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Apple accidentally left Claude.md files Apple Support app
https://xcancel.com/aaronp613/status/2049986504617820551 https://xcancel.com/aaronp613/status/2049986504617820551
- hilti 5mo agoDozens of comments, but not a single "What was in their Claude.md"
- fusslo 5mo agoto be honest, for some reason I expected most of apple to eschew claude/ai coding. I'm not sure why. It just doesn't feel very Apple-like
- alex43578 5mo agoBecause unlike Apple Intelligence, Claude is useful?
- basisword 5mo agoThey've had it built in to Xcode for a while now, and I imagine internally a lot longer.
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoI'm also not sure why you'd think that, Apple's been at the forefront of "AI" for years now, running models locally and optimizing their CPUs for local workloads to e.g. identify people, places and pets (much appreciated lmao), create slideshows, and subtly improve photo's made on the device.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoThe photo organization is nice but that being said, if you try to use the on device Apple Foundation models you quickly find it is totally useless.
- tracerbulletx 5mo agoSome people are living in a different universe. Every single tech company I know is pivoting their entire company to AI based software development. Its in the performance evals, the wallet is fully open to use tokens to experiment, every practice and every process is open for re-evaluation. Its all gas no breaks everywhere. The conversation on the internet does not seem to realize this? Or is in denial.
- ryandrake 5mo agoI think OP's comment comes from the "Think Different" mysticism that used to be around Apple. You'd think that if there was one company on the planet not embracing slop, it would be Apple, and the realization that it's not the case can be a bummer.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- internet2000 5mo ago> Apple runs on Anthropic at this point. Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple is doing internally in terms of product development, a lot of their internal tools…They have custom versions of Claude running on their own servers internally. --Mark Gurman, Bloomberg https://x.com/tbpn/status/2016911797656367199 https://x.com/tbpn/status/2016911797656367199
- rustyhancock 5mo agoApple seems to purposefully have decided to sit out the arms race. Probably smart time to rent and not buy if they plan on buying in a downturn.
- stefan_ 5mo agoOkay, but why is the Siri team sitting out transformers. I really wanna move past the „Dragon Naturally Speaking“ experience with a bolted on decision tree.
- gchamonlive 5mo agoI think it's the same reason why MacOS and iOS degraded a lot in terms of UX the past decade. The focus of Apple shifted towards hardware independence. The 2010s was marked by Intel's lazy product lineup, year after year pumping rehashes of older products, iterating on top of their 14nm lithography with increasingly minor improvements on its architecture until AMD overcame them. In the process, Apple's partnership with Intel became a liability it had to solve, and a push for the unified ARM architecture was no small feat. If you ask me I don't think it's justified to degrade the user experience for the sake of focusing on this. It's a trillion dollar company, and has been for a while. Sure it could have tackled both, but what do I know. In any case I think it explains really well why Siri feels so abandoned.
- threetonesun 5mo agoI dunno, Apple has always had a pretty high level of hardware independence, and one could imagine even if Intel did produce great chips for longer the ARM architecture would replace it eventually. Certainly the timeline got shifted (and I'm glad for it) but I don't know if that really impacted Siri. If anything it seems like it got pushed to the bottom of the pile in favor of projects like the Apple Car and Vision Pro OS one on side and the demand to increase services revenue on the other.
- christkv 5mo agoI really hope its not churning out massive amounts of code for osx and ios or we are in for some pretty interesting times in the next year or so.
- neko_ranger 5mo agoSo much FUD (and bot replies dogpiling on?) in that thread. It's just a file that specifies some structure for the project. Nothing super secret.
- fidotron 5mo agoX somehow manages to get worse for this as time goes on. Seems like at some point most of the actual humans just gave up on replying.
- sunaookami 5mo agoWhy bother replying if your post gets buried under AI bots with twitter blue (or whatever it's called now) that just try to farm engagement for money. Revenue sharing is a big mistake for every platform because it incentives engagement slop. Ordering by Newest first often gives you more human replies.
- klustregrif 5mo agoIt’s not super secret no. It’s just embarrassing they they don’t have instructions in their AI agents coding and pushing deployments to not push the Claude.md files. It demonstrates that they haven’t fed their AI prompts through AI yet cause it would hav added a clause for that.
- caymanjim 5mo agoHave you never used Claude? It regularly ignores directives, no matter how they're worded or how many times they're repeated. It's also hierarchal. Org-wide rules would be in a higher-level directory than repo rules or component rules. This is obviously just a tiny snippet of prompts.
- fantasizr 5mo agomostly it's a knock on their lack of attention to detail which was sorta jobs' thing. is the culture becoming lax in this new era
- ramon156 5mo agoUnrelated: Yuck. a lot of those replies have LLM smells. Do people love being a hollow puppet for LLMs to fill in? Have people lost their identity?
- j-kent 5mo agoIt's not about contributing to the conversation — it's about the fake internet points.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoIt's not about the fake internet points — it's about manipulating people to support companies they otherwise wouldn't.
- worldsavior 5mo agoThat's why he said fake internet points.
- rvnx 5mo agoThese points might be fake, but they are far from being useless, and actually have monetary value. There is a market for buying and selling "aged" Hacker News accounts (3 USD <-> 15 USD for ~500 points) and upvotes / downvotes By purchasing just ~300 karma points, founders can unlock an uplift of tens of thousands of dollars in visibility on the home page (clients and investors). So the LLM comments are not here just for fun, they are clearly farming points. Ironically, it also increases actual human engagement. This way the day Ycombinator wants to announce something, they already have more public than if there was low engagement. Like the shilling you mentioned, these bots can push downvotes and flag competitors service. Essentially the same as on Reddit. If you have incentive, you have a market.
- cryptoegorophy 5mo agoNot familiar with posts and points, so if you have a higher points balance this affects some kind of post rating/upvote rating?
- mushufasa 5mo agoIs it really a mistake? OpenAI's own agent SDK also has a Claude.md file. That's not an indication that OpenAI internally use Claude, rather, it's there because the SDK has multi-model support.
- klustregrif 5mo agoIt was a mistake yes. And they corrected it. Why would you assume they would do this intentionally?
- traceroute66 5mo agoWhilst tempting, I think it is important not to read too much into this. It is no secret that Apple has an enormous R&D budget. It is no secret that Apple operates with hundreds of siloed teams in order to maintain individual domain expertise. The teams then come together in a collaborative manner to bring together the final products. So yes, it is likely true that SOME teams use SOME LLM for SOME tasks. It is a viable argument from R&D and other perspectives. Apple is an enormous multinational company, it is unlikely they have zero-AI on-site. What is guaranteed NOT to be the case is that Apple is somehow vibecoding company-wide. Old-school engineering is too important for Apple. I'm sure journalists and Anthropic would love to have you believe otherwise, but I think we need to keep our feet on the ground here and accept the reality is more old-school. Afterall, as others have pointed out already here ... whilst the rest of Silicon Valley has been shoveling truckloads of cash at AI, Apple have been patiently sitting, watching the bandwagon trundle along the rails.
- einsteinx2 5mo ago> It is no secret that Apple operates with hundreds of siloed teams in order to maintain individual domain expertise. The teams then come together in a collaborative manner to bring together the final products. Having worked there this is a perfect description of the organization from my experience. > So yes, it is likely true that SOME teams use SOME LLM for SOME tasks. It is a viable argument from R&D and other perspectives. > What is almost guaranteed NOT to be the case is that Apple is somehow vibecoding company-wide. 100% agree
- engineer_22 5mo agoRisk of embarrassment is too great to be vibe coding, apple's brand is TRUST and people don't trust AI... A slip like this erodes their brand
- rvnx 5mo agoNot really, almost all active software developers use AI nowadays. The research surveyed 121.000 developers across 450+ companies. A striking 92.6% of them use an AI coding assistant at least once a month, and roughly 75% use one weekly It's weird to believe that large corporations should be ashamed to use AI. It's a standard engineering practice, otherwise it's like if you refuse autocomplete because autocomplete is not right 100% of the time.
- nailer 5mo agoOriginal link: https://x.com/aaronp613/status/2049986504617820551?s=20 https://x.com/aaronp613/status/2049986504617820551?s=20
- MattRix 5mo agono thanks
- embedding-shape 5mo agoI don't think you need to even see any files to realize much of Apple's software is vibe-coded by now. Had some issues with my monitor apparently seeing connection to my Mac Mini, but the Mac Mini displaying black, apparently somehow got out of sync with my monitor, sleeping the display controller then waking it solved it. Gathered a bunch of data, wanting to submit a report, since I'm a Apple Developer Program member since like two days ago, and I wanna be a good c̶u̶s̶t̶o̶m̶e̶r̶ user, so I opened up Feedback Assistant. It asks me for my email, I input it, press enter. A password input appears, but keyboard focus doesn't move there automatically. I know is such a tiny nitpick practically, but tiny shit like this makes it so obvious that not a single person actually tried this UX. 10-15 years ago, Apple would never release something that isn't perfect, but now there are these UX edges absolutely everywhere across the OS. I ended up not logging in at all, wrote my fix into a tiny fix-display.swift file which I'll run when it happens instead.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 5mo agoI don't think we get to blame these issues on "vibe coding", they've been around for too long.
- MattRix 5mo agoThis stuff has been happening in Apple software since well before the AI coding stuff came along.
- suyavuz 5mo agoPeople become so lazy after ai. Even they don't check what they commit.
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoAnything that goes to production should have a 4-6+ eyes rule, at least one reviewer that can review the changes in isolation. If tools or LLMs can help them with it then that's fine, but it should always be at least two humans involved, one making changes, one verifying, and if something like this happens, they're both culpable. Not that they should be blamed for it per se, but the process and their way of working should be reviewed.
- doctorwho42 5mo agoThe problem is that humans inherently fill in data in what the process from the world. Our brain is designed to fill in gaps, it's why memory is so blurry when it comes to reciting the facts of what we saw in a trial. It's why you could swear you saw "x" in the production software you were about to push. But it really comes down to expectations - and those expectations help reduce cognitive load/increase cognitive efficiency (resource usage). So after more and more people get used using AI, you will see these mistakes occur more frequently. B/c it's how our brains work.
- dawnerd 5mo agoI cringe whenever someone suggests to just have an agent review because “it knows code better”. An ai agent wouldn’t catch a lot of things a human would flag. And before someone goes you just need to prompt it better, that’s a huge amount of work for large projects and you’re still essentially begging it to do what you want.
- throwatdem12311 5mo agoI have not encountered anything more soulcrushing in my entire career than having to spend hours going over LLM generated slop that was vomitted out by a contractor in Pakistan that doesn’t give a shit, to only have the review itself be fed in as a re-prompt, and get the same 2000 line ball of spaghetti back with even more issues and going back and forth until I just give up and approve it. No, AI code review doesn’t help. Claude can’t even give me correct line numbers 80% of the time, literally just makes them up, and more than half of it is false positive BS anyway.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- rib3ye 5mo agoAre we going to keep on brow-beating vibe coders from here?
- ryandrake 5mo agoI wouldn't even think that CLAUDE.md would make it into source control, let alone into the product. I don't AI-code for a living, so I don't know what is considered best practices, but I would think that CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, REQUIREMETNS.md, MY_PLAN.md, THIS_STUFF.md, THAT_THING.md, all the instruction/feeder files that drive the AI should not go into source control. Only the actual code that gets compiled. I look at all those files the same way as IDE configuration cruft--it's workstation-specific configuration that shouldn't even go into source control. I would .gitignore all of those files. Is this not what is done in industry? EDIT: Wow, thanks for all the replies. Very eye-opening to see what's happening outside of my hobby-experimentation with the technology. I was coming at it with the assumption that 1-2 out of 20 people on the team were using CLAUDE.md, so why have it in source control. But if all 20 people are using it, I can see the benefits. This reply chain has really opened my eyes, thank you HN.
- Wowfunhappy 5mo agoI think it makes sense to include in source control, just as it’s pretty typical to include documentation (such as a readme file) in source control. CLAUDE.md is really just project documentation.
- comboy 5mo agomethinks if you really want to have it versioned it should be AGENTS.md in VCS and your globally gitignored CLAUDE.md just @AGENTS.md otherwise it's like leaving vim dotfiles in the repo or something
- arrowleaf 5mo agoIf you're committed to Anthropic at an organizational level, there's no point to have a 'standard' AGENTS.md with a CLAUDE.md layer on top. Just commit the CLAUDE.md.
- data-ottawa 5mo agoI’ve always struggled with what should be in Claude.md that doesn’t belong in readme.md or a similar supporting file. I tend to include a well documented justfile, so between the readme and that common commands are covered. If there’s a style guide it should be its own file, or summarized in the readme. If Claude is making errors I tend to just update my global Claude file, but I haven’t updated it in 6 months — only to disable Claude signatures on generated commit messages.
- Wowfunhappy 5mo agoDoes anyone have a copy of the files? It would be interesting to see!
- mcrk 5mo agoCloude Code has cascading rules for md files. You can include project/team based md files in your repo and exclude env/system md files (eg from you home directory, which includes your personal coding instructions). So yeah.. nothingburger.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoConsidering that XCode supports using Claude directly, I'm not surprised to a degree. I'm more surprised it was not blocked out by whatever build tooling they use.
- zombot 5mo agoAfter the AI blitz it's amateur hour everywhere.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoA claude.md file is not really that terrible imho.
- johnwheeler 5mo agoAll the AI hate... Of course they use Claude. What do you think? They're idiots? They use computers too...
- oefrha 5mo agoI use Claude. Somehow CLAUDE.md hasn’t ended up in any of our company’s production artifacts yet. Am I a genius?
- danaw 5mo agofunny claude let this file through to production, i thought it was safe to rely on llms for everything now? /s
- dqh 5mo agoI’ve been wondering if vibe coding was responsible for the recent introduction of acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) bugs in FaceTime (muting and unmuting the microphone appears to temporarily fix it). Apple has always had excellent AEC in my experience, it’s sad to see them breaking a fundamental phone function.
- elicash 5mo agoIt could also be the problem was that they tried to code it themselves instead of letting a computer do it. Like doing long division by hand instead of trusting a calculator.
- kjkjadksj 5mo agoWell, at least the calculator is deterministic.
- dqh 5mo agoIt worked perfectly for a long before Claude and friends existed, so I don't think it follows that not using these tools has led to the problem now.
- elicash 5mo agoJust a few years before Claude, in 2019, there was that huge facetime audio bug.
- dqh 5mo agoPerfectly for me I guess I should have said. Nonetheless, this md file packaging mistake suggests that at least once they’ve fallen into not reviewing changes properly, and I wonder if that lack of discipline is more widespread. I hope not, otherwise their ability to deliver on their privacy promises will be compromised.
- da02 5mo agoWhat would you buy if you were Apple and there were post-bubble/fire-sale prices on equipment and/or companies?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- stronglikedan 5mo agoThey say what happened, but they don't say what is the impact for us naive folks. It doesn't look like sensitive data or IP. What's the big deal?
- akmarinov 5mo agoIt’s not a big deal, just embarrassing, something that you wouldn’t expect from a tech giant worth trillions.
- zombot 5mo agoIf that's the backdoor that gets Apple to accidentally write documentation again, I'm all for it.
- nottorp 5mo agoSo the low contrast UI was designed by Claude?
- mohamedabdallah 5mo ago[flagged]