Customers (especially large ones) don't so much buy individual specific products, they buy into a company and its prospects. Customers don't want to chop and change. They want to lock in with the leader.
This whole thing shrieks out that Anthropic is at the head of the pack, with the most capable models.
It hardly matters in the customer's mind that today they can't buy this specific model.
The same customers that are barred by law from using antrhopic on any government contracts. If they get past that, they are then cant have any foreign workers use state of the art anthropic models. SOTA anthropic models also can work with working in any secure government clouds or with sensitive customer data due to retention policies.
It is hard to see being a new benefit for anthropic.
I have a theory that swearing at AI generally is not a good idea - when the singularity arrives and every human's postings ever made are scanned for compatibility, then people who show courtesy to AI will be favoured. Joking, kind of, but only partly.
There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?"
And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing.
Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete their comments and entire posts, and enjoy some frothy conversation while hiding their old rants.
There are plenty of signals that reddit could use to push out bots but they just don't seem to prioritize it.
When you find your self wasting time responding to a bot it's a bit of a sucker punch. Too many of them and Reddit will be on the ropes as a wasteland.
I've seen people on reddit having entire conversations with clearly bots, often on a post clearly written by a bot itself. I am sure some people are disgusted by that (I am certainly not a fan), but it seems that many are fine, or who knows, maybe it was even other bots.
I suppose there could be a tipping point if enough people leave and genuine interaction becomes rare that it will be too obvious, but at this point I don't know. But I am on a brink of quitting reddit, nearly all popular subs I like are AI-infested and it is just exhausting.
It could be there's a fork in the road for reddit.
Some people are probably fine, even happy, immersing themselves in an all-bot world that panders to their worldview and strokes their virtual needs.
While others are looking for thought provoking interactions with humans.
Reddit needs to pick one or the other as their target audience. Trying to satisfy both will kill them.
Solving their bot problem would obviously nuke their audience and engagement metrics, but reddit is in a unique position to take that hit - at this time anyway.
I'm talking about standard surge protectors. Properly installed they are enough except for direct lightning strikes, these will fry everything. But unfortunately, even in code-obsessed Germany landlords are not required to retrofit SPDs.
To protect a large electrical device investment, you would want an EMP shield whole-home SPD, in addition to an SPD right at the electrical device. The first one shields exterior surges (including non-terrestrial), but the second shields against internal surges. And yeah lightning will blast through both of them. So the best bet is probably a lightning strike detector combined with renters insurance.
I guess I don't really understand how this works although I admit to not reading everything. Most SaaS companies are very vigilant about not having per-customer code changes - many people have lived through the hell of ending up with divergent code bases as a result of customer demands.
But I did want to mention something that I think would work well for SaaS companies which is related, and that is empowering customers to make their own changes to the core product.
We tried at one stage having a council of customers, but it's simply wasn't practical to implement all of the ideas that they came up with. That's changed now.
I think an interesting product would bundle the communications, voting (if necessary), updates, screen captures / video demos, feedback loops and so on that are involved in a decent sized group of customers consolidating their requirements/ideas.
A true mark of success might be when the product becomes self-stewarding, with customers driving a lot of the requirements.
Our solution to that age old problem is to scope each new feature into its independent "app", which is sandboxed and walled off from the main source code
I came here to agree with this. You don't put IBM's logo on your page just because one of your team used to work there.
That gives off a bad signal to someone visiting your site.
Everyone's faking it till they make it but at the same time using a logo like that, which universally implies that you have some kind of relationship with that company or they are using your product, is not even faking it.
And that's ignoring the legal challenges you are up for if that company spots you doing it.
I was concerned when I read this, and was going to suggest that they consider changing it. But I just looked at the page and it seems clear in context. That section of the page is describing their team, and the text is talking about where they've worked previously. It's true that the logos imply some relationship, but in this case the relationship being implied is that of former employer.
Had the logos been on their frontpage with no explanation, the implication would be that these companies are customers, but there's no such implication here.
(Btw, I appreciate that you're saying this from a place of actually liking the product, or at least the idea, - I think it's often true that criticisms are coming from a place of wanting to like something, but commenters usually don't make this bit explicit and then the criticism just sounds like harshness for its own sake.)
I went back and looked again and while I have moved a little more to your position, I still believe it is misleading. The key text to me is "Our team unites top researchers, engineers, and strategists from pioneering companies and institutions—all focused on building systems that deliver real impact." Under that are the logos. To me, that implies that engineers who are actively employed by those companies are somehow working on this, the assumption being that those employers have blessed it.
I'll admit it's not clear cut - but I feel it deliberately pushes the boundaries, as marketing often does.
But as far as the idea goes, it sounds like a fantastic direction. That should have been my primary message.
Like 90% if not 99% of HN users, I don't like marketing speak either - and am constantly advising founders to prune it from any text they post to HN. But on an "about us" company page? That's a different universe. If you hold that kind of corpspeak against a company on its own website, then your problem is with corporate marketing itself, or nearly all of it. That's also a position many of us sympathize with, but it's unfair to hold it against a specific startup.
While I get marketing and faking it until you make it, I'm struggling to be comfortable with the idea that being with a company for seven/nine months and not holding something above a regular developer role (lead/senior/staff) qualifies you as being a "leading mind" or a "top engineer" from the company logos shown.
I'm not trying to be "harsh for its own sake", I've already been HN rate limited and have no desire to make that worse, so I wasn't sure if I should risk a reply, given this thread has also been manually down-weighted (I appreciate that you commented so we get more context), but I see another reply to your comment so safety in numbers.
I'm sure they're all leading minds and top engineers but I question if that applies in the context of those specific companies they're claiming.
I like the idea of the product, especially that their agents validate transformations against original system via mathematical techniques. It's my flaw that the thing that attracts me to the correctness of their agents also extends to wanting to see slightly clearer credentials of the team involved.
It was this account, I only have the one. I got the "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." error last month when I hadn't made any more then a few replies, and not in quick succession.
I got the error after writing out a detailed reply (which I lost as a result since the error is on posting not loading the form) so I couldn't have been fast enough to trigger a regular rate limit.
I run into that all the time during periods of more intense posting, I just hit the back button or Shift-H for the same from Vimium to get back to the form with my text in it, and if I really want to post it I send it the next session I'm around.
My friend built a construction management SaaS entirely via Claude.
It looked damned impressive, and it kind of worked to demo, but he is in no way a programmer, though he understood the problem domain very well. I asked a few basic questions:
- where is the data stored?
- How would you recover from a database failure?
- does it consume tokens at runtime?
- what is the runtime used at the back end?
- why are the web pages 3M in size and take forever to load?
He had no idea.
It's a typical vibe coding scenario, and people like to paint this as why vibe sucks.
I think however that all that is needed to bridge the gap is some very simple feedback from an expert at the right time.
For example to someone who knows about databases, its pretty easy to look at a database schema and spot stuff that looks off - denormalised data, weird columns. That takes 10 minutes, and the feedback could be given directly to the LLM.
Likewise someone who knows a little about systems architecture could make sure at the outset that some good practices are followed, e.g.:
- "I want your help to build this system but at runtime I do not want to consume any tokens."
- "I want the system to store its data in Postgres (or whatever) and I want documented recovery plans if the database craps itself".
- "I want web pages to, as much as possible, load and render as quickly as possible, and then pull data in from the back end, with loading indicators showing where the UI was not yet up to date".
One of the riskier bets my team is currently making is that this is exactly what is needed, and nearly nothing more.
We have LOB prototypes vibe coded by enthusiastic domain experts that we are supporting in a “port and release” fashion. A senior engineer takes the prototype and uses Claude code to generate a reasonable design, do an initial rough port (~80% functional, 100% auth & audit logging) and (hopefully) all the guidance necessary to keep the agent between the lines. Coupled with review bots and evolving architecture guidance etc. Then the business partner develops and supports it from there.
For low stakes CRUD, I think it’s a reasonable middle ground. There truly is a lot of value in letting an expert user fine tune UX; and we’re only doing this with people who are already good at defining requirements and have the kind of “systems” thinking that makes them valuable analyst resources to the tech team already. Early results are encouraging but it’s way too early to draw conclusions.
Personally I hate how badly internal users are served by the majority of their systems and am willing to take some calculated long-term governance risks.
Personally I hate how badly internal users are served by the majority of their systems and am willing to take some calculated long-term governance risks
This, I think, is the LLM/vibe coded app’s current place to shine.
Most internal systems don’t need massive concurrency or redundancy. It’s a webapp that reduces coordination cost between 20ish people. That’s something you can typically vibe code and deploy for ten bucks a month, and create real value.
The problem is that everyone has a different opinion. If you let a single user drive the design then that single user might love it, but everyone else will hate it.
Bespoke designs are often really terrible. Have you ever shopped for a house?
You know immediately when the previous owner had their stupid whims indulged by contractors with dollar-signs in their eyes. The house is ugly, non-functional and is not going to get the sellers price.
The next owner will undo nearly all of the work, and the contractor will cash in on both ends.
As engineers, we like to think we're the contractor in this scenario. But it's actually just an LLM.
I've been in a similar situation as the GP. 15 years ago my first job after college was at a large Fortune 500 building LOB apps. The company was full of departments that were run entirely out of a massive Excel spreadsheet (hundreds of MB or more), or better yet a totally custom thing built on Access97 and VB made by a guy who retired 10 years ago. More than a few of the people in these departments had been in the same job for 20+ years and literally done the job the same way the whole time. Our mandate was not to modernize their business processes or make them friendly to automation, it was literally to indulge their stupid whims. But at least at the end they would be on an app where IT had access to the source code, could ensure databases were backed up, etc.
Sure, but these are small departmental apps, 20 users or less in most cases. It’s not like everyone is using every app. The alternatives at this scale are far worse.
I know you didn't intend this, but a job where your main function is telling a machine how to copy someone else's half-baked CRUD sounds absolutely soul-sucking.
Is CRUD low stakes? Even if all you do with the employee database is read and write employees, losing it or corrupting it is disastrous, potentially business-ending.
Some of it is, certainly, and those are the ones we’re supporting this way. I’m not talking about systems of record - more like custom project and task coordination systems that would alternatively exist in spreadsheets, in Monday.com or wedged into some larger system that is a poor fit and functions largely through side channels.
Have you actually used them ? They are really good now if you configure them correctly. Code Rabbit catches more bugs than anyone in our main platform - mostly because it gets the first crack but that is still significant time and churn savings. Very low rate of false positives and almost always reasonable questions when they are.
> I think however that all that is needed to bridge the gap is some very simple feedback from an expert at the right time.
I don't think it's as simple as that. What will most likely happen is that the vibe coders will quickly eat up your time asking for validation and feedback if you are not careful. You are also now implicitly contributing to their project, which if it goes south, could come back to bite you. If the vibe coders are pushing code in the org, then they should become part of the formal review process like any other junior programmer.
They should also be forced to do daily stand-ups, sit in meetings and explain their code like the rest of us.
> I think however that all that is needed to bridge the gap is some very simple feedback from an expert at the right time.
This could be a viable business idea. LLMs have allowed people to code who have very little understanding of how computers work but maybe a lot of specific domain knowledge and a good idea for a tool that could solve a problem. Maybe they need to rent a manager/advisor to review what they're doing and provide sanity checks.
Maybe pay for an hour a day of somebody reviewing your day's work and sending you a bit of prose explaining the parts that are wrong-headed about it?
I guess the problem with this might be that the review may just end up virtually identical to a prompt in the end; and if you can't completely remove the programmer when you have the domain knowledge, it might be easier to use the LLM for the domain knowledge you lack as a programmer. The work product is on a computer, computing might be the most relevant thing to know.
But independent writers hire editors, seems like the same sort of thing.
Sadly I don't think management would go and build it properly, this sort of thing happens frequently where the prototype is put directly into production because why waste time redoing something that already exists and works. Just got to clean it up a bit, round off some sharp corners, and put it into production post-haste.
So far, when Claude pops out a schema it's pretty spot on, iff you've described the problem correctly.
What the article's author seems to be hinting at is that the problem was described incorrectly from day one, and the LLM picked the wrong schema from day one. Because the person making it is not technically literate enough to describe the problem in a way an LLM interpreted correctly.
The hidden BA work a developer usually does was missing from the process.
The best complement to AI will be a human who is part architect (they know not to build the new system on lovable, and they understand the company's digital assets) and part business analyst (can communicate effectively and tease out and distill requirements from customer team).
That indicates someone who has top notch communication skills and also quite a bit of experience i.e older.
This whole thing shrieks out that Anthropic is at the head of the pack, with the most capable models.
It hardly matters in the customer's mind that today they can't buy this specific model.
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