The Making of Claude Code

https://www.anthropic.com/features/making-of-claude-code

by kanamekun • 16 days ago

61 31 16 days ago

alpineman• 16 days ago

The self-mythologising is strong with this one...

I had written a whole pull request by hand, and then Adam rejected it. But he said, “Actually, you should use clide for this.”

Interesting

adi_pradhan• 16 days ago

Sonnet 3.5 and Cursor proving PMF for agentic coding should've at least got a mention...

hatefulheart3• 16 days ago

Incredibly cringe. Literally every single medium mode problem for a team is framed as a groundbreaking achievement. These people snort their own farts.

ryanschaefer4• 16 days ago

Please be respectful. I find it incredibly dismissive that you would use such language to describe such amazing individuals. They revolutionized the industry. They built a game engine to render text for cripes sake! So please get it right.

Huff. They huff their own farts.

hatefulheart3• 16 days ago

You’re totally right! You’re not building a CLI tool, you’re building a game engine!

deterministic• 14 days ago

They built a game engine to render text for cripes sake!

Nope they didn't. I recommend taking a look at a real game engine (Unreal or Unity) and compare.

I personally wrote two game engines used for commercial games. Which included rendering text. It is not hard.

jatindavis05• 16 days ago

new product : claude cringe

eth0up• 16 days ago

I support this comment, at the expense of wanton karma forfeiture.

I think the fart snorting assertion can be proven. There is evidence.

Lord_Zero• 15 days ago

Yeah for sure lmao.

@dawn-drain — Research Engineer at Anthropic My main project for my first three years at Anthropic, beginning in 2021, was to try and make a model that was as good at coding as possible— at least as good as me.

grim_io• 16 days ago

Why do I have to select if i want to read it in terminal or in the browser? I clicked the link, show me the text.

You are not being clever, you are annoying.

sunaookami• 16 days ago

You are absolutely right and I apologize. Would you like me to summarize the article in five short bullet points? Just give me the word!

rramadass• 16 days ago

Nice; Pretty interesting historical narration of Claude Code.

lifthrasiir• 16 days ago

Claude itself (Opus) gave me the following conclusion:

The article frames Claude Code as the latest step in a lineage from punch cards → ed → modern editors → AI agents. Multiple team members say they no longer write any code by hand. The overall tone is "we built the right primitive (read/edit/bash), bet on future model improvements, and it paid off."

Honestly I don't want to endure an awkward terminal interface and/or questionable design to just arrive at this conclusion.

xpct• 16 days ago

Nauseating on so many levels. What are we celebrating, even? Authors themselves say that Claude does their work, so what is their input? It's been barely a year in production for what can be best described as a 'buggy mess'.

xyzsparetimexyz2• 16 days ago

Pi was written by like one guy and it's better than this

nsingh22• 16 days ago

To be fair, Pi only had to be useful. Claude Code had to solve the difficult unsolved problem of making a terminal print text, so naturally they built a small game engine [1]

[1] https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427

xyzsparetimexyz2• 15 days ago

Hall of fame tweet. Can't believe it hasn't even been 6 months

HarHarVeryFunny• 15 days ago

Yes, and to solve the equally tough problem of actually writing the game engine's screen updates to the terminal, they used the log-update library which cleared the screen area it was going to update before writing the text, resulting in horrendous screen flickering.

Now, a mere human might have fixed this by removing the flicker-inducing clear-before-write, but Anthropic had a powerful AI-hammer at hand that was cleverly (after months of deep thought) able to turn this tough problem into a nail-like band-aid which they duly applied... leave the root-cause clear-before-write bug in place, and have the terminal cover it up by buffering and combining the clear+update !

Amazing times we live in!

randomise_seq12• 16 days ago

Can you be more specific about how one is better than the other?

nsingh22• 16 days ago

My own experience: much less context bloat, and hidden system prompts. Can tune it to your own workflow, instead of dealing with whatever hidden system prompt Claude Code forces on you.

a_c• 16 days ago

Once you are popular, whatever said is automatically true

chrisvenum• 16 days ago

Aider was also some of the most amazing prior art. After switching from the early copilot (crazy to think they were first to market with this stuff?) it was an amazing TUI experience. CC won because it offered token hungry devs a fixed price for almost infinite usage in the early days with stacks of VC cash to burn.

therobots927• 16 days ago

“The autonomous software engineering agent vision is more or less coming to fruition.”

Oddly enough no evidence of this is provided. I’ll admit it’s possible to have Claude write 100% of your code - however this is very distinct from autonomy. If I iterate on the code with Claude - telling it what to change, checking for errors and reporting them back to Claude, etc., I can build an app without “writing code” - but that is totally different from autonomy. And it’s not even clear how much of a time saver this really is if I know the language myself.

mccoyb• 16 days ago

Perhaps the most telling part of this transcript is Tristan Hume, a prolific and talented programmer, and presumably an expert performance engineer, is repeatedly saying "this thing just doesn't work that well yet" or "it's just not there yet" and everyone else is kind of just fawning over it.

"It actually made something that worked. But when I tried using it, I found I didn’t like it. I need to wait for a Claude that has the taste ..."

Yes, I am familiar with that experience.

The Making of Claude Code

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