5 ms·

Bit surprised about the amount of flak they're getting here. I found the article seemed clear, honest and definitely plausible. The deterioration was real and

by cmenge 5mo ago

Bit surprised about the amount of flak they're getting here. I found the article seemed clear, honest and definitely plausible. The deterioration was real and annoying, and shines a light on the problematic lack of transparency of what exactly is going on behind the scenes and the somewhat arbitrary token-cost based billing - too many factors at play, if you wanted to trace that as a user you can just do the work yourself instead. The fact that waiting for a long time before resuming a convo incurs additional cost and lag seemed clear to me from having worked with LLM APIs directly, but it might be important to make this more obvious in the TUI.

maronato 5mo ago
I agree that it’s plausible, and I hope they learn. But trust is earned, and Anthropic’s public responses this past month were dismissive and unhelpful. Every one of these changes had the same goal: trading the intelligence users rely on for cheaper or faster outputs. Users adapt to how a model behaves, so sudden shifts without transparency are disorienting. The timing also undercuts their narrative. The fixes landed right before another change with the same underlying intent rolled out. That looks more like they were just reacting to experiments rather than understanding the underlying user pain. When people pay hundreds or thousands a month, they expect reliability and clear communication, ideally opt-in. Competitors are right there, and unreliability pushes users straight to them. All of this points to their priorities not being aligned with their users’.
- xpe 5mo ago
  > All of this points to their priorities not being aligned with their users’. Framing this as "aligned" or "not aligned" ignores the interesting reality in the middle. It is banal to say an organization isn't perfectly aligned with its customers. I'm not disagreeing with the commenter's frustration. But I think it can help to try something out: take say the top three companies whose product you interact with on a regular basis. Take stock of (1) how fast that technology is moving; (2) how often things break from your POV; (3) how soon the company acknowledges it; (4) how long it takes for a fix. Then ask "if a friend of yours (competent and hard working) was working there, would I give the company more credit?" My overall feel is that people underestimate the complexity of the systems at Anthropic and the chaos of the growth. These kind of conversations are a sort of window into people's expectations and their ability to envision the possible explanations of what is happening at Anthropic.
  - willis936 5mo ago
    So you're arguing they're just plain incompetent? Not sure that's going to win the trust of customers either.
    - xpe 5mo ago
      > So you're arguing they're just plain incompetent? Not sure that's going to win the trust of customers either. This is not a charitable interpretation of what I wrote. Please take a minute and rethink and rephrase. Here are two important guidelines, hopefully familiar to someone who has had an account since 2019: > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
      - willis936 5mo ago
        I didn't assume bad faith, I simply reworded your conclusions with less soft language so that others would understand your position more clearly. You are saying what they are doing is hard. That's fine. Their stated goals are to be the responsible stewards of the technology and we agree they are failing at that goal. You would attribute that to incompetence and not malice.
        xpe 5mo ago
        I personally try to follow Rapoport's Rules, and I since think they are consistent with the HN Guidelines, I like to mention them: [1]. I've thought on it, and I will try to start off with something we both agree on... We both agree that Anthropic made some mistakes, but this is probably a pretty uninteresting and shallow agreement. I find it unlikely that we would enumerate or characterize the mistakes similarly. I find it unlikely that we would be anywhere near the same headspace about our bigger-picture takes. > I didn't assume bad faith Ok, I'm glad. That one didn't concern me; if I had a do-over I would remove that one from the list. Sorry about that. These are the ones that concern me: > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, > not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When I read your earlier comment (~20 words), it didn't come across as a thoughtful and substantive response to my comment (~160 words). I know length isn't a perfect measure nor the only measure, but it does matter. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what > someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Are you sure you didn't choose an easier to criticize interpretation? Did you take the take to try to state to yourself what I was trying to say? Back to Rapaport's Rules ... > You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so > clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, > I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” I'm grateful when people can express what I'm going for better than the way I wrote it or said it. > I simply reworded your conclusions with less soft language Technically speaking, lots of things could be called "rewording", but what you did was relatively far from "simply rewording". Charitably, it is closer to "your interpretation". But my intent was lost, so "rewording" doesn't fit. > ... so that others would understand your position more clearly. If you want to help others understand, then it is good to make sure you understand. For that, I recommend asking questions. > Their stated goals are to be the responsible stewards of the technology and we agree they are failing at that goal. No, I do not agree to that phrasing. It is likely I don't agree with your intention behind it either. > You would attribute that to incompetence and not malice. No; even if I agreed with the premise, I think it is more likely I would still disagree. I don't even like the framing of "either malice or incompetence". These ideas don't carve reality at the joints. [2] [3] There are a lot of stereotypes about "incompetence" but I don't think they really help us understand the world. These stereotypes are more like thought-terminators than interesting generative lenses. I'll try to bring it back to the words "malice" and "incompetence" even though I think the latter is nigh-useless as a sense-making tool. Many mistakes happen without malice or incompetence; many mistakes "just happen" because people and organizations are not designed to be perfect. They are designed to be good enough. To not make any short-term mistakes would likely require too much energy or too much rigidity, both of which would be a worse category of mistake. Try to think counterfactually: imagine a world where Anthropic is not malicious nor incompetent and yet mistakes still happened. What would this look like? When you think of what Anthropic did wrong, what do you see as the lead up to it? Can you really envision the chain of events that brought it about? Imagine reading the email chain or the PRs. Can you see how there may be been various "off-ramps" where history might have gone differently? But for each of those diversions, how likely would it be that they match the universe we're in? At some point figuring out what is a "mistake" even starts to feel strange. Does it require consciousness? Most people think so. But we say organizations make mistakes, but they aren't conscious -- or are they? Who do we blame? The CEO, because the buck stops there, right? He "should have known better". But why? Wait, but the Board is responsible...? Is there any ethical foundation here? Some standard at all or is this all just anger dressed up as an argument? If this assigning blame thing starts to feel horribly complicated or even pointless, then maybe I've made my point. :) If nothing else, when you read what I write, I want it to make you stop, get out a sheet of paper, and try to imagine something vividly. Your imagination I think will persuade you better than I can. [1]: https://themindcollection.com/rapoports-rules/ https://themindcollection.com/rapoports-rules/ [2]: https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Carving_nature_at_its_joints https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Carving_nature_a... [3]:https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303819/what-do-the-joints-signify-in-the-metaphor-carve-nature-at-the-joints https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303819/what-do-t...
epsteingpt 5mo ago
They gaslit people for months saying it wasn't an issue publicly. That's the reason for the flak
- thomassmith65 5mo ago
  And still are gaslighting: We take reports about degradation very seriously. We never intentionally degrade our models [...] On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium Anthropic is the best company of its kind, but that is badly worded PR.
  - xpe 5mo ago
    To my eye, gaslighting is a serious accusation. Wikipedia's first line matches how I think of it: "Gaslighting is the manipulation of someone into questioning their perception of reality." Did I miss something? I'm only looking at primary sources to start. Not Reddit. Not The Register. Official company communications. Did Anthropic tell users i.e. "you are wrong, your experience is not worse."? If so, that would reach the bar of gaslighting, as I understand it (and I'm not alone). If you have a different understanding, please share what it is so I understand what you mean.
    - thomassmith65 5mo ago
      I'd rather not speak too poorly of Anthropic, because - to the extent I can bring myself to like a tech company - I like Anthropic. That said, the copy uses "we never intentionally degrade our models" to mean something like "we never degrade one facet of our models unless it improves some other facet of our models". This is a cop out, because it is what users suspected and complained about. What users want - regardless of whether it is realistic to expect - is for Anthropic to buy even more compute than Anthropic already does, so that the models remain equally smart even if the service demand increases.
      - xpe 5mo ago
        It seems to me you dropped the "gaslighting" claim without owning it. I personally find this frustrating. I prefer when people own up to their mistakes. Like many people, to me, "gaslighting" is just not a term you throw around lightly. Then you shifted to "cop out". (This feels like the motte and bailey.) But I don't think "cop out" is a phrase that works either... Some terms:... The model is the thing that runs inference. Claude Code is not a model, it is harness. To summarize Anthropic's recent retrospective, their technical mistakes were about the harness. I'm not here to 'defend' Anthropic's mistakes. They messed up technically. And their communication could have been better. But they didn't gaslight. And on balance, I don't see net evidence that they've "copped out" (by which I mean mischaracterized what happened). I see more evidence of the opposite. I could be wrong about any of this, but I'm here to talk about it in the clearest, best way I can. If anyone wants to point to primary sources, I'll read them. I want more people to actually spend a few minutes and actually give the explanation offered by Anthropic a try. What if isolating the problems was hard to figure out? We all know hindsight is 20/20 and yet people still armchair quarterback. At the risk of sounding preachy, I'm here to say "people, we need to do better". Hacker News is a special place, but we lose it a little bit every time we don't in a quality effort.
voxgen 5mo ago
Some of the flak is that issues are often only acknowledged once a fix is in place, and the partial fixes are presented as if they solve the whole problem. The near-instant transition from "there is no problem" to "we already fixed the problem so stop complaining" is basically gaslighting. (Admittedly the second sentiment comes more from the community, but they get that attitude after taking the "we fixed all the problems" posts at face value.)
- noname120 5mo ago
  And they are often dismissed at first as perception/subjective bias, getting used to models being good and having higher expectations due to that, etc. users are blamed a lot before they are forced to admit that there is an actual problem.
adam_patarino 5mo ago
The explanations are all fine. But they come after the team gaslit everyone, telling us it was a skill issue.

by cmenge 5mo ago

maronato 5mo ago

I agree that it’s plausible, and I hope they learn. But trust is earned, and Anthropic’s public responses this past month were dismissive and unhelpful. Every one of these changes had the same goal: trading the intelligence users rely on for cheaper or faster outputs. Users adapt to how a model behaves, so sudden shifts without transparency are disorienting. The timing also undercuts their narrative. The fixes landed right before another change with the same underlying intent rolled out. That looks more like they were just reacting to experiments rather than understanding the underlying user pain. When people pay hundreds or thousands a month, they expect reliability and clear communication, ideally opt-in. Competitors are right there, and unreliability pushes users straight to them. All of this points to their priorities not being aligned with their users’.

xpe 5mo ago
> All of this points to their priorities not being aligned with their users’. Framing this as "aligned" or "not aligned" ignores the interesting reality in the middle. It is banal to say an organization isn't perfectly aligned with its customers. I'm not disagreeing with the commenter's frustration. But I think it can help to try something out: take say the top three companies whose product you interact with on a regular basis. Take stock of (1) how fast that technology is moving; (2) how often things break from your POV; (3) how soon the company acknowledges it; (4) how long it takes for a fix. Then ask "if a friend of yours (competent and hard working) was working there, would I give the company more credit?" My overall feel is that people underestimate the complexity of the systems at Anthropic and the chaos of the growth. These kind of conversations are a sort of window into people's expectations and their ability to envision the possible explanations of what is happening at Anthropic.
- willis936 5mo ago
  So you're arguing they're just plain incompetent? Not sure that's going to win the trust of customers either.
  - xpe 5mo ago
    > So you're arguing they're just plain incompetent? Not sure that's going to win the trust of customers either. This is not a charitable interpretation of what I wrote. Please take a minute and rethink and rephrase. Here are two important guidelines, hopefully familiar to someone who has had an account since 2019: > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
    - willis936 5mo ago
      I didn't assume bad faith, I simply reworded your conclusions with less soft language so that others would understand your position more clearly. You are saying what they are doing is hard. That's fine. Their stated goals are to be the responsible stewards of the technology and we agree they are failing at that goal. You would attribute that to incompetence and not malice.
      - xpe 5mo ago
        I personally try to follow Rapoport's Rules, and I since think they are consistent with the HN Guidelines, I like to mention them: [1]. I've thought on it, and I will try to start off with something we both agree on... We both agree that Anthropic made some mistakes, but this is probably a pretty uninteresting and shallow agreement. I find it unlikely that we would enumerate or characterize the mistakes similarly. I find it unlikely that we would be anywhere near the same headspace about our bigger-picture takes. > I didn't assume bad faith Ok, I'm glad. That one didn't concern me; if I had a do-over I would remove that one from the list. Sorry about that. These are the ones that concern me: > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, > not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When I read your earlier comment (~20 words), it didn't come across as a thoughtful and substantive response to my comment (~160 words). I know length isn't a perfect measure nor the only measure, but it does matter. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what > someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Are you sure you didn't choose an easier to criticize interpretation? Did you take the take to try to state to yourself what I was trying to say? Back to Rapaport's Rules ... > You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so > clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, > I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” I'm grateful when people can express what I'm going for better than the way I wrote it or said it. > I simply reworded your conclusions with less soft language Technically speaking, lots of things could be called "rewording", but what you did was relatively far from "simply rewording". Charitably, it is closer to "your interpretation". But my intent was lost, so "rewording" doesn't fit. > ... so that others would understand your position more clearly. If you want to help others understand, then it is good to make sure you understand. For that, I recommend asking questions. > Their stated goals are to be the responsible stewards of the technology and we agree they are failing at that goal. No, I do not agree to that phrasing. It is likely I don't agree with your intention behind it either. > You would attribute that to incompetence and not malice. No; even if I agreed with the premise, I think it is more likely I would still disagree. I don't even like the framing of "either malice or incompetence". These ideas don't carve reality at the joints. [2] [3] There are a lot of stereotypes about "incompetence" but I don't think they really help us understand the world. These stereotypes are more like thought-terminators than interesting generative lenses. I'll try to bring it back to the words "malice" and "incompetence" even though I think the latter is nigh-useless as a sense-making tool. Many mistakes happen without malice or incompetence; many mistakes "just happen" because people and organizations are not designed to be perfect. They are designed to be good enough. To not make any short-term mistakes would likely require too much energy or too much rigidity, both of which would be a worse category of mistake. Try to think counterfactually: imagine a world where Anthropic is not malicious nor incompetent and yet mistakes still happened. What would this look like? When you think of what Anthropic did wrong, what do you see as the lead up to it? Can you really envision the chain of events that brought it about? Imagine reading the email chain or the PRs. Can you see how there may be been various "off-ramps" where history might have gone differently? But for each of those diversions, how likely would it be that they match the universe we're in? At some point figuring out what is a "mistake" even starts to feel strange. Does it require consciousness? Most people think so. But we say organizations make mistakes, but they aren't conscious -- or are they? Who do we blame? The CEO, because the buck stops there, right? He "should have known better". But why? Wait, but the Board is responsible...? Is there any ethical foundation here? Some standard at all or is this all just anger dressed up as an argument? If this assigning blame thing starts to feel horribly complicated or even pointless, then maybe I've made my point. :) If nothing else, when you read what I write, I want it to make you stop, get out a sheet of paper, and try to imagine something vividly. Your imagination I think will persuade you better than I can. [1]: https://themindcollection.com/rapoports-rules/ https://themindcollection.com/rapoports-rules/ [2]: https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Carving_nature_at_its_joints https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Carving_nature_a... [3]:https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303819/what-do-the-joints-signify-in-the-metaphor-carve-nature-at-the-joints https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303819/what-do-t...

epsteingpt 5mo ago

They gaslit people for months saying it wasn't an issue publicly. That's the reason for the flak

thomassmith65 5mo ago
And still are gaslighting: We take reports about degradation very seriously. We never intentionally degrade our models [...] On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium Anthropic is the best company of its kind, but that is badly worded PR.
- xpe 5mo ago
  To my eye, gaslighting is a serious accusation. Wikipedia's first line matches how I think of it: "Gaslighting is the manipulation of someone into questioning their perception of reality." Did I miss something? I'm only looking at primary sources to start. Not Reddit. Not The Register. Official company communications. Did Anthropic tell users i.e. "you are wrong, your experience is not worse."? If so, that would reach the bar of gaslighting, as I understand it (and I'm not alone). If you have a different understanding, please share what it is so I understand what you mean.
  - thomassmith65 5mo ago
    I'd rather not speak too poorly of Anthropic, because - to the extent I can bring myself to like a tech company - I like Anthropic. That said, the copy uses "we never intentionally degrade our models" to mean something like "we never degrade one facet of our models unless it improves some other facet of our models". This is a cop out, because it is what users suspected and complained about. What users want - regardless of whether it is realistic to expect - is for Anthropic to buy even more compute than Anthropic already does, so that the models remain equally smart even if the service demand increases.
    - xpe 5mo ago
      It seems to me you dropped the "gaslighting" claim without owning it. I personally find this frustrating. I prefer when people own up to their mistakes. Like many people, to me, "gaslighting" is just not a term you throw around lightly. Then you shifted to "cop out". (This feels like the motte and bailey.) But I don't think "cop out" is a phrase that works either... Some terms:... The model is the thing that runs inference. Claude Code is not a model, it is harness. To summarize Anthropic's recent retrospective, their technical mistakes were about the harness. I'm not here to 'defend' Anthropic's mistakes. They messed up technically. And their communication could have been better. But they didn't gaslight. And on balance, I don't see net evidence that they've "copped out" (by which I mean mischaracterized what happened). I see more evidence of the opposite. I could be wrong about any of this, but I'm here to talk about it in the clearest, best way I can. If anyone wants to point to primary sources, I'll read them. I want more people to actually spend a few minutes and actually give the explanation offered by Anthropic a try. What if isolating the problems was hard to figure out? We all know hindsight is 20/20 and yet people still armchair quarterback. At the risk of sounding preachy, I'm here to say "people, we need to do better". Hacker News is a special place, but we lose it a little bit every time we don't in a quality effort.

voxgen 5mo ago

Some of the flak is that issues are often only acknowledged once a fix is in place, and the partial fixes are presented as if they solve the whole problem. The near-instant transition from "there is no problem" to "we already fixed the problem so stop complaining" is basically gaslighting. (Admittedly the second sentiment comes more from the community, but they get that attitude after taking the "we fixed all the problems" posts at face value.)

noname120 5mo ago
And they are often dismissed at first as perception/subjective bias, getting used to models being good and having higher expectations due to that, etc. users are blamed a lot before they are forced to admit that there is an actual problem.

adam_patarino 5mo ago

The explanations are all fine. But they come after the team gaslit everyone, telling us it was a skill issue.