Anthropic's Claude Code's full source code leaked. Claude is seen by many to be the best coding LLM on the market with Anthropic proudly stating that Claude Code itself is mostly written by the LLM.

Now this sounds good as long as nobody can see the code which is quite the trash fire. Detecting "code sentiment" via regular expressions, variable and functions names containing prompt parts trying to influence the bot, a completely intransparent mess of a control flow that makes actual maintenance and debugging functionally impossible and the prompts ... of the prompts. All the begging and pleading to the chatbot not to do this or not to do that or please to do this.

It is fascinating but it is as far away from actual engineering as drunkenly pissing your name in the snow. Dunno what you call the people prompting software at Anthropic but "engineer" is not it.

Now it is fun to look at the currently hyped product striped bare and showing its pathetic quality but that is the future of software if we let those companies continue to undermine every good practice software engineering has tried establishing.

The software we have to use will be bad, insecure, unmaintainable, expensive with nobody having the skills or resources to build something better. As I wrote a few months ago: LLM based software production is equivalent to saying that fast fashion should be the only way to produce clothing. A tragic degeneration of the quality of the artefacts we rely on build for maximum profit on the backs of people in countries from the global majority.

@tante I often wonder how much of (especially proprietary) software already suffered from these issues before the whole LLM situation came about.

@Namnatulco @tante

This Reddit thread is a good example. A dev posts some visible problems with the leaked code — some problems more serious than others, but just about everything in there counts as dubious “code smell”, sketchy team/organization culture, or both, at a minimum.

The general response? Blowing it off. Stating that the person posting this doesn’t know what real software development is like. Reinforced by an AI-generated summary at the top of the thread, emphasizing the sentiment just described, and generally belittling the concerns raised here.

(TL;DR summary of my own experience with enterprise software development, going back almost 30 years: the quality of what’s in the Claude Code leak is, at the absolute best, definitely on the “very dysfunctional” side of “typical”. I’ve seen lots of dubious code, outdated code, tech debt time bombs as code, and just plain crap code; I have *not* routinely seen codebases for major applications that look quite like this.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s8lkkm/i_dug_through_claude_codes_leaked_source_and/

@dpnash @Namnatulco @tante

re: AI top of thread summary

can't get much more dystopian than having AI's defend themselves using some unknown energy amount.

bad code actually costs energy.

whole bunch of thesis papers on it.