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What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture

• j_bum 5mo ago
  As someone who finds a huge amount of enjoyment in developing using Opus 4.6 in Claude code, I’d love to know what other harnesses people use that deliver the same experience as CC. CC is a vibe-coded mess, but it works very well for me. I do a lot of work in R and find codex (5.4 & 5.3-codex) just totally drop the ball with R. Anthropic’s models are far better with R, so I use them. But I do wonder how much the harness affects performance. Would GPT-5.3-Codex perform just as well if it was plugged into CC?
  • voidfunc 5mo ago
    I used OpenCode and find it works just as well or better than CC. I dont think CC has a moat other than their model but their model is also available through Copilot.
    • _menelaus 5mo ago
      Have you found any cheaper models to work well with OpenCode? Like any of the Chinese models?
      • voidfunc 5mo ago
        Haven't tried, corporate pays for use on both work and personal projects.
      • Alifatisk 5mo ago
        I use Z.ai GLM-5.1 with Opencode, haven't had any issues.
  • beacon294 5mo ago
    Pi
    • Alifatisk 5mo ago
      No one is going to find out exactly what you mean. I'll add this link for reference, https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi
      • beacon294 5mo ago
        It was my intent but it's also fine to be more direct.
  • lsaferite 5mo ago
    CC is riddled with bugs and poor UI/UX. It's effective in spite of that. Just think what a well-designed agent would do in place of that. I don't use other coding agents currently because the subscription with CC gets me what I need and I don't want to pay retail token rates. I would 100% prefer an open source agent so I could fork it and tweak it to my needs.
    • adampunk 5mo ago
      Every time I hear someone say that software is successful in spite of something I find that looking harder shows some interesting choices. If this software succeeds despite the manifest failures that are pointed out here, that’s a sign that something is working. We could argue that something is just access to the model, but plenty of other companies sell that and they don’t seem to do as well.
      • lsaferite 5mo ago
        In this case it's because they gate subscription access to their agent. If not for that, I wouldn't be using Claude Code. I like Anthropic overall, but it disappoints me that they didn't make CC open source and that they insist on tying subscription use to CC.
• mpalmer 5mo ago
  Why does everything always have to reveal something? It's such a definitive, decisive word, which is abused to the point of meaninglessness by clickbait. Claude Code's source could imply, suggest, point to, highlight, call attention to, indict, or invite deeper reflection about AI engineering culture. Quit sucking all the life out of words to get clicks. The way we use them, they're a finite resource.
  • adrian_b 5mo ago
    Reveal = show something that was hidden previously. Seems like the appropriate word to use about a source code leak. The words proposed by you are suitable for describing the consequences of a revelation, while no longer containing any hint about their original cause, so using them would have lead to a more verbose sentence for delivering the same information.
    • mpalmer 5mo ago
      It wasn't hidden previously. It was fairly well-understood. The CC source doesn't "reveal" a single thing about anything other than Anthropic internals. It says nothing about the industry at large, certainly nothing new. And this: The words proposed by you are suitable for describing the consequences of a revelation, while no longer containing any hint about their original cause doesn't make any sense. There is no "revelation" here. And the word "reveal" contains no connotations whatsoever about the "cause" of a "revelation".
• golly_ned 5mo ago
  I came away with a very different conclusion, which is that the fact that such “bad” software can be so resoundingly successful for a business, yet be so odious to experienced human reviewers, means that it was the right engineering choice to go fast, rather than “do things right” by emphasizing code quality. What good would it truly be if a 3K line function is split into 8 modules? It’ll be neater and more comprehensible to a human reader. More debuggable, definitely. But given the business problem the have: winner takes all of a massive market, first mover wins, — the right move is to throw the usual rulebook about quality software out the window, and double down on the bets of the company, that AI will make human code engineering less and less necessary very quickly. It turned out incredibly well despite the “bad” engineering — which in this case, I really count as good engineering.
  • anewhnaccount2 5mo ago
    People notice the jank, and it's affecting CC's reputatio That's not easy to come back from.
  • K0balt 5mo ago
    You can go just as fast if you make good code, you just have to burn more tokens to do it. The tokens you burn in strict structure and documentation you’ll save in debugging as the codebase grows. I’m 5-30x my normal production depending on the day…with zero team and writing better code than I ever have, but you need a robust system to manage the path, and active supervision and management basically you’ll apply your senior dev skills as if you were managing 50 frisky interns.
  • adrian_b 5mo ago
    It was "good engineering" only because this was a new kind of product and the customers were not aware yet of what they should get for the money they pay. The bad quality of the Claude Code program has resulted in increased costs for the customers (very high memory consumption, slow execution, higher and sometimes much higher token count than necessary), and even for Anthropic, but nobody was aware of this, because there was no previous experience to compare with. This kind of sloppy vibe coding works only when there is no competition. When the competition comes with something much more efficient, e.g. pi-dev, the inefficient application will be eliminated. Anthropic attempts to protect their badly written program by forbidding its customers to use other coding harnesses, but this will not be able to protect them from competition for long. If you are the first on a new market without competitors, then indeed time-to-market matters more than anything else and the sloppiest vibe-coded application is the best if it can be delivered immediately. However, one must plan to replace that with a better and more efficient application ASAP, because the advantage of being the first is only temporary.
• K0balt 5mo ago
  Obviously they were legit vibing it. AI coding is like having a team of 100 interns. It’s incredibly powerful but you need to keep it under control or you’re gonna have a bad day. Write documentation describing the specs , the APIs, the protocols, and the customer stories. Specify that everything must be divided with clear separations of concerns, interfaces, and state objects. Any single file should have a clearly defined role and should not span domains or concerns. File separation is even more critical than functional refactoring. It’s the files and their well defined and documented interface surfaces that will keep things from becoming an indecipherable tangle of dependencies and hidden state. Keep everything not defined in the interfaces private so that it is not accessible from outside the file, and prohibit attaching to anything without using the designated public interface surfaces. Then write an implementation plan. Then the skeleton, then start filling features one by one. Write the tests or testing documentation at the same time. If you have the luxury of compile time flags, put the tests right in the functions so they are self validated if built with test=1. (I know that’s weird but it helps the AI stay constrained to the intent) After each minor feature (anything that would take me >1 hour to personally do, since the last review), have all touched files reviewed for correctness, consistency, coherence, and comments both within the codebase and the documentation. Don’t add features to the code, add them through the documentation and implementation plan. Don’t let Claude use the planning tool, it tries to do too much at once…. That’s how you get spaghetti. One little thing, then review. 1/4 of the tokens burned in writing code, 1/2 in aggressive review / cleanup and 1/4 in ongoing documentation maintenance. Thats the real price if you want to produce good code…. and you can produce really solid , maintainable code. It’s just 4x the price of vibe coding… but 1 solid senior developer can still produce about as much as if he was running a team of 5-10 engineers depending on the project. Still incredibly rapid and economical…. But it takes the same skills as you need to run a team as well as an excellent sense of smell to call out wrong turns. Also, use the 1M context model, have a solid onboarding that describes your company culture, and why the project matters to the AI collaborator, as well as your coding practices, etc. I also use several journals (musings, learnings, curiosity) that the AI maintains itself, reading them during onboarding and writing them in wrapup. It is at least a 2x when the AI is acting as if it were a person that is deeply invested in the outcome. Treat it like a collaboration and you will get better results. It’s a token fire. But IMHO it’s the way if you’re building something that has to be deployed at scale and maintainable. Straight vibes are fine for mockups, demos, and prototypes.
• DonHopkins 5mo ago
  Sure, worse may be better, but how do you know your code is worse unless you actually review it? You might accidentally let some good code slip into production, then your product isn't as better as it could be.
• haspok 5mo ago
  > I’m seriously considering a pivot to security Exactly my conclusion, unfortunately I'm too old to pivot now, but anyone in their junior-to-mid days as a software developer should consider this pivot. And this is only about generating source code in a closed environment. All hell will break loose when Openclaw et al get in the hands of average users...
  • iainctduncan 5mo ago
    Man, same boat. If I weren't only looking for another 10 years of working, I'd be doing the same.
  • ryandrake 5mo ago
    I wouldn't. Until companies become liable for their security failures, and that liability comes with a big price tag, there will be no money in security. Currently, poor security costs companies nothing, so they won't pay to improve their security.
• g8oz 5mo ago
  Ironically this article critical of AI coding is guilty of AI writing.
  • airbreather 5mo ago
    As most results in coding by AI are the result of some kind of recursive application of the fundemental concept, irony is abundant.
• R00mi 5mo ago
  I agree with the core of what you're saying, but I think the real split isn't "Anthropic trustworthy or not" — it's: what's proprietary vs what's open in the stuff you're actually building on. Routines, Projects, Artifacts, Skills — that's vendor-specific, disposable by definition. MCP, CLAUDE.md, markdown in your repo — that's portable. If Anthropic pivots or nerfs the thing tomorrow, you just rewire your MCP tools onto another harness in 10 minutes. Personally I build my agent workflows as scripts + MCP tools — called by Claude Code today, callable by whatever harness replaces it tomorrow. The building block is "a set of MCP tools + one CLAUDE.md", not "a Routine defined in Anthropic's console". Functionally the same, zero lock-in. Routines are fine for quick-wins, but the moment you start stacking them into a real workflow you're just moving your tech debt into a proprietary format. At that point you might as well externalize to scripts from the start.
  • airbreather 5mo ago
    Yes definately, I do a lot of OT devops and if you want determinstic results then the best use of AI is to get it to write scripts that solve your problems and that you run outside of AI. Often, the use of AI is a lazy case of not wanting to spend the time to understand the essence of the problem and solve it directly, often far more efficiently. (Not always, but often). The ability of getting results that surpass your understanding, and quickly, is seducing, but you invariably end up being capped on the usefullness. AI generally seems to raise anyone with the basic skills to "expert beginner" in almost any field, but it is then a big struggle to get past this stage, without substantial extra work.
• markisus 5mo ago
  Claude code has some basic security features like asking for user confirmation for bash commands, or restricting commands to the current directory. If these features are not being code reviewed, what assurances do we have that they actually work?
  • nurettin 5mo ago
    You don't. I learned this from it executing commands while in plan mode. It is LLMs all the way down.
    • jmux 5mo ago
      if you read the thinking context while in plan mode (I had it shown to me, i think mistakenly, by switching modes while Claude was thinking a week or so ago) plan mode is just a pre-prompt saying “you are now in plan mode, don’t propose edits, read the code and understand how it works.” it’s not an actual limitation on the harness.
  • ninininino 5mo ago
    They don't work. Do not trust them. Run Claude Code in an isolated, disposable micro VM and assume it will break your environment, steal any available secrets, do destructive commands, etc. So don't give it any way to do that to anything you care about.
    • airbreather 5mo ago
      Humans don't really work any better, just fail in different ways. This is why certain workflows and practices have emerged. We are now in the early days of working through a similar process with AI. They most definately do work for some use cases, but how they are used is important. Just because you apply human processes and systems to AI based workflows and don't get historically expected results, this is zero basis to claim the sky is falling with use of AI in coding.
      • ninininino 5mo ago
• jgalt212 5mo ago
  > Issue #38335 had 201 upvotes and zero team responses. Labeled “invalid.” They're doing the right thing. The market is resoundingly telling them this. > Anthropic draws VC interest at up to $800 billion valuation, Business Insider reports https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/anthropic-draws-offers-vcs-invest-up-800-billion-valuation-business-insider-2026-04-14/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/anthropic-draws-...
• Olivia_Pan 5mo ago
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• mstr_anderson 5mo ago
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• airbreather 5mo ago
  The problem isn't the AI writing the code, it is the specification - I assert much of the described problems could be rectified by improved specification with no hand coding. Specification of software has been very weak for decades, and little effort has been put towards defining methadologies of specification that are both exhaustive and unambiguous. It is possible, I know because I work in an exotic niche where being exhaustive and unambiguous isnot optional - Functional Safety. Here you might spend 90% or more of your time planning what and how to code, before writing the first line. The cost - I have worked on projects where, across the duration of the project, the average production of code was less than two lines a day. But when a single error could result in the death of 100, or 300, people, then this time worth it. You can't get this kind of quality when you pivot twice a week, you need to have fairly fixed objectives. The are ways to get better outcomes that are known, but not widely applied, and they could do with some development to make them accessible. Some has been done, eg Leslie Lamport and TLA+. But, as you might have been told as a child, don't get upset that you did not get what you wanted when you failed to ask for it properly.
• fredcallagan 5mo ago
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• deleted 5mo ago
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• adnasalk 5mo ago
  the "it worked despite being bad code" argument proves too much. plenty of bad codebases succeeded for reasons unrelated to their quality such as first mover, distribution, pricing. correlation isn't causation, and survivorship bias is real. the 3K-line function didn't make Claude Code win, the model and the timing did. the more honest version of golly_ned's point upthread is narrower: in the very early days of a new category, shipping beats quality because nothing is proven yet. that's actually true. it's not true as a general principle, and it's definitely not true for the 99% of projects that aren't racing to define a new market.
• adnasalk 5mo ago
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