Thread

I am often wrong

345 points · 226 comments · bcherny

alasano · 1789954573 · focus · HN ↗
Haven't seen any Claude Code specific examples of Boris admitting he's wrong and then actually fixing things in the way the community wants.
There are mind blowing bugs in CC that go unaddressed for months.
Something like 15-20% of all Fable messages in CC are invisible to users. You've most likely noticed this when Claude references something it said but it never said it?
It happens frequently when Fable outputs a message above a certain number of tokens just before doing a tool call.
This has been going on for months. If "users can't see messages the agent sends" isn't a critical issue that gets addressed within 24 hours, I don't really care if you admit you're often wrong, we know.
1. dimitri-vs · 1789955778 · focus · HN ↗
  He would, but he keeps hitting his weekly limit. /s Seriously though, you would think they would have the (agentic) resources to do better QA on their flagship product. Not a week goes by without some kind of regression.
  1. voidhorse · 1789959168 · focus · HN ↗
    Huh, it's almost like using agents exclusively to write software doesn't lead to quality code or a quality product. Interesting.
    misterderpie · 1789968810 · focus · HN ↗
    Preaching the choir.
    Another example of "More AI, worse app" is amazon.com for me lately. Alexa AI Chat keeps showing whenever I scroll up on the amazon.com mobile page. I don't want Alexa to search for products. Worst thing is, I can't close it. The "X" button just isn't doing anything. So the only way out of it is to refresh the page and avoid scrolling up ...
    This has been going on for at least 1 1/2 months by now, and I wonder if it'll ever be fixed.
    8bitsout · 1790002883 · focus · HN ↗
    What a bizarre and frustrating "feature". I was bewildered when that was first introduced. Glad I'm not the only one frustrated by it.
    misterderpie · 1790571592 · focus · HN ↗
    It's fixed. I can't believe it's gone, finally Amazon is usable from the phone again. Hopefully that's not due to a bug.
2. bellowsgulch · 1789955803 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
  1. wiseowise · 1789970849 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean, TikTok/Reddit kids, and Twitter freaks, might find it “insightful”, “inspiring”, an “honest take”, “breath of fresh air” in “the age of ai”.
    First thread when searching for “Boris Cherny” : <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1r161uq/are_swes_like_cherny_and_karpathy_just_built/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1r161uq/...
    Just read through their messages, they live with a bizarre, crooked worldview. Seeing something basic, like “you can pee and poo at the same time”, blows their mind.
    [deleted] · 1789993920 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  2. lelanthran · 1789974537 · focus · HN ↗
    > Just shut up dude. Show me your numbers or shut up.
    While Claude Code is a bunch of bugs held together by below-cost prices, and many have strong opinions on the seniority level of the lead dev(s), I think this is unnecessarily rude.
    You're not talking to a bot here, you're talking to a person. Would you communicate your argument in this way to someone standing in front of you?
    Whatever happened to attacking the idea, not the person?
    [deleted] · 1789993949 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
3. nullbio · 1789956177 · focus · HN ↗
  Anthropic never listens to their customers or community. It's basically their culture at this point.
  1. alasano · 1789958697 · focus · HN ↗
    We'd gladly fix the bugs in Claude Code in our own forks but they're too ashamed of their AGI level code to make it open source.
    Sorry I meant it's too dangerous to be released.
  2. barrenko · 1789968082 · focus · HN ↗
    That is the culture of any self-respecting startup.
    You can be informed by the community, but the decisions are your own.
    customguy · 1789970637 · focus · HN ↗
    Only gross incompetence can even lead to the point of users telling them what obvious things to fix.
    So what are they respecting themselves for, what do they take pride in? Anything I would care about?
4. bcherny · 1789956512 · focus · HN ↗
  Author here. How can I repro what you’re seeing? Double check you don’t have /focus mode enabled.
  1. stingraycharles · 1789957621 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m surprised that you haven’t noticed this yourself, this is an incredibly common issue.
    I always thought that it was perhaps referencing something that’s in its hidden thinking tokens, but the grandparent’s explanation could also very well be it.
    alasano · 1789958917 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah it's something server side if I recall correctly from the numerous threads, regular messages getting returned as thinking tokens or something strange.
    I've got a Claude session going which can check sessions and count how many of these messages I haven't seen due to this bug.
    bcherny · 1789968697 · focus · HN ↗
    I always use /focus mode, Tag, or Projects, so didn’t notice it personally. Either way, digging in.
    troupo · 1789975178 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    stingraycharles · 1789975632 · focus · HN ↗
    This comment is needlessly hostile and adds no value to the conversation.
    troupo · 1789991190 · focus · HN ↗
    I feel like we should call the behaviour of people out.
    That is the modus operandi of Anthropic and all of its employees (at least those active on social media).
    More here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785996">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785996
    This behaviour is regardless of whether the issue is an edge case or it affects most of their users who are shouting from the rooftops
    albedoa · 1790009732 · focus · HN ↗
    You actually don't speak for us. On the contrary, it is because of threads like this that I am aware of bcherny's reputation. You are woefully ill-equipped to be assigning value to anyone's contributions or policing their tone, especially as someone who so eagerly laps up what he is fed by bad-faith actors.
    > I’m surprised that you haven’t noticed this yourself
    How much money have you lost to crypto scams.
    jannyfer · 1789983852 · focus · HN ↗
    On a similar topic - since you said "I always use" - is it true that nearly everyone at Anthropic is using Fable and that's why Opus 5's style of speech was not really noticed as problematic by Anthropic employees?
  2. alasano · 1789958388 · focus · HN ↗
    Which one of multiple GitHub issues on this topic should I link to?
    #67071 is one of them
    Or #83281 which you closed as a duplicate of #67051 which was closed as not planned.
    There's a bunch more. Just ask Claude to search repo issues for messages not being shown.
    bcherny · 1789959534 · focus · HN ↗
    Looking
    _345 · 1789961774 · focus · HN ↗
    Are there days when you forget to apply your framework or you feel lazy and cheat/shortcut parts/all of the framework?
    bcherny · 1789966273 · focus · HN ↗
    Fairly often, yeah. Sometimes it is too easy to get excited about a solution without taking the time to specify a clear problem/goal.
    orta · 1789974234 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, I feel you here :+1:
    cryptonector · 1790013809 · focus · HN ↗
    I bet things fall by the wayside. The firehose volume is very high.
  3. troupo · 1789975114 · focus · HN ↗
    The typical Anthropic/bcherny reaponse. "I've never noticed this, can you tell me more".
    See literally every isssue, even those widely reported.
    epihelix · 1789976469 · focus · HN ↗
    To be fair, isn't this the standard response to issues everywhere? Generally, users will find edge cases in odd scenarios that are difficult to reproduce.
    (But I do not use CC and have never looked at their issue trackers, so maybe I'm missing something.)
    troupo · 1789990954 · focus · HN ↗
    > To be fair, isn't this the standard response to issues everywhere?
    No, not really. Anthropic is notorius for ignoring issues, pretending they don't exist, gaslighting and blaming users, then spending weeks fixing things that end up being obvious even to juniors.
    At the same time they proudly tell everyone how they don't look at code anymore and only run a gazillion Claude sessions.
5. scmccarthy · 1789962961 · focus · HN ↗
  Step 1 "Understand the available information" is apparently a hard step.
  (I too have been incredulous that this remains an open issue; if this gets it fixed, bring on the boris blog posts!)
6. plesiv · 1789966267 · focus · HN ↗
  Ridiculous CC bug I encountered, that others have encountered as well: I asked Fable to review a commit. Suddenly my Fable quota for the week was at 100%, while a moment ago it was at 55%. A few days pass (1 day before the weekly reset) the quota resets back to 55%. ?!?!?!?!
7. klausa · 1789969602 · focus · HN ↗
  There’s bugs, and there’s also just a ton of bizarre choices that no human would ever make.
  CC (the desktop version) has a built-in terminal. It’s great idea when working with worktrees!
  But the terminal is _in the sidebar_. Not as a panel that pops up from the bottom like in… every IDE ever that has this feature, but in the sidebar.
  You can drag it to the bottom using tiny drag targets if you want, but if course this only persists for a duration of a single conversation.
  And there’s a built-in keyboard shortcut to toggle it being shown/hidden. Again, great idea!
  But using this resets the panel to its original position, again, making it appear in the sidebar.
  Bonus points: when I tried to submit this via the GUI version of /feedback, it told me that it was disabled by workspace policy _after_ I filled out the form and hit submit. Brother, just hide the button that makes the form appear in the first place!
8. Yizahi · 1789988891 · focus · HN ↗
  Users of Claude aren't customers, they are the product (a living training set data generators). The customers are governments and megacorpos.
9. cube00 · 1790012291 · focus · HN ↗
  He also edits bug titles to reduce the appearance of the severity while not participating in the discussion to explain why.
  <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48948656">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48948656

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