One thing that's odd about this package is the amount of internal, anthropic-specific tooling that's in it. Aside from the sort of comical gating behind the USER_TYPE='ant' env var, normally in a well designed package you would expect that it would provide proper hooks so that internal tooling could just be a set of plugins rather than in the source itself.

Claude code does have a number of extension points: agents, hooks, plugins, skills, and tools - even if their structure is somewhat, ah, gestural.

Some things could potentially become features (like the MagicDocs thing, even if that's a comically expensive idea, i'll write more about that later tho), but there are also some things that make no sense to be in here. Like in the startBackgroundHousekeeping task there is an 'ant'-gated task to clean their .npm-cache directory.

There are even notes in here like "this used to block the whole event loop" which you think might have indicated that they might have, say, "just written some separate cron task that runs totally outside claude code." So it seems like "writing claude code with claude code" leads to a collapse of separation of concerns, where anthropic can't really manage the distinction between their projects to the point of inlining the devtools - this can also be seen in comments re: code duplication with Cowork, which i'll also get to later. It also confirms what they say publicly, that they just have claude code sessions running 24/7 (where having a task run every 24 hours makes sense)

@jonny

I'm definitely not a professional programmer, but the more of this leak I see, both from you and from others, the more convinced I am that, at least once upon a time, there was an idea of a core of halfway decent code in there, somewhere. That they were actually trying to make SOMETHING that didn't totally suck to maintain, and could actually cleanly scale.

Then they all ran their brains through the ChatGPT grinder a couple thousand times, and what came out is this vibeslop mess of completely insane, totally unmaintainable spaghetti that somehow is the Messiah™ of all programming to come to thousands of reddit and twitter sysadmins.

And one of the few big questions I can even think of to ask is: How can anyone, with ANY professional experience, look at this shit and say "Yeah no this is perfectly acceptable, ship it."????

What are we DOING, man???