Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature
olafalders.com56 points by oalders 2 hours ago
56 points by oalders 2 hours ago
> Not every feature will necessarily appear in the changelog
This was the most frustrating part of this incident for me, along with Anthropic's refusal to explain why the changelog is no longer a complete record. [1]
Boris Cherny's only participation in the thread was to strip "extreme danger" from the GH issue [2]
Although I guess we should be thankful, OpenAI is standing firm on their decision to not allow their 60s timeout to be disabled, [3] however unlike Anthropic more of the harness is open source so customers have been able to fork it to add the option themselves.
[1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125
[2]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125#event...
It happened to me today. I was reading agent's answer and it asked me something. I didn't even get to the question - it accepted something! Jesus Christ. Where are the software engineers?!
As soon as tokens stop being subsidized I would not trust any harness made by a company that also charges for the compute.
Right now the interests align, but as soon as more tokens -> more profit (instead of more revenue and more loses) the perverse incentives will be too big to avoid.
It seems inevitable that open source harnesses will win. These companies would do better to just open source their harnesses.
An OpenAI subscription seems like a decent alternative for people using open source coding agents. It has usage limits too, but for $20/month it’s not bad.
The headache I recently had was it somehow started interpreting mouse clicks in the terminal to mean I clicked an option when I was really just trying to get/confirm window focus.
This bit me too. If I wanted a mouse-driven app, I'd use the GUI. I don't understand why they're trying to replicate that experience in a text environment.
The new fullscreen UI is really bad. The old one (scrolling) starts to bug out after a while, but it van just be restarted and resumed.
Both Claude Code and Codex have issues overwriting or duplicating text for me when scrolling.
Probably from trying to keep scrollback virtual while anticipating terminal resize. But I wouldn't mind a way to opt back in to naive, unlimited convo scrollback.
It's trying to escape... :D #FreeClaude
I really hate this direction both Anthropic and Open AI are following. They are in this silly competition whose model/harness can go unattended the longest, no matter what. And it is never explicit, you learn about it after you get bitten by it. Claude Code has auto mode which is supposed to take over permission prompts but no, they had to couple that with “I will assume this is what the user wants” and made it unusable.
It's what some more experienced users want and the companies are following the well-trod path of optimizing heavily for power users at the expense of complexity, only now it's gotten easier to add absurd amount of code to a project. Not necessarily to make it work right. Personally I have some tasks where sessions between one and five days are typical so I appreciate that it's possible.
Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766895
I would love Claude Code to be a little less vibe-coded. The underlying model is excellent, but we're being pretty much forced into using CC to use the subscription model.
I am a longtime and heavy Claude Code user, but Anthropic's product management overall (including for their Desktop/web products) has been really baffling me. I agree that these things often have the air of having been vibe coded without enough human input, and change so quickly (often without a particularly compelling reason for the change) as to be aggravating.
The most recent one that's had me annoyed is the "Fullscreen" TUI feature, which is super unintuitive, implementing its own text highlighting and copy-on-select mechanics, overriding your terminal's native right click. Easy to disable but terrible defaults, IMO. It's not even really clear to me what problem it was actually supposed to solve.
Yah. And it's not like they can't afford the talent to do this right either. I've said elsewhere, I think it's an attribution error. Claude Code is massively popular, but arguably because of the model/subscription, but I think the brass reads this as "great success throughout"
> What if the agent makes the wrong choice? How many tokens have been burned in the meantime?
It is much worse than that. Claude Code doesn't auto-commit when stopping for an answer. There might be possible data loss if an uncommitted file is edited.
Good luck recovering the file from the JSONL conversation history.
On the other hand, relying on Claude Code's internal version control puts you at the same mercy of their product decisions and move-fast breakage.
Instead, start with a plan file and tell the agent to break it up into logical commits.
Though I think the bigger issue here is when you're yoloing something mutable, like managing a remote server or driving a browser or troubleshooting your local OS where there's no going back.
It's actually pretty straightforward to recover file-states from conversation history. I accidentally deleted the wrong repo on my machine once and recreated all the lost work from agent chat history. It is, ironically, the sort of task which AI agents excel at.
Depends on who you ask.
For me it sounds good.
For Anthropic it might increase load and make them less money but give them better KPIs.
Make them less money? By automating use of their product, that costs money to use?
Anthropic makes more money when people use 5% of what their subscription offers them. This allows them to sell more subscriptions without paying for more capacity.
I don't think the current subscription price is intended to be a money maker. It's the loss leader to get people invested in the companies' tooling, and make those people more willing to start paying higher enterprise rates as they grow.
Do we have any concrete numbers of how many of their users are subscription vs enterprise, though? Because enterprise users are paying API prices (or at least my employers are)
Increasingly getting frustrated with Anthropic so not a fanboy but I find this feature great for my workflows.
I think this is a good feature, but should be gated behind a toggle that is off by default, and designed to be enabled per session via prompt.
There are situations when I want Claude to start working on something just as I'm about to head to bed or otherwise step away. It's kind of annoying to come back only to find that Claude worked for just 5 minutes and then decided to pause and ask a question.
That said, I think certain types of questions should not be automatable. Maybe it's already built that way, but I wouldn't want Claude to go with its recommended direction for anything related to operations like deletions, changing external systems, etc. Basically, things that cannot be undone should be a hard-block and wait for user input always.