What's your number?

My strategy is to go until I can't take anymore pain, then just walk away guilt free.

> There's a legit justification.

Maybe I'm just out of touch, but it feels like every day I look at hackernews, there's another articulate response patiently explaining why it's ok for companies to sell you things you don't own, and dictate how to use the things you think you own.

I just fundamentally don't accept it, and find it exhausting to engage in the constant overton window shifting.

For anyone reading this and wondering where the truth could possibly be:

We can't really know what the truth is, because Anthropic is tightly controlling how you interact with their product and provides their service through opaque processes. So all we can do is speculate. And in that speculation there's a lot of room (for the company) to bullshit or provide equally speculative responses, and (for outsiders) to search for all plausible explanations within the solution space. So there's not much to action on. We're effectively stuck with imprecise heuristics and vibes.

But consider what we do know: the promise is that Anthropic is providing a black-box service that solves large portions of the SDLC. Maybe all of it. They are "making the market" here, and their company growth depends on this bet. This is why these processes are opaque: they have to be. Anthropic, OpenAI and a few others see this as a zero-sum game. The winner "owns" the SDLC (and really, if they get their way the entire PDLC). So the competitive advantage lies in tightly controlling and tweaking their hidden parameters to squeeze as much value and growth as possible.

The downside is that we're handing over the magic for convenience and cost. A lot of people are maybe rightly criticizing the OP of the issue because they're staking their business on Claude Code in a way that's very risky. But this is essentially what these companies are asking for. The business model end game is: here's the token factory, we control it and you pay for the pleasure of using it. Effectively, rent-seeking for software development. And if something changes and it disrupts your business, you're just using it incorrectly. Try turning effort to max.

Reading responses like this from these company representatives makes me increasingly uneasy because it's indicative of how much of writing software is being taken out from under our feet. The glimmer of promise in all of this though is that we are seeing equity in the form of open source. Maybe the answer is: use pi-mono, a smattering of self hosted and open weights models (gemma4, kimi, minimax are extremely capable) and escalate to the private lab models through api calls when encountering hard problems.

Let the best model win, not the best end to end black box solution.

I am reminded of OpenAI's first voice-to-voice demo a couple of years ago. I rewatched it and was shocked at how human it was; indiscernible from a real person. But the voice agent that we got sounds 20% better than Siri.

There's a hope that competition is what keeps these companies pushing to ship value to customers, but there are also billions of compute expense at stake, so there seems to be an understanding that nobody ships a product that is unsustainably competitive

Don’t turn vibe coding into your day job (because the vibe won’t keep vibing). Write code (that you own) that can make you money and hire real developers.

These companies don't get the chance to raise a trillion dollars, and you're laughing???

This is largely the world we've created with litigation practices.

Corpo is very careful to show empathy that can be perceived in some way as accepting blame in a way that would open them to litigation.

Yeah, our litigation culture to me is just an inability for individuals/companies to resolve conflicts and escalate it to the legal system. And unfortunately there are many elements in the system that discourage us from reconciling and push us towards escalating.

Like anything else, it's easier to complain about the legitimacy of something and nitpick it to death than it is to do the actual thing.

Most people on HN aren't scientists, even if they fancy themselves as such.

Can you please give examples of people you consider to be leftist? Kindly, name five "super rich leftists"

I don't have their names, but you can look them up. The super-rich leftists are the people who funded the politicians elected to various positions in Monterey, CA who have opposed desal in the area despite drought-like conditions for a decade.

Also, the super-rich leftists are the people who funded the politicians in CA who have banned nuclear power in the state, and also various kinds of mining in the state.

This might help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47159430

Chatgpt banned me after I said disparaging things about Sam Altman in a chat.

When I appealed the ban, I was told that I couldn't be told exactly why I was banned, but if I wrote a written apology and "promised to never do it again" my ban could be appealed.

I asked for an update on the ban via email every month for over a year.

Maybe you could tell me a little bit about that process?

> I genuinely don't understand why this model is the norm. As a game developer working in my own engine, UI is unbelievably straight-forwar

I can't really think of a statement that resonates with me less.