausting to me, but it probably feels exhilarating to the people in the middle of it.