The Claude Code Leak

anematode

> But then the clean room implementations started showing up. People had taken Anthropic’s source code and rewritten Claude Code from scratch in other languages like Python and Rust. Seems like the phrase "clean room" is the new "nonplussed"... how does this make any sense?

twelfthnight

Seems equally valid to come out of this with the takeaway that code quality _does_ matter, because poor coding practices are what led to the leak. Sure, the weights are where the real value lives, but if the quality is so lax they leak their whole codebase, maybe they are just lucky they didn’t leak customer data or the model weights? If that did happen, the entire business might evaporate overnight.

leduyquang753

> Many software developers have argued that working like a pack of hyenas and shipping hundreds of commits a day without reading your code is an unsustainable way to build valuable software, but this leak suggests that maybe this isn’t true — bad code can build well-regarded products. The product hasn't been around long enough to decide whether such an approach is "sustainable". It is currently in a hype state and needs more time for that hype to die down and the true value to show up, as well as to see whether it becomes the 9th circle of hell to keep in working order.

thaumaturgy

I wonder what happened to the person that wrote "Coding as Creative Expression" ( https://build.ms/2022/5/21/coding-as-creative-expression/ )? I'm not (just) being glib. That earlier article displays some introspection and thoughtful consideration of an old debate. The writing style is clearly personal, human. Today's post is not so much. It has LLM fingerprints on it. It's longer, there are more words. But it doesn't strike me as having the same thoughtful consideration in it. I would venture to guess that the author tried to come up with some new angles on the news of the Claude Code leak, because it's a hot topic, and jotted some notes, and then let an LLM flesh it out. Writing styles of course change over time, but looking at these two posts side by side, the difference is stark.

pregseahorses

They just said this was an April Fools joke.

grey-area

Points from the article. 1. The code is garbage and this means the end of software. Now try maintaining it. 2. Code doesn’t matter (the same point restated). No, we shouldn’t accept garbage code that breaks e.g. login as an acceptable cost of business. 3. It’s about product market fit. OK, but what happens after product market fit when your code is hot garbage that nobody understands? 4. Anthropic can’t defend the copyright of their leaked code. This I agree with and they are hoist by their own petard. Would anyone want the garbage though? 5. This leak doesn’t matter I agree with the author but for different reasons - the value is the models, which are incredibly expensive to train, not the badly written scaffold surrounding it. We also should not mistake current market value for use value. Unlike the author who seems to have fully signed up for the LLM hype train I don’t see this as meaning code is dead, it’s an illustration of where fully relying on generative AI will take you - to a garbage unmaintainable mess which must be a nightmare to work with for humans or LLMs.

himata4113

I personally found it really amusing how they weaponized the legal system to DMCA all the claude code source code repositories. Code ingested into the model is not copyrightable, but produced code apparently is when by legal definition computer generated code can not be copyrighted and that's one of their primary arguments in legal cases.

slopinthebag

Claude Code proves you don't need quality code — you just need hundreds of billions of dollars to produce a best-in-class LLM and then use your legal team to force the extreamly subsidised usage of it through your own agent harness. Or in other words, shitty software + massive moat = users. Seriously, if Anthropic were like oAI and let you use their subscription plans with any agent harness, how many users would CC instantly start bleeding? They're #39 in terminal bench and they get beaten by a harness that provides a single tool: tmux. You can literally get better results by giving Opus 4.6 only a tmux session and having it do everything with bash commands. It seems premature to make sweeping claims about code quality, especially since the main reason to desire a well architected codebase is for development over the long haul.

komali2

> bad code can build well-regarded products. Yes, exactly. Products . It seems like me and all the engineers I've known always have this established dichotomy: engineers, who want to write good code and to think a lot about user needs, and project managers/ executives/sales people, who want to make the non-negative numbers on accounting documents larger. The truth is that to write "good software," you do need to take care, review code, not single-shot vibe code and not let LLMs run rampant. The other truth is that good software is not necessary good product; the converse is also true: bad product doesn't necessarily mean bad software. However there's not really a correlation, as this article points out: terrible software can be great product! In fact if writing terrible software lets you shit out more features, more quickly, you'll probably come ahead in business world than someone carefully writing good software but releasing more slowly. That's because the priorities and incentives in business world are often in contradiction to priorities and incentives in human world. I think this is hard to grasp for those of us who have been taught our whole lives that money is a good scorekeeper for quality and efficacy. In reality it's absolutely not. Money is Disney bucks recording who's doing Disney World in the most optimal way. Outside of Disney World, your optimal in-park behavior is often suboptimal for out-of-park needs. The problem is we've mistaken Disney World for all of reality, or, let Walt Disney enclose our globe within the boundaries of his park. > The object which labor produces confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer.

kstenerud

> It should serve as a warning to developers that the code doesn’t seem to matter, even in a product built for developers. Code doesn't matter IN THE EARLY DAYS. This is similar to what I've observed over 25 years in the industry. In a startup, the code doesn't really matter; the market fit does. But as time goes on your codebase has to mature, or else you end up using more and more resources on maintenance rather than innovation.

Finbarr

Who cares that the code is garbage? As the models get bigger and more powerful it will be trivial to fully refactor the whole codebase. It’s coming sooner than you think.