xpe

Sorry, I was too harsh. Or to be more precise: I should not have directed my criticism only at this particular blog post. This topic is a hot mess. Yes, even the 2019 blog post announcing Async Rust [1] used the phrase:

On this coming Thursday, November 7, async-await syntax hits stable Rust, as part of the 1.39.0 release. This work has been a long time in development -- the key ideas for zero-cost futures, for example, were first proposed by Aaron Turon and Alex Crichton in 2016! -- and we are very proud of the end result. We believe that Async I/O is going to be an increasingly important part of Rust's story.

While this first release of "async-await" is a momentous event, it's also only the beginning. The current support for async-await marks a kind of "Minimum Viable Product" (MVP). We expect to be polishing, improving, and extending it for some time.

Already, in the time since async-await hit beta, we've made a lot of great progress, including making some key diagnostic improvements that help to make async-await errors far more approachable. To get involved in that work, check out the Async Foundations Working Group; if nothing else, you can help us by filing bugs about polish issues or by nominating those bugs that are bothering you the most, to help direct our efforts.

---

MVP originated from the lean startup world: the core meaning is to build the smallest thing that validates demand. Async-await (a-a) was so much more than that.

Whoever wrote the blog post wrote "MVP" which leaves a reader wondering: are those scare quotes? [2]

Nice a-a was "in the air" since Go shipped it in 2009. Compiled state machines hit the scene not long after: C# in 2012, Clojure in 2013. So demand did not need validation. As I understand it, probably the biggest driver for Rust a-a was to provide a common foundation for work going forward.

The effort and thinking that went into async/await probably blows away 99.9% of MVPs released out into the world! And I don't think it would be crazy to say Rust's a-a was better than ~80% of even "1.0" products.

I don't want to get bogged down in mere definitions... I'm emphasizing the primary emotional vibe. Using MVP (or "MVP") is a surefire way to conjure the wrong emotional valence. It invites confusion and downplays years of incredible work.

My feeling is that original blog post used that framing because the Rust team is famously open to taking however much time is needed to get things as close to perfect as they know how.

[1] https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/11/07/Async-await-stable/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes

So on the title, I picked this because it's simply the truth. Since async landed in 2019 or so, not much has changed.

Hi. The article calls Rust async an MVP. You should expect strong reactions when you frame it like that.

"MVP" has a generally understood meaning; distorting that is unhelpful and confusing. Rust's async was not an MVP when it was released in 2019. It was the result of a lot of earlier work.

Rust async: (a) works well for a lot of people and orgs in production settings and (b) is arguably better designed than most (all?) other async implementations. Calling it an MVP is far from "simply the truth". It is an opinion -- and frankly a pretty clickbaity one. I appreciate your article's attention to detail, but the title is straight up shameful sensationalism.

I strive to not reflexively defend the status quo, but I get really chafed when people conveniently blur the difference between fact and opinion.

Please argue on narrowest correct claims available. The current title overstates your claims and undermines its overall credibility. Your central claim (as I read it) is that for embedded software there are opportunities for async improvement in Rust. Yeah this might sound boring, but I think it's accurate.

My other main criticism of your article is when it claims Rust async breaks the "zero cost abstraction" principle. I don't buy this claim, because you do not show that hand rolling the code provides the same guarantees. A lot of people misunderstand what "zero cost" means; your article wouldn't be the first to give the wrong impression.

Writing is hard (different audiences bring different backgrounds), and I commend anyone who puts their ideas out into the world. Please take this as constructive feedback: please agree or disagree with me on the merits. Ask and engage where I'm unclear.

Claim-1: the async versus sync distinction cannot be meaningfully dissolved at the programmer level.

Claim-2: async versus sync is a fundamental division in CS

Discuss amongst yourselves. I lean towards thinking both are probably true (P~70%, P~90%)

See: “What Color is Your Function?” by Bob Nystrom (2015). https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-...

Especially for something like a code editor, where plenty of less-shady competitors are available.

On what basis are you claiming Zed is shady? I seek evidence, not feels.

If you don't understand the contract language, it seems rather presumptuous to make that kind of claim. See what I mean?

If you want to make a _relative_ claim, then I have to ask: have you read the licenses of VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor, WindSurf?

Several people at work, none use OpenClaw, had their limits jump immediately to 100%.

Substantively: assuming this is true, what are the possible explanations? If they don't use OpenClaw, wouldn't this suggest there is some other cause?

What company? Will these people go on the record?

We live in a world where it is irrational for me to put much credence in a HN account. I see it has 125 karma and was created in January 2022.

So far, after reading ~20 HN comments, I see one mention of something akin to "I verified this myself". Where are the people saying "Maybe this is true, but please tell me you considered other explanations first!"

I try to avoid X, and I put relatively low credence in a HN account I don't know. [1] Browsing X, it looks like something like 1 out of 20 say they verified.

Who here has _verified_ this claim or can find a _quality_ source that has? Not X. Someone who will take serious reputational or financial damage if they are wrong?

It is 2026. Think about epistemics. What do you believe and why? And why should I believe you if you aren't asking this question?

This situation has many characteristics of being an information cascade. [2] Raise your hand if you piled on before thinking it through. Be honest. Everyone does it sometimes. Intellectually honest people own it.

P.S. I am _not_ making a claim about the original statement. Don't shoot the messenger: somebody needs to say what I'm saying.

[1]: "We cannot trust identity like we used to here on HN ... we live in a world or anyone or any AI can claim almost anything ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47804884

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade

The comment above has started a sh-tstorm. Please, slow down and learn about the details before jumping to conclusions. Most of us here did NOT "go pro" in the law. [1] For those that want to educate themselves, you could do worse than immediately leave HN and go _learn_:

1. SaaS Agreements: Key Contractual Provisions https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/resources/bu...

2. Cornell Law School's Wex: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex

3. Coursera : American Contract Law I (Yale prof): https://www.coursera.org/learn/contracts-1

4. Software as a Service (SaaS) Agreements: Thomson Reuters/Westlaw (paywalled; trial available) https://content.next.westlaw.com/practical-law/document/I61c...

If anyone has good detailed resources that are free, please add.

[1] IANAL but I wasn't that far from going down that path. I've worked for a legal-tech startup, did really well in an undergrad Constitutional Law class, incorporated several small companies, managed lots of contractor agreements. So, I know from experience: legal language is weird and specific in ways you may not realize. So be intellectually humble and defer judgment until you talk to a legal expert. Hopefully people more experienced than I can weigh in with more specifics.

This language fits common SaaS templates. Let me illustrate by removing chunks and labeling them:

    Customer hereby grants Zed
    {{ broad list of rights }}
    solely:
    {{ for these purposes }}

Also see "4.4. Telemetry: .... For avoidance of doubt, Telemetry expressly does not include Customer Data."

My two cents: I'm not worried about Zed's contract here. Much more important to pay attention to when your data goes to third-party AI providers: read _their_ contract language.

Meta-comment: Don't let a well-meaning comment like the above trigger a panic. Better to get familiar with typical contracts and/or build your personal network for legal advice.

P.S. Look out for shameless legal slop on the Web, I "promise.legal" it is out there.

1. Yes, Zed is open source, you can build it yourself.

2. Telemetry defaults to on. So turn off telemetry as explained at https://zed.dev/docs/telemetry#configuring-telemetry-setting...

    "telemetry": {
        "diagnostics": false,
        "metrics": false,
    },

Which Macs, hardware, OS's? What's your baseline comparison?

If the idea of hiding extra Markdown elements or making it more WYSIWYG appeals to you, maybe we can put more eyes on some kind of feature request. I've seeing several comments come at this from different angles: ?id=47950471 ?id=47950748

Also extensions can't add new UI, so you are stuck fitting to the recipe Zed team provides for you to plug into, and often enough this is not satisfactory.

What did you have in mind for "new UI"? I'm hoping to see basic text transformation myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47950471

What's your favorite theme, maybe we can point you to something close? If you have any special needs or usability issues (colorblindness is common), that's probably relevant too.

I use the default theme + the Catppuccin Icon Theme : https://github.com/catppuccin/zed-icons

I wish Zed had built-in APIs for extension developers to allow for more customizable text transformations. In particular, I want to write tools that have more control over what a buffer displays. Imagine a Markdown extension that gives Zed something close to the WYSIWG experience of Obsidian. To make this happen, I think something like a customizable presentation layer to transform the buffer's contents and adjust cursor movement would be a great start. Vim has a 'conceal' feature that could serve as an inspiration or reference point. [1]

I have no affiliation with Zed, though I have applied to work there, so I'm hardly neutral. I've been an enthusiastic user for probably two years. I don't expect perfect alignment with what I want, and sometimes the team doesn't respond how I would like with particular issues. But man, in a pretty suboptimal world right now, Zed is an amazing thing to have: open source, regular updates, extensions, nice settings. In the past I've used BBEdit, Eclipse, TextEdit, Sublime, Emacs, VS Code, Jetbrains, Helix. Zed is my favorite by far, probably because of the latency. It is an intangible feeling that just clicked immediately for me.

Personally, as a mostly independent developer/researcher, I go through bursts of re-evaluating my tools. To give some context about my newer tools over the last few years: Ghostty, Nushell, Podman, Nix, Mochi, Monodraw, Swish (window manager for macOS), Base (macOS SQLite editor by Menial), LM Studio, (probably obviously) Claude Code. So for a "seasoned" developer, I'm probably more open to new tools than most? Oh, totally off-topic but I think some of the lesser appreciated new open source tools / formats / conventions are: KDL (https://kdl.dev), Typst, and (evaluating) Djot, Cocogitto (Conventional Commits, took me long enough).

[1] https://alok.github.io/2018/04/26/using-vim-s-conceal-to-mak...

Here is a top-level comment for people who want to post the things they wish Zed had.

Request: please be sincere if you claim "the one thing that keeps me from using Zed is X" ... because let's face it, there is probably more than one thing. Editor ecosystems are complex beasts, and it is ok if people are slow to switch, but the "one thing" claims are rarely credible to me. Anyhow, such comments are rarely consistent with how human nature works. People find rationalizations, and that's fine. It would just be nice if people were a little more self-aware. Changing editors is harder for some people more than others.

My suggestion: if you want to make Zed better for your use case, please smart by explaining who you are as a developer, what you've used, what your expectations are. And be intellectually honest about the last time you've made a big change to your development workflow. End soapbox.

Thanks. Along those lines, here's a sort of thought experiment. Of said engineers who know a higher standard, say we teleported them into Anthropic, what are some likely scenarios?

- How much time would they need to import their standards into Anthropic? ... things like tooling, process, culture, hiring, etc? Maybe externally-sourced discipline and rigor are the missing catalysts. [1]

- OTOH, it seems possible these engineers (many of which are used to certain levels of stability, sanity, internal tooling, etc) would be destabilized by Anthropic's problems, the scale, the rate of hiring, the rate of customer growth.

- Perhaps Anthropic needs new instrumentation to cover end-to-end customer metrics? More internal tool-building teams? A new ops team? A new org structure? I don't know.

The growth, the environment has put Anthropic into a position where these kinds of mistakes are just statistically inevitable ... unless they chose to grow more slowly.

So my overall hunch (very few people really grok the constellation of factors at Anthropic) is fuzzy. That's why I'm trying to lay out some of the questions that underlie it, without resorting to simplistic notions of blame (which paper over the deeper causes).

Lastly, can you think of comparable scenarios with this kind of growth where companies don't have major hiccups? This is driving towards thinking about the outside view [2]. Roughly speaking: don't expect to "beat the market" for long. Entropy wins.

[1]: I recently watched a video where Steve Jobs described a time in early Macintosh history where Apple tried to "professionalize" its management. Hiring proven managers didn't work, so they shifted towards hiring for cultural fit and letting them grow the management skills.

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/inside-outside-view

As I understand Anthropic's recent retrospective, calling the models directly via API did not change; the problem was that the harness changed and this was not communicated well to users.

Metaphorical reasoning is lossy, so talking about lossy image compression seems to be ironically fitting! ... perhaps a (hypothetical) metaphor involves Photoshop changing their default JPEG compression level without making it clear to users. PS did not change the JPEG algorithm, only a setting for it. If you look closely, you would notice it: I'll come back to this point in the last paragraph.

But a part of metaphor breaks down if you accept that Anthropic was making a net positive trade-off for customers so that they could provide a better overall service level statistically to their entire user base.

A rough metaphor for the individual versus collective trade-off might be when a retail store caps the number of toilet paper rolls customer can buy at a time. The goal is to reduce hoarding, which in a way is an analogous to Claude users having usage patterns at the high end of the statistical tail.

When it comes to PR*, transparency almost always wins? Anthropic's mistake hid the change from users, but they're going to notice when overall performance is degraded. I would hazard a guess that Claude has endured more verbal assault in the last month than in its entire history.

* both for public relations and pull requests

Please link us to it. Linking it provides an anchor for community discussion.

> My overall feel is that people underestimate the complexity of the systems at Anthropic and the chaos of the growth.

Do you not think people here work at big companies with big products? I do, and we have a much higher bar for shipping.

This form of comment (The "Do you not think {X}?") comes across as a swipe (discouraged by the HN guidelines). It doesn't respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of my comment (also in the guidelines).

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.

    > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what
    > someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

    > 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 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/

[2] https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Carving_nature_a...

[3] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303819/what-do-t...

You shouldn't have to rely on finding an individual employee's posts on Reddit or X for policy announcements.

I agree with this as a principle. Which raises this question: is it true? Are you certain these messages don't show up in (a) Claude Code and (b) Claude on the Web?

I've seen these kinds of messages pop up. I haven't taken inventory of how often they do. As a guess, maybe I see notifications like this several times a month. If any important ones are missing, that is a mistake.

Anyhow, this is the kind of discussion that I want people to have. I appreciate the detail.

A company with their resources could easily do better.

Yes, they could. But easily? I'm not so sure.

Also ask yourself: what function does saying e.g. "they could have done better" serve? What does it help accomplish? I'm asking. I think it often serves as a sort of self-reinforcing thing to say that doesn't really invite more thinking.

Ask yourself: If "doing better" was easy, why didn't it happen? Maybe it isn't quite as easy as you think? Maybe you've baked in a lot of assumptions. Easy for who? Easy why? Try the questions I asked, above. They are not rhetorical. Here they are again, rephrased a bit

    > take the top three companies whose product you 
    > interact with on a regular basis. Take stock of
    > (1) how fast the 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 mine (competent, hard working)
    > worked there, how would I be thinking about the situation?"

Thanks for the example -- you are one of the first people to quote a source, so I appreciate it. This makes constructive discussion much easier. You quoted this:

    > To manage growing demand for Claude we're adjusting our
    > 5 hour session limits for free/Pro/Max subs during peak
    > hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged.
    >
    > During weekdays between 5am–11am PT / 1pm–7pm GMT, you'll
    > move through your 5-hour session limits faster than before.

Broken expectations are highly dependent on perception. People get used to having some particular level. When that changes and they notice, and being humans a strong default is to reach for something to blame. Then we rationalize. That last two parts are unhelpful, and I push back on them frequently.

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.

I also have the same question. That said, for some problems, at least over the last week or so, I did sometimes get better results from lower-effort Opus or even Sonnet. Sometimes I get (admittedly this is by feels) a better experience from voice mode which uses Haiku. This is somewhat surprising in some ways but maybe not in others. Some possible explanations include: (a) bugs relating to Anthropic's recent post-mortem [1] or (b) a tendency for a more loquacious Claude to get off in the weeds rather than offering a concise answer which invite short back-and-forth conversations and iteration.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem ... but also see the September 2025 one at https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...

I very much value and appreciate the first four paragraphs! [3] This is my favorite kind of communication in a social setting like this: it reads more like anthropology and less like judgment or overgeneralization.

The last two paragraphs, however, show what happens when people start trying to use inductive reasoning -- and that part is really hard: ...

Therefore I need more time and effort with Gen AI than I needed before because I need to read a lot of code, understand it and ensure it adheres to what mental model I have.

I don't disagree that the above is reasonable to say. But it isn't all -- not even enough -- about what needs to be said. The rate of change is high, the amount of adaptation required is hard. This in a nutshell is why asking humans to adapt to AI is going to feel harder and harder. I'm not criticizing people for feeling this. But I am criticizing the one-sided-logic people often reach for.

We have a range of options in front of us:

    A. sharing our experience with others
    B. adapting
    C. voting with your feet (cancelling a subscription)
    D. building alternatives to compete
    E. organizing at various levels to push back
    

Hence Gen AI at this price point which Anthropic offers is a net negative for me because I am not vibe coding, I'm building real software that real humans depend upon and my users deserve better attention and focus from me hence I'll be cancelling my subscription shortly.

The above quote is only valid unless some pretty strict (implausible) assumptions: (1) "GenAI" is a valid generalization for what is happening here; (2) Person cannot learn and adapt; (2) The technology won't get better.

[1]: I'm at heart more of a "let's improve the world" kind of person than "I want to build cool stuff" kind of person. This probably causes some disconnect in some interactions here. I think some people primarily have other motives.

Some people cancel their subscriptions and kind of assume "the market and public pushback will solve this". The market's reaction might be too slow or too slight to actually help much. Some people put blind faith into markets helping people on some particular time scales. This level of blind faith reminds me of Parable of the Drowning Man. In particular, markets often send pretty good signals that mean, more or less, "you need to save yourself, I'm just doing my thing." Markets are useful coordinating mechanisms in the aggregate when functioning well. One of the best ways to use them is to say "I don't have enough of a cushion or enough skills to survive what the market is coordinating" so I need a Plan B!

Some people go further and claim markets are moral by virtue of their principles; this becomes moral philosophy, and I think that kind of moral philosophy is usually moral confusion. Broadly speaking, in practice, morality is a complex human aspiration. We probably should not not abdicate our moral responsibilities and delegate them to markets any more than we would say "Don't worry, people who need significant vision correction (or other barrier to modern life)... evolution will 'take care' of you."

One subscription cancellation is a start (if you actually have better alternative and that alternative being better off for the world ... which is debatable given the current set of alternatives!)

Talking about it, i.e. here on HN might one place to start. But HN is also kind of a "where frustration turns into entertainment, not action" kind of place, unfortunately. Voting is cheap. Karma sometimes feels like a measure of conformance than quality thinking. I often feel like I am doing better when I write thoughtfully and still get downvotes -- maybe it means I got some people out of their comfort zone.

Here's what I try to do (but fail often): Do the root cause analysis, vent if you need to, and then think about what is needed to really fix it.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_drowning_man

[3]: The first four are:

    I write detailed specs. Multifile with example code. In markdown.

    Then hand over to Claude Sonnet.

    With hard requirements listed, I found out that the generated code missed requirements, had duplicate code or even unnecessary code wrangling data (mapping objects into new objects of narrower types when won't be needed) along with tests that fake and work around to pass.

    So turns out that I'm not writing code but I'm reading lots of code.

Accidentally/deliberately making your CS teams ill-informed should not function as a get out of jail free card. Rather the reverse.

Thanks for your reply. I very much agree that intention or competence does not change responsibility and accountability. Both principles still apply.

In this comment, I'm mostly in philosopher and rationalist mode here. Except for the [0] footnote, I try to shy away from my personal take about Anthropic and the bigger stakes. See [0] for my take in brief. (And yes I know brief is ironic or awkward given the footnote is longer than most HN comments.) Here's my overall observation about the arc of the conversation: we're still dancing around the deeper issues. There is more work to do.

It helps to recognize the work metaphors are doing here. You chose the phrase "get out of jail free". Intentionally or not, this phrase smuggles in some notion of illegality or at least "deserving of punishment" [1]. The Anthropic mistakes have real-world impacts, including upset customers, but (as I see it) we're not in the realm of legal action nor in the realm of "just punishment", by which I mean the idea of retributive justice [2].

So, with this in mind, from a customer-decision point of view, the following are foundational:

    Rat-1: Pay attention to _effects_ of what Anthropic. did

    Rat-2: Pay attention to how these effects _affect me_.

    Rat-3: Not one-sidedly or selectively re-introduce *intent* into my other critiques. If I get back to diagnosing or inferring *intent*, I have to do so while actually seeking the whole truth, not just selecting explanations that serve my interests

    Rat-4: When in a customer frame, I don't benefit from "moralizing" ... my customer POV is not well suited for that. As a customer, my job is to *make a sensible decision*. Should I keep using Claude? If so, how do I adjust my expectations and workflow?

Personally, when I view the dozens of dozens I've read here, a common theme is see is disappointment. I relatively rarely see constructive and truth-seeking retrospective-work. On the other hand, I see Anthropic going out of their way to communicate their retrospective while admitting they need to do better. This is why I say this:

    Of course companies are going to screw up. The question is: as a customer, am I going to take a time-averaged view so I don't shoot myself in the foot by overreacting?

This is the IABIED (The book "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" by Yudkowsky and Soares) argument -- plenty of people write about it -- though imo few of the book reviews I've seen substantively engage with the core arguments. Instead, most reviewers reject it for the usual reasons: it is a weird and uncomfortable argument and the people making it seem wacky or self-interested to some people. I do respect reviews who disagree based on model-driven thinking. Everything else to me reads like emotional coping rather than substantive engagement.

With this in mind, I care a lot about Anthropic's failures and what they imply about how it participates in the evolving situation.

But I care almost zero about conventional notions of blame. Taking materialism as true, free will is at bottom a helpful fiction for people. For most people, it is the reality we take for granted. The problem is blame is often just an excuse for scapegoating people for their mistakes, when in fact these mistakes just flow downstream from the laws of physics. Many of these mistakes are nearly statistical certainties when viewed from the lens of system dynamics or sociology or psychology or neuroscience or having bad role models or being born into a not-great situation.

To put it charitably, blame is what people do when they want to explain s--tty consequences on the actions of people and systems. That sense bothers me less; I'm trying to shift thinking away from the kind of blaming that leads to bad predictions.

[1]: From the Urban Dictionary (I'm not citing this as "proof of credibility" of the definition):

    "A get out of jail free card is a metaphorical way to refer to anything that will get someone out of an undesirable situation or allow them to avoid punishment."

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-retributive/

People come at this with all kinds of life experience. The above notion of trust to me is quaint and simplistic. I suggest another way to frame trust as a more open ended question:

    To what degree do I predict another person/org will give me what I need and why?

In my life experience, looking back, when I've found myself swinging from "high trust" to "low trust" the change was usually rooted in my expectations; it was usually rooted in me having a naive understanding of the world that was rudely shattered.

Will you force trust to be a bit? Or can you admit a probability distribution? Bits (true/false or yes/no or trust/don't trust) thrash wildly. Bayesians update incrementally: this is (a) more pleasant; (b) more correct; (c) more curious; (d) easier to compare notes with others.

I'm aiming for intellectual honesty here. I'm not taking a side for a person or an org, but I'm taking a stand for a quality bar.

They knew they had deliberately made their system worse

Define "they". The teams that made particular changes? In real-world organizations, not all relevant information flows to all the right places at the right time. Mistakes happen because these are complex systems.

Define "worse". There are lot of factors involved. With a given amount of capacity at a given time, some aspect of "quality" has to give. So "quality" is a judgment call. It is easy to use a non-charitable definition to "gotcha" someone. (Some concepts are inherently indefensible. Sometimes you just can't win. "Quality" is one of those things. As soon as I define quality one way, you can attack me by defining it another way. A particular version of this principle is explained in The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian, by the way, regarding predictive policing iirc.)

I'm seeing a lot of moral outrage but not enough intellectual curiosity. It embarrassingly easy to say "they should have done better" ... ok. Until someone demonstrates to me they understand the complexity of a nearly-billion dollar company rapidly scaling with new technology, growing faster than most people comprehend, I think ... they are just complaining and cooking up reasons so they are right in feeling that way. This possible truth: complex systems are hard to do well apparently doesn't scratch that itch for many people. So they reach for blame. This is not the way to learn. Blaming tends to cut off curiosity.

I suggest this instead: redirect if you can to "what makes these things so complicated?" and go learn about that. You'll be happier, smarter, and ... most importantly ... be building a habit that will serve you well in life. Take it from an old guy who is late to the game on this. I've bailed on companies because "I thought I knew better". :/

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.

I know some people use the word "gaslighting" in connection with Anthropic. I've read some of those threads here, and some on Reddit, but I don't put much stock in them. To step back, hopefully reasonable people can start here:

    1. Degraded service sucks.
    2. Anthropic not saying i.e. "we're not seeing it" sucks.
    3. Not getting a fix when you want it sucks.

If you can point me to an official communication from Anthropic where they say "User <so and so> is not actually seeing degraded performance" when Anthropic knows otherwise that would clearly be gaslighting -- intent matters by my book.

But if their instrumentation was bad and they were genuinely reporting what they could see, that doesn't cross into gaslighting by my book. But I have a tendency to think carefully about ethical definitions. Some people just grab a word off the shelf with a negative valence and run with it: I don't put much stock in what those people say. Words are cheap. Good ethical reasoning is hard and valuable.

It's fine if you have a different definition of "gaslighting". Just remember that some of us have been actually gaslight by people, so we prefer to save the word for situations where the original definition applies. People like us are not opposed to being disappointed, upset, or angry at Anthropic, but we have certain epistemic standards that we don't toss out when an important tool fails to meet our expectations and the company behind it doesn't recognize it soon enough.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/tep32v/can...