They're changing their tune because AI is not showing productivity gains. I've seen this first-hand. Every major tech company dove headfirst into AI, and the work being produced went up. But it's the wrong kind of work. It's not revenue producing work.

The reason is simple: The time it takes for humans to review *new* work is often similar to the time it takes to create new work in the first place. So every engineer eventually comes to the conclusion that they'll send agents to do code-cleanup type tasks in parallel with the actual work, because it's easier to review and validate that. The result is they're now splitting their time on the real work and the tasks they added to keep the agents busy to increase productivity. So on aggregate people are "more productive", but moving slower on real work, only now with high token costs.

The answer of course is "more AI", which means AI code reviews, but nobody is comfortable with the inmates running the prison yet, or the increasing token costs that are being paid to frenemies. So effectively there needs to be a generational leap in capability and an overall reduction in token cost before AI coding productivity gains are realized, but right now capability has plateaued and costs are going up.

One of the requirements for using Fable or Mythos is agreeing that Anthropic can look at your prompts and sessions. Presumably so they can data mine how people try to misuse it.

I recently saw an innocuous prompt trip the "safety" warning. It wasn't the prompt though, it was a sub-agent that tripped it. I asked Claude to try again several times and the same thing happened. I asked why it was triggering a safety issue and Claude said the safety checks happen on the backend and it had no idea. The most likely explanation is that a subagent went off the rails in some way and **was** doing something worthy of being called "unsafe". I've seen Claude reverse engineer binaries to better understand why a command failed. Who knows what a subagent might try.. if for example, it failed a file permission check.

It's been clear for at least a year there was not going to be a true successor to the Vision Pro. The M5 upgrade was a strategy to take all of the parts Apple had sitting in warehouses, throw in a new CPU (which they were already going to make), then sell it as an upgrade to previous buyers. They knew they weren't going to win over new customers (more CPU power was never the problem), they just needed a way to get rid of excess parts inventory. The people on the Vision Pro team moved on long ago.

Security isn't something you bolt on after the fact, but a new tool could significantly upend what it is you need to secure against. I suspect that's the real issue here.

My experience of Opus is that it's shockingly capable of tearing apart software binaries. I drop a path to a binary in Claude Code and ask it to tell me how a feature works, and it will usually give me a complete breakdown of classes and functions and how they work together. The binary loader information, symbol data, assembly, etc. are all just another language to Claude, so it really doesn't care. It's not hard to imagine a model trained on and geared toward binary data could seriously undermine how "secrets" are hidden in software.. "Hey Claude, could give me the API keys and explain how transactions are signed for this app?"

There is a huge AI bubble, it's just not going to pop with the top-tier model providers. They'll be fine. But the companies building data centers that are sitting on expensive, rapidly out-moded GPUs.. the thousands of companies that are building a single AI feature and hoping to be acquired.. the AI service companies trying to grab some market in some vertical.. There's a lot that's not going to work, and there's going to be a turning point where those guys start dying off and the money being thrown around will dry up.

As far as I've seen, the AI fanatic's answer is "don't care about the code".

I'm not an AI fanatic, I work for a major tech company and have been forced into being "AI Native" to keep my job. I *like* writing the code, and often disagree with how CC does it, but "don't care about the code" is pretty much right and not a fanatic's point of view.

All of these arguments already happened when "high-level" languages like C first appeared. "How can I trust the assembly produced by the compiler?" "I can do register optimization better!" "If I don't practice managing operands on the fpu stack I'll lose that skill!"

English is just the next high-level programming language. If you don't like the code being produced, write a skill or update your personal context.md to explain why. Ask CC to do code reviews that catch and fix the bad patterns.

Maybe not today, but ultimately saying "I need to always read every line" is going to turn out like trying to verify the assembly produced by compilers.

I'm not here to hype AI. After decades wielding terminals and IDEs I'm being forced to use it. I still want to write code that I don't because it will hurt my AI use metrics that count toward my performance. This is what it's like at a major tech company in 2026. But the picture has changed. AI can search through our codebase and find real bugs. Subtle ones.

Posts like this are unhelpful because they paint a picture that there are these limitations that really aren't there anymore. If you're not getting the same results, frankly, you're using it wrong. My guess would be that you've tried one-shotting a bug hunt with no real context.

Instead of comparing AI's output to compiler warnings ask CC (or whatever you like) to build with warnings as errors and fix the build. Then ask it to generate a list of suspected errors, and when the list is trash, tell it which the ones you don't care about and why, then ask it to try again. That's one way you can start to build up context about what you do care about.

How is AI any less authentic than a game? Both are simulations of reality.

A recording of a singer is a "simulation of reality", but it started out with a real person. Knowing that is part of the recording's power. If you replace the singer with something generated by technology and a listener knows it, it's much harder to create the same emotional connection, even when it "sounds good". People want to feel there's a connection with other people. Why would games be so different?

It's easy to fall behind the state of the art on AI tools. I tried various coding assistants over the past few years and never found them helpful until suddenly last November, Claude Code crossed over to being legitimately useful. I now use it throughout the day, occasionally giving it tasks could easily go to a low-level engineer.

An LLM may not be able to reason, but the combination of an orchestrator, agents and MCP tools certainly can. Not at a human level, but if I can ask it to do something, and it decides whether and how to do it based on the knowledge trained into the model, combined with the current state of the codebase, and then gives a valid reason for the choices, I don't know what else to call that if not reasoning.

...Anthropic's CEO sees the purpose of his role to do everything he can to sell the company for many billions, as quickly as possible...

I really doubt this. Anthropic is not some startup. They had $14 billion in revenue in 2025, with worse models than they have now. They're projected to have $70 billion in revenue by 2028 and that seems entirely reasonable for the path they're on. The kind of growth they are having would make them one of the largest tech companies in the world in 5 years. Why would they sell..? And to who..?

If every AI agent needs a license then the question becomes: Is it cheaper to just ask the AI agent to write the software needed to do the job? The problem for the current business model isn't the measurement of the licenses, it's that as the cost of creating software drops the value of the licenses is also dropping.

I was at a Q&A with an Anthropic engineer and he said they have all ditched their IDEs and just use Claude Code now. That alone seems like a radical step (and possibly naive if true) but there is a direction this stuff is going in. The leading sign won't be that they ditch software engineers, it'll be that they stop hiring low-level engineers.

They have a real job, which is to produce Irish culture. Without Irish artists, Ireland becomes the same as everywhere else. How can citizens care or want to invest in a country that has no identity?

I work at a major tech company and we have access to several models with unlimited tokens. Nearly everyone chooses Claude and uses it daily now. I wouldn't be surprised if the favorite model changes, but anyone who thinks this technology isn't the future is toast. English is going to be the new language for writing code, and hand writing Python, Rust or C++ is going to be like writing assembly. Respected and in rare circumstances useful, but extremely niche. That's been the direction of the abstractions for computers since the beginning and it's not stopping now.