I use Claude code in a number of different parts of my business - coding internal applications, acting as a direct interface to SaaS via APIs and just general internal use.
I find there is a virtuous cycle here where the more I use it, the more helpful it is. I fired my bookkeeper and have been using Claude with a QBO API key instead, and because it already had that context (along with other related business context), when I gave it the tax docs I gave to my CPA for 2024's taxes plus my return, and asked it to find mistakes, it determined that he did not depreciate goodwill from an acquisition. CPA confirmed this was his error and is amending my return.
Then I thought it'd be fun to see how it would do on constructing my 2024 return just from the same source docs my CPA had. First time I did it, it worked for an hour then said it had generated the return, checked it against the 2024 numbers and found they're the same. I had removed the 2024 before having it do this to avoid poisoning the context with the answers, but it turns out it had a worksheet .md file that it was using on prior questions that I had not erased (and then it admitted that it had started from the correct numbers).
In order to make sure I wouldn't have that issue again, I tried the 2024 return again, completely devoid of any historical context in a folder totally outside of my usual Claude Code folder tree. It actually got my return almost entirely correct, but it missed the very same deduction that it had caught my CPA missing earlier.
So for me, the buildup of context over time is fantastic and really leads to better results.
> it can price compare and then ask the user for confirmation
Sure, but that's explicitly not what the Citrini article said. It said: "The part that should have unsettled investors more than it did was that these agents didn’t wait to be asked. They ran in the background according to the user’s preferences. Commerce stopped being a series of discrete human decisions and became a continuous optimization process, running 24/7 on behalf of every connected consumer."
I do think the models themselves will get commoditized, but I've come around to the opinion that there's still plenty of moat to be had.
On the user side, memory and context, especially as continual learning is developed, is pretty valuable. I use Claude Code to help run a lot of parts of my business, and it has so much context about what I do and the different products I sell that it would be annoying to switch at this point. I just used it to help me close my books for the year, and the fact that it was looking at my QuickBooks transactions with an understanding of my business definitely saved me a lot of time explaining.
On the enterprise side, I think businesses are going to be hesitant to swap models in and out, especially when they're used for core product functionality. It's annoying to change deterministic software, and switching probabilistic models seems much more fraught.
In many sane countries, companies can ask you to provide a legal certificate that you did not commit X category of crime. This certificate will then either say that you did not do any crimes in that category, or it will say that you did commit one or more of them. The exact crimes aren't mentioned.
Coincidentally these same countries tend to have a much much lower recidivism rate than other countries.
I'm an employer and I want to make sure you haven't committed any serious crimes, so I ask for a certificate saying you haven't committed violent crimes. I get a certificate saying you have. It was a fistfight from a couple of decades ago when you were 20, but I don't know if it's that or if you tortured someone to death. Gotta take a pass on hiring you, sorry.
Seems like the people this benefits relative to a system in which a company can find out the specific charges you were convicted of would be the people who have committed the most heinous crimes in a given category.
At least where I live, a fistfight from decades ago wouldn’t be on the certificate. In your example you want to know about serious crimes, but ask for violent crimes, why are you surprised that the answer you get won’t be useful to make a decision?
As in many things judicial, it only works if the rest of the system is designed to make it work.
No, because even if they're not sold as new (which as others have commented is often not the case), they're still competing with you for sales. Someone who would have paid full price for a new one instead gets a version with a slight issue at 25% off. That's fine if you're the one selling it at a discount, but here you've lost money on the production and are now losing even more money because you've lost a sale of a full price unit.
I think the spirit of that regulation is so you as the producer see this as an incentive to better manage production so there is no need to discard/burn 10% of everything.
I'm with you. I own a business and have created multiple tools for myself that collectively save me hours every month. What were boring, tedious tasks now just get done. I understand that the large-scale economic data are much less clear about productivity benefits, in my individual case they could not be more apparent.
I run an eComm business and have built multiple software tools that each save the business $1000+ per month, in measurable wage savings/reductions in misfires.
What used to take a month or so can now be spat out in less than a week, and the tools are absolutely fit for purpose.
It's arguably more than that, since I used to have to spread that month of work over 3-6 months (working part time while also doing daily tasks at the warehouse), but now can just take a week WFH and come back with a notable productivity gain.
I will say, to give credit to the anti-AI-hype crowd, that I make sure to roll the critical parts of the software by hand (things like the actual calculations that tell us what price an item at, for example). I did try to vibecode too much once and it backfired.
But things like UIs, task managers for web apps, simple API calls to print a courier label, all done with vibes.
This is the one that gets me - sometimes you're forced to work with systems that do annoying things that you have to accommodate. It's annoying, but it's more important to do the thing that prevents your users from having issues than it is to be theoretically right about whether something's required by a standard.
I've dealt with many worse cases than this, where the systems I was integrating with were doing things that weren't even close to reasonable, but they had the market power so I sucked it up and dealt with it for the sake of my users. Maybe Google's wrong here, but how do you not just implement the solution anyway?
> Maybe Google's wrong here, but how do you not just implement the solution anyway?
But they just did (make it work). The logical assumption is that most ppl did the same, just used another email provider. Why would viva care? (same as google, why would google care?).
Well, apparently it's not even an issue for gmail users:
To unblock myself, I switched to a personal @gmail.com address for the account. Gmail's own receiving infrastructure is apparently more lenient with messages, or perhaps routes them differently. The verification email came through.
So it's only an issue for people paying for Google's hosted email—a much smaller set!
Not at all cynically, this is classic product management - simplify by removing information that is useful to some users but not others.
We shouldn't be over it by now. It's good to think carefully about how you're using space in your UI and what you're presenting to the user.
You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using verbose mode a good solution? Presumably the answer is because in addition to containing useful information, it also clutters the UI with a bunch of information the user doesn't want.
Same thing's true here - there are people who want to see the level of detail that the author wants and others for whom it's not useful and just takes up space.
> It requires deep understanding of customer usage in order not to make this mistake.
It requires deep understanding of customer usage to know whether it's a mistake at all, though. Anthropic has a lot deeper understanding of the usage of Claude Code than you or I or the author. I can't say for sure that they're using that information well, but since you're a PM I have to imagine that there's been some time when you made a decision that some subset of users didn't like but was right for the product, because you had a better understanding of the full scope of usage by your entire userbase than they did. Why not at least entertain the idea that the same thing is true here?
Simplification can be good---but they've removed the wrong half here!
The notifications act as an overall progress bar and give you a general sense of what Claude Code is doing: is it looking in the relevant part of your codebase, or has it gotten distracted by some unused, vendored-in code?
"Read 2 files" is fine as a progress indicator but is too vague for anything else. "Read foo.cpp and bar.h" takes almost the same amount of visual space, but fulfills both purposes. You might want to fold long lists of files (5? 15?) but that seems like the perfect place for a user-settable option.
> "Read 2 files" is fine as a progress indicator but is too vague for anything else. "Read foo.cpp and bar.h" takes almost the same amount of visual space, but fulfills both purposes.
Now this is a good, thoughtful response! Totally agree that if you can convey more information using basically the same amount of space, that's likely a better solution regardless of who's using the product.
There are a lot of Claude Code users who aren't software developers. Maybe they've decided that group is the one they want to cater to? I recognize that won't be a popular decision with the HN crowd, but that doesn't mean it's the wrong one.
I fully agree with you on almost everything you wrote in this thread, but I’m not sure this is the right answer. I myself currently spend a lot of time with CC and belong to that group of developers who don’t care about this problem. It’s likely that I’m not alone. So it doesn’t have to be the least professional audience they serve with this update. It’s possible that Anthropic knows what are they doing (e.g. reducing level of detail to simplify task of finding something more important in the output) and it’s also possible that they are simply making stupid product decisions because they have a cowboy PM who attacks some OKR screaming yahoo. We don’t know. In the end having multiple verbosity levels configured with granularity similar to java loggers would be nice.
Oh totally - I'm definitely not saying that they made the decision to cater to non-dev users, just that it's a possibility. Totally agree with you that at the end of the day, we haven't the foggiest idea.
Yeah, I made a similar point about the tone of ChatGPT responses; to me, I can't imagine why someone would want less information when working and tuning an AI model. However, something tells me they actually have hard evidence that users respond better with less information regardless of what the loud minority say online, and are following that.
100%. Metrics don't lie. I've A/B tested this a lot. Attention is a rare commodity and users will zone out and leave your product. I really dislike this fact
Metrics definitely lie, but generally in a different way to users/others. It's important to not let the metric become the goal, which is what often happens in a metric-heavy environment (certainly Google & FB, not sure about the rest of big tech).
> You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using verbose mode a good solution?
Because reading through hundreds of lines verbose output is not a solution to the problem of "I used to be able to see _at a glance_ what files were being touched and what search patterns were being used but now I can't".
Right, I understand why people prefer this. The point was that the post I was responding to was making pretty broad claims about how removing information is bad but then ignoring the fact that they in fact prefer a solution that removes a lot of information.
They know what people type into their tools, but they don't know what in the output users read and focus on unless they're convening a user study or focus group.
I personally love that the model tells me what file it has read because I know whether or not it's headed in the generally right direction that I intended. Anthropic has no way of knowing I feel this way.
But you have no idea if they've convened user study or focus groups, right?
I'll just reiterate my initial point that the author of the post and the people commenting here have no idea what information Anthropic is working with. I'm not saying they've made the right decision, but I am saying that people ought to give them the slightest bit of credit here instead of treating them like idiots.
Developer> This is important information and most developers want to see it.
PM1> Looks like a PM who is out of touch with what the developers want. Easy mistake to make.
PM2> Anthropic knows better than this developer. The developer is probably wrong.
I don't know for sure what the best decision is here, I've barely used CC. Neither does PM1 nor PM2, but PM2 is being awfully dismissive of the opinion of a user in the target audience. PM1 is probably putting a bit too much weight on Developer's opinion, but I fully agree with "All of us... have seen UIs where this has occurred." Yes, we have. I personally greatly appreciate a PM who listens and responds quickly to negative feedback on changes like this, especially "streamlining" and "reducing clutter" type changes since they're so easy to get wrong (as PM1 says).
> It's good to think carefully about how you're using space in your UI and what you're presenting to the user.
I agree. It's also good to have the humility to know that your subjective opinion as someone not in the target audience even if you're designing the product is less informed in many ways than that of your users.
----
Personally, I get creeped out by how many things CC is doing and tokens it's burning in the background. It has a strong "trust me bro" vibe that I dislike. That's probably common to all agent systems; I haven't used enough to know.
> Personally, I get creeped out by how many things CC is doing and tokens it's burning in the background. It has a strong "trust me bro" vibe that I dislike.
100% this.
It might be convenient to hide information from non-technical users; but software engineers need to know what is happening. If it is not visible by default, it should be configurable via dotfiles.
> PM2> Anthropic knows better than this developer. The developer is probably wrong.
Nope! Not what I said. I specifically said that I don't know if Anthropic is using the information they have well. Please at least have the courtesy not to misrepresent what I'm saying. There's plenty of room to criticize without doing that.
> It's also good to have the humility to know that your subjective opinion as someone not in the target audience even if you're designing the product is less informed in many ways than that of your users.
Ah, but you don't know I'm not the target audience. Claude Code is increasingly seeing non-developer users, and perhaps Anthropic has made a strategic decision to make the product friendlier to them, because they see that as a larger userbase to target?
I agree that it's important to have humility. Here's mine: I don't know why Anthropic made this decision. I know they have much more information than me about the product usage, its roadmap and their overall business strategy.
I understand that you may not like what they're doing here and that the lack of information creeps you out. That's totally valid. My point isn't that you're wrong to have that opinion, it's that folks here are wrong to assume that Anthropic made this decision because they don't understand what they're doing.
I've been on the other side of this as a PM, and it's tough because you can't always say what you want to, which is roughly: This product is used by a lot of users with a range of use cases. I understand this change has made it worse for you, and I'm genuinely sorry about that, but I'm making decisions with much more information than you have and many more stakeholders than just you.
> What majority? The change just shipped and the only response it got is people complaining.
I'll refer you to the old image of the airplane with red dots on it. The people who don't have a problem with it are not complaining.
> People explained, repeatedly, that they wanted one specific thing: file paths and search patterns inline. Not a firehose of debug output.
Same as above. The reality is there are lots of people whose ideal case would be lots of different things, and you're seeking out the people who feel the same as you. I'm not saying you're wrong and these people don't exist, but you have to recognize that just because hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people want something from a product that is used by millions does not make it the right decision to give that thing to all of the users.
> Across multiple GitHub issues opened for this, all comments are pretty much saying the same thing: give us back the file paths, or at minimum, give us a toggle.
This is a thing that people love to suggest - I want a feature but you're telling me other people don't? Fine, just add a toggle! Problem solved!
This is not a good solution! Every single toggle you add creates more product complexity. More configurations you have to QA when you deploy a new feature. Larger codebase. There are cases for a toggle, but there is also a cost for adding one. It's very frequently the right call by the PM to decline the toggle, even if it seems like such an obvious solution to the user.
> The developer’s response to that?
> I want to hear folks’ feedback on what’s missing from verbose mode to make it the right approach for your use case.
> Read that again. Thirty people say “revert the change or give us a toggle.” The answer is “let me make verbose mode work for you instead.”
Come on - you have to realize that thirty people do not in any way comprise a meaningful sample of Claude Code users. The fact that thirty people want something is not a compelling case.
I'm a little miffed by this post because I've dealt with folks like this, who expect me as a PM to have empathy for what they want yet can't even begin to considering having empathy for me or the other users of the product.
> Fucking verbose mode.
Don't do this. Don't use profanity and talk to the person on the other side of this like they're an idiot because they're not doing what you want. It's childish.
You pay $20/month or maybe $100/month or maybe even $200/month. None of those amounts entitles you to demand features. You've made your suggestion and the people at Anthropic have clearly listened but made a different decision. You don't like it? You don't have to use the product.
I know product managers in particular hate it but, especially with professional software, when you gave lots of users you have to make things configurable and live with maintaining the complexity.
The alternatives are alienating users or dumbing down the software, both of which are worse for any serious professional product.
I don't think it's fair to say that product managers hate it. There are a lot of product managers and a lot of kinds of software. I've worked on complex enterprise software and have added enormous amounts of complexity into my products when it made sense.
> The alternatives are alienating users or dumbing down the software, both of which are worse for any serious professional product.
I disagree that this is universally true. Alienating users is very frequently the right call. The alienated users never feel that way, but it's precisely the job of the PM to understand which users they want to build the product for and which ones they don't. You have to be fine alienating the latter group.
I left my job as a PM a couple of years ago to start acquiring small e-commerce brands that sell on Amazon. I'm currently running those, and mid-acquisition on one.
Because they're relatively low-effort (Amazon is terrible for sellers in many ways but man do they provide an incredible amount of infrastructure), that leaves me plenty of time to play with AI, and it just so happens that the business serves as a giant, practical eval as new models come out.
I've been vibe coding apps for internal use and using Nano Banana for listing images and whitebox photos, and more recently I've started to lean on Claude Code heavily as an assistant. It's got API creds for my Amazon account, so I use it for everything from figuring out when I need to reorder to filling out spreadsheets for companies that safety test my product.
And of course I am writing a Substack that I must shamelessly self promote that goes into the practical use cases of AI in my business: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/
I find there is a virtuous cycle here where the more I use it, the more helpful it is. I fired my bookkeeper and have been using Claude with a QBO API key instead, and because it already had that context (along with other related business context), when I gave it the tax docs I gave to my CPA for 2024's taxes plus my return, and asked it to find mistakes, it determined that he did not depreciate goodwill from an acquisition. CPA confirmed this was his error and is amending my return.
Then I thought it'd be fun to see how it would do on constructing my 2024 return just from the same source docs my CPA had. First time I did it, it worked for an hour then said it had generated the return, checked it against the 2024 numbers and found they're the same. I had removed the 2024 before having it do this to avoid poisoning the context with the answers, but it turns out it had a worksheet .md file that it was using on prior questions that I had not erased (and then it admitted that it had started from the correct numbers).
In order to make sure I wouldn't have that issue again, I tried the 2024 return again, completely devoid of any historical context in a folder totally outside of my usual Claude Code folder tree. It actually got my return almost entirely correct, but it missed the very same deduction that it had caught my CPA missing earlier.
So for me, the buildup of context over time is fantastic and really leads to better results.
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