I posted about the Claude Code leak on LinkedIn and almost immediately someone attacked me about my criticism.

[abucci@buc.ci]

I posted about the Claude Code leak on LinkedIn and almost immediately someone attacked me about my criticism. They tried the "take a look at COBOL and get back to me" angle.

Buddy. I've written COBOL. I spent several years working almost daily with a 3-million-line monstrosity of a COBOL program. I was working on another app that interfaced with it, but in that work I occasionally had to read the code and in a few cases modify it. Granted I haven't spent as much time looking at the leaked Claude Code source code (and won't lol), but nevertheless I confidently declare that Claude Code is worse. "Spaghetti code" doesn't come close to describing this thing.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #ClaudeCode #ClaudeCodeLeak #Anthropic #Claude #tech #dev #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment #software #COBOL #LinkedIn

[abucci@buc.ci]

The person commented again and I ended up blocking them. It is really astonishing how many people become negative, personal, and emotional in response to straightforward and uncontroversial statements about AI. Nobody who's written software can look at this leaked Claude Code source code and conclude "Nope, that's not spaghetti code. That's clean and well-structured code with understandable abstractions". How does pointing out the low quality of this code and implications that has for Anthropic merit personal attacks, denials, and dissembling?

Shades of COVID denial, anger about any suggestion that this disease is dangerous and dissembling about wearing a protective mask.

[adingbatponder@fosstodon.org]

@abucci I think the value of open source or leaked code is that one can get a feel for the way the authors are working. Some repo code is so clean and well commented and so on that one can feel the care and craft. Others, that one might look at if there is a problem with the tool, are written in a way that makes one worry if this is moving with all due care and attention. However the commercial pressure to be great is something that we cannot feel and I still think claude code is remarkable.

[abucci@buc.ci]

@adingbatponder@fosstodon.org Their code is remarkable for how terrible it is. Learning from it would be a bit like learning how to be a chemist by studying the pollution from a chemical plant. As far as I can see, what there is in there to learn is learnable in a much better way from more conventionally produced software, courses, books, etc.

the commercial pressure to be great is something that we cannot feel

This feels like an apology for Anthropic, and I do hope you're receiving a nice paycheck for doing their PR for them. Otherwise you're doing their work for free.

I've worked in both corporations and startups. I've felt the pressure "to be great". I did not resort to whatever the heck resulted in a mess like Claude Code. Many of my colleagues can say the same.

[adingbatponder@fosstodon.org]

@abucci Fair enough. (I am prohibited from publicly criticising my employer, and it is not one that has anything to do with computing.) Claude code works. How do I know? Well I tested it. It is even more remarkable when seeing that under the hood there is that. The competition in IT startups etc. is brutal & I am sorry for the pressure. All I know is at the receiving end it feels like it is Christmas every day because the tool does stuff that helps novices do stuff. For experts it is hellish.

[abucci@buc.ci]

@adingbatponder@fosstodon.org

Claude code works.

...

All I know is at the receiving end it feels like it is Christmas every day because the tool does stuff that helps novices do stuff.

Claude Code "works" in the way that slot machines "work" for gambling addicts or Christmas "works" for children.

Claude Code deliberately sets up an addiction loop the way casino gambling machines do, inducing the perception that it is helping when more and more data shows that it does exactly the opposite. It does not help novices "do stuff". Rather, it deskills them, prevents them from learning, and passes the negative consequences of these effects downstream to someone else, all while fooling them into believing they are being more productive.

The reality is that insurance companies more and more won't insure companies that lean on AI for exactly this reason: the downsides are not documented and therefore not auditable, and are ultimately pushed outside the company, which introduces liability and other loss risk. Companies are of course free to take on needless and unaccounted-for internal risk, but insurance companies won't cover it and that is a very important signal about the actual real-world value of this technology.

"Christmas every day" is a phrase gambling addicts use too. But somebody has to clean up the wrapping paper and replace the batteries that die and dispose of the toys that break or are discarded after one use. Somebody has to buy them in the first place, and somebody has to make them for them to be available to buy. Christmas "works" for children, but it's a temporary illusion created for their benefit, not the basis for a sustainable workflow, business, or economy.