5 ms·

I read the article but I find this response kind of strange. Am I alone in this? Wanton accountability for a multi-billion dollar cutting edge company… leaves

I read the article but I find this response kind of strange. Am I alone in this? Wanton accountability for a multi-billion dollar cutting edge company… leaves more to be desired from the best? Take Apple or Google or any top tech company of the past at its prime and compare. This kind of behavior then would probably reflect poorly on the institutions behind the tech and not maintain their image of technical brilliance because it shows weakness in a vulnerable way. It is human. It is not strategic. By wanton accountability, I mean things like saying “This was my change!” or “ wanted to apologize and agree that this did not meet our bar and does not represent how we plan to ship on Claude Code”. It makes them (the company) look weak? Accountability is important but where, how, and when you do it is even more important. These stakes are, not joking, life and death, and in this big game of chess we get paid for, naivety not only in our technical implementation can weaken our position. Not trying to attack, just trying to learn and probe with the community. Maybe a cost of this kind of transparency on the internet. I am wondering if this a new trend and tech companies are changing in a way I don’t understand! In any case, it’s really cool work that is being with Claude Code!

thewhitetulip 2mo ago
We already lived in a post truth world. Now we live in a post logic world. Nothing makes sense anymore
fooster 2mo ago
It doesn't feel strange to me at all. It feels like a very human response from the person that introduced the change. I great appreciate that, rather than ignoring the problem, or some canned corpspeak response.
brabel 2mo ago
> it shows weakness in a vulnerable way. It is human. It is not strategic. Are you complaining that the answer is too human and that a multi billion company should not allow a human who made a mistake to own the mistake in public, being honest about what happened in this case?? Would you prefer complete silence from them like you most certainly would from Google or Apple. That sounds incredibly sad to me, we don’t even expect humanity from big tech since that’s what we’ve become accustomed to seeing. fTR both the Anthropic dev response and the blog post seem to believe that a single person can be blamed for something like this, which I wholeheartedly disagree with! Nobody reviews your changes? There’s no QA? Not even an AI checking the release notes match the diff from the previous release?? Blaming a dev for “putting a serious bug in production” sounds really 90’s to me.
- Jcampuzano2 2mo ago
  > It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it. In a sense yes, I think it is actually reasonable to complain that the answer is too human/individualized here because it likely wasn't this individual human who made this decision, but he's making it seem like it is so that we are less likely to blame the company as a whole. It's counterintuitive but when one singular person owns up to the problems that, at the root, are actually systemic to the decision making of the whole company it plays on the psychology of us as humans. "I'm in charge of maintaining it" - This is not the same as "I'm in charge of all of the decision-making behind the implementation of how this tool works for users". I actually agree exactly with your last point that one single person taking blame is counter-intuitive/non-productive here, but it actually seems like what these large companies desire is to have one person be the fall guy to play on people's sympathies. If this were some small startup it would make sense but this is not that case.
  - trq_ 2mo ago
    I did make the decision, and shipped the PR.
    - Jcampuzano2 2mo ago
      Okay I stand corrected then. Seems strange for a company of your size to have one person push changes that should have easily caught this edge case then. Seems like a change even a small handful of people could have reasonably thought up this side effect of.
      - randysalami 2mo ago
        This is the kind of weakness I was alluding to… internal information that shows dysfunction is now shown to the public and there is no ambiguity. People pay attention and there is a low tolerance for unforced errors.
    - cube00 2mo ago

thewhitetulip 2mo ago

We already lived in a post truth world. Now we live in a post logic world. Nothing makes sense anymore

fooster 2mo ago

It doesn't feel strange to me at all. It feels like a very human response from the person that introduced the change. I great appreciate that, rather than ignoring the problem, or some canned corpspeak response.

brabel 2mo ago

> it shows weakness in a vulnerable way. It is human. It is not strategic. Are you complaining that the answer is too human and that a multi billion company should not allow a human who made a mistake to own the mistake in public, being honest about what happened in this case?? Would you prefer complete silence from them like you most certainly would from Google or Apple. That sounds incredibly sad to me, we don’t even expect humanity from big tech since that’s what we’ve become accustomed to seeing. fTR both the Anthropic dev response and the blog post seem to believe that a single person can be blamed for something like this, which I wholeheartedly disagree with! Nobody reviews your changes? There’s no QA? Not even an AI checking the release notes match the diff from the previous release?? Blaming a dev for “putting a serious bug in production” sounds really 90’s to me.

Jcampuzano2 2mo ago
> It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it. In a sense yes, I think it is actually reasonable to complain that the answer is too human/individualized here because it likely wasn't this individual human who made this decision, but he's making it seem like it is so that we are less likely to blame the company as a whole. It's counterintuitive but when one singular person owns up to the problems that, at the root, are actually systemic to the decision making of the whole company it plays on the psychology of us as humans. "I'm in charge of maintaining it" - This is not the same as "I'm in charge of all of the decision-making behind the implementation of how this tool works for users". I actually agree exactly with your last point that one single person taking blame is counter-intuitive/non-productive here, but it actually seems like what these large companies desire is to have one person be the fall guy to play on people's sympathies. If this were some small startup it would make sense but this is not that case.
- trq_ 2mo ago
  I did make the decision, and shipped the PR.
  - Jcampuzano2 2mo ago
    Okay I stand corrected then. Seems strange for a company of your size to have one person push changes that should have easily caught this edge case then. Seems like a change even a small handful of people could have reasonably thought up this side effect of.
    - randysalami 2mo ago
      This is the kind of weakness I was alluding to… internal information that shows dysfunction is now shown to the public and there is no ambiguity. People pay attention and there is a low tolerance for unforced errors.
  - cube00 2mo ago