> 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?
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.
I look at other people's code a lot. The security issues are always boring, that's the thing. API keys sitting in the client bundle, auth middleware missing half the routes. Not clever exploits, just nobody actually reading what the AI spit out.
Actually wait, it's worse than that. The product works, demo looks great. Then someone opens the network tab and ... yeah. "Quality doesn't matter" really just means nothing caught fire yet.
> 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.
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.
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.
Hey there, post author here. I think if you read deeper into my blog post history you’ll see that I have a reasonably balanced take on AI.
I generally think this will be a very important technology so I teach the subject to make sure people understand how to use it as leverage in their lives. (Yes as paid workshops, but I also volunteer weekly for 3-4 hour sessions at a non-profit where I get nothing more than the joy of helping people learn a valuable skill.)
At the same time just last week I wrote a post decrying the slop people are hoisting on their coworkers[^1], because I want people to use this technology in a positive way to create the lives they want, not to create downstream consequences for others. Ultimately I think agentic systems are incredibly powerful but also a technology that lends itself to anti-social behavior because of how independently empowering it can be. And so I hope that with the right exposure, discussion, and teaching we can take advantage of its democratizing nature, while reinforcing that what makes us special as humans is that we care and coordinate to do greater things. Value in this world — not just in the financial sense that we often boil it down to when we talk about this subject.
Hope that context helps provide a better lens into the piece, and that I still do care a lot about code and everything else that got me here, but that you are also reading personal reflections of who I am in a time of change, which is making me question (or reinforcing) some of the fundamental things I believed about software and sometimes the world more widely.
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.
I did an interesting spin to avoid it: generated Claude abstracted as a set of PRD style architectural instructions so you can do your claude-code inspired program effortlessly.
There's even a GUI called claudia for a piecemeal extraction with a PRD.
I wonder if GitHub would rule it a copyright violation if the source code was rewritten by an agent, i.e. copy my answers but change a few words. Legally, if the original source code is copyrighted then an agent rewriting it likely doesn't lose that copyright, but I wonder if GitHub would go through the effort of determining whether it was a derived work.
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.
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.
This code matters for exactly one reason: they’re playing stupid DRM games restricting what subscriber tokens can be used for to force you to use their front ends and harnesses or buy more expensive API credits.
Claude Code is strictly worse than e.g. OpenCode in my experience. Not much to see in the app’s code except how it authenticates itself…
Sure I try and use all my subscription allowance with CC on side tasks, etc. but I still end up burning a bunch of API tokens (via OpenRouter) for more serious work (even the UI and ability to quickly review what the agent has done/is doing is vastly inferior in CC).
What they have done is got me experimenting with cheaper models from other providers with those API credits.
Code quality aside (n.b. there exist many bad quality codebases before AI), a risk I perceive as an industry is we are making the logic of our businesses dependent on a few big players.
Given the output speed, it's practically impossible for developers to keep up, which directly impacts maintenance: the knowledge that would previously reside in-house, now is becoming dependent on having codebases pre-processed by LLMs.
I hope in the near future local LLMs will gain traction and provide an alternative, otherwise we are in the risky path where businesses are over-reliant on a few big companies.
Yes, and once they've found their market, why does claude code need to keep changing at high velocity? Has the harness really needed to change so much that they're not converging on a stable shape to the code?
Is it possible to start with something of this size that's vibe coded and refactor your way into something resembling a human codebase?
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.
There is a reason why Copilot+Opus4.6 is shit, while Claude Code + Opus 4.6 produces excellent results.
The harness matters A LOT.
The model is the engine, the harness is the driver and chassis. Even the best top of the line engine in a shitty car driven by a bad driver won't win any races.
I dont understand why so many people have the need to emphasize the code vs product battle. There is no battle. Coding/developing/software engineering is a skill, that just like any other skill has certain requirements and best practices that have to be followed in order to make a quality, maintainable and adaptable application that can stand the test of time from the software perspective. Product, features, marketing bla bla that is entrepreneurship part, and is not related to software, other than directing the software requirements,but not beacuse product people think about requirements, but instead just because they come naturally from the required features they envision.Just because programmers can write code doesnt mean they can ship good products.Just because a plumber can lay pipes doesnt mean he can run his own company or invent a new way of laying pipes. But I will tell you that a bad plumber who lays pipes and doesnt know how to connect them, bend them or shield them will surely have inferior product/service in the long term. And by the way, success of a company is measured over time, we will see where claude code will be in 10 years time when the hype dips a little, then we can say yeah the code was bad but everyone loved it and uses it still. I mean they leaked entire code online and this guy says yeah code was bad but who cares, what world are we living in? The fact that anything got leaked is a serious breach of best practices and security also at this point, something a company that used to work for DoD(W) shouldnt be doing, it can even be considered a national threat at this point. I know mistakes happen, I do them all the time, but then again the 'best' companies should be almost immune to mistakes cause stakes are high.But of course, move fast and break things is more important.Am I wrong?
On the other hand, consider if they took their time to make sure that quality is super good, did not mainly vibe code it, then they would have never become as popular as quickly as they did and would have been outcompeted by other llm providers. They only got so popular because they released Claude Code so quickly it was the most productive thing for everyone to use at that time.
And frankly at that point Claude Code as software doesn't matter anymore. It is about their models, they could throw it away, rewrite from scratch, etc, it wouldn't be a big deal.
Claude Code as a harness was never likely going to be for 10 years, because there would be so many of these harnesses, all different, the direction may change, etc.
As I understand someone internally quickly vibecoded for themselves only as a productivity tool, and then they realized internally how productive it can be, they decided to release it and people found it so productive they got hugely popular now thanks to that while otherwise would have been eaten out by OpenAI.
Also if requirements for this had to came from product it would have never even happened in the first place. As it was engineer trying to optimize their own workflow.
The only reason they decided to hide source code is to delay competitors imo and it wasn't related to security or anything, but by now OpenCode etc are objectively better tools anyway.
> The fact that anything got leaked is a serious breach of best practices and security also at this point, something a company that used to work for DoD(W) shouldnt be doing, it can even be considered a national threat at this point.
Wasn't it CC itself the one that leaked, well, itself? It's completely vibe-coded, which I assume means it does its own build step too, which means it leaked itself.
The only breach of best-practice I see here is using an LLM for coding.
> The success of Claude Code and Cursor at the higher end of the market shows that even the people pickiest about their software (developers) will use your software regardless of how good the code is.
Seems wrong. Devs will whine, moan and nitpick about even free software but they can understand failure modes, navigate around bugs and file issues on GitHub. The quality bar is 10-100x amongst non-techno-savvy folks and enterprise users that are paying for your software. They’re far more “picky”.
OP should expand on #1, why he thinks it’s garbage. Claude Code is the REPL harness Anthropic built, can read, write, edit, bash. Pi, Gemini, Codex do the same, but they are not hinted as garbage. Where’s the beef?
And this is why so much software today runs extremely hot.
It's creators clearly care not for the efficiency of how it is built, which translates directly into how it runs.
This blog post is effectively being apologetic about the fact that this is alright, since at least they got product market fit. Except Anthropic is never going to go back and clean up the mess once (if) they become profitable.
I doubt anyone will like how things will be in 5 years time if this trend of releasing badly engineered spaghetti continues.
Heya, post author here. I would say I’m not trying to be apologetic for the idea that software quality is diminishing, especially cause I became an indie developer because I care about quality.
When I say “it doesn’t matter” I mean more in an existential sense, and that people don’t seem to care. On the other hand people should do things because they care, which is why I personally still review the code that goes into my apps and spend the time to refactor and improve the stability and foundation rather than slopping like there’s no tomorrow.
Maybe I’m growing cynical but I understand why a business doesn’t care (at least until it comes back to bite them — which may take longer than some have assumed). And most of what you read about the subject is ultimately being driven by business needs of the desire of businesses.
Afaik you can run Claude Code locally but every single demo i see uses it exclusively with apis, so are the local models already good enough to be worth it or is the only reasonable use for claude code with cloud models?
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 64.9 ms ] threadSeems like the phrase "clean room" is the new "nonplussed"... how does this make any sense?
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.
Actually wait, it's worse than that. The product works, demo looks great. Then someone opens the network tab and ... yeah. "Quality doesn't matter" really just means nothing caught fire yet.
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.
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.
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.
I generally think this will be a very important technology so I teach the subject to make sure people understand how to use it as leverage in their lives. (Yes as paid workshops, but I also volunteer weekly for 3-4 hour sessions at a non-profit where I get nothing more than the joy of helping people learn a valuable skill.)
At the same time just last week I wrote a post decrying the slop people are hoisting on their coworkers[^1], because I want people to use this technology in a positive way to create the lives they want, not to create downstream consequences for others. Ultimately I think agentic systems are incredibly powerful but also a technology that lends itself to anti-social behavior because of how independently empowering it can be. And so I hope that with the right exposure, discussion, and teaching we can take advantage of its democratizing nature, while reinforcing that what makes us special as humans is that we care and coordinate to do greater things. Value in this world — not just in the financial sense that we often boil it down to when we talk about this subject.
Hope that context helps provide a better lens into the piece, and that I still do care a lot about code and everything else that got me here, but that you are also reading personal reflections of who I am in a time of change, which is making me question (or reinforcing) some of the fundamental things I believed about software and sometimes the world more widely.
[^1]: https://build.ms/2026/3/23/workslop/
There's even a GUI called claudia for a piecemeal extraction with a PRD.
https://github.com/kristopolous/Claudette
I've got a web, rust and tkinter version (for fun) right now just making sure this approach works.
The answer is... Mostly...
Enjoy
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Counterpoint: Code does matter, in the early days too!
It matters more after you have PMF, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter pre-PMF.
After all, the code is a step-by-step list of instructions on solving a specific pain point for a specific target market.
Claude Code is strictly worse than e.g. OpenCode in my experience. Not much to see in the app’s code except how it authenticates itself…
Sure I try and use all my subscription allowance with CC on side tasks, etc. but I still end up burning a bunch of API tokens (via OpenRouter) for more serious work (even the UI and ability to quickly review what the agent has done/is doing is vastly inferior in CC).
What they have done is got me experimenting with cheaper models from other providers with those API credits.
Given the output speed, it's practically impossible for developers to keep up, which directly impacts maintenance: the knowledge that would previously reside in-house, now is becoming dependent on having codebases pre-processed by LLMs.
I hope in the near future local LLMs will gain traction and provide an alternative, otherwise we are in the risky path where businesses are over-reliant on a few big companies.
Is it possible to start with something of this size that's vibe coded and refactor your way into something resembling a human codebase?
Wut? The value in the ecosystem is the model. Harnesses are simple. Great models work nearly identically in every harness
It is not everyone’s experience that models work the same in every harness.
The harness matters A LOT.
The model is the engine, the harness is the driver and chassis. Even the best top of the line engine in a shitty car driven by a bad driver won't win any races.
And frankly at that point Claude Code as software doesn't matter anymore. It is about their models, they could throw it away, rewrite from scratch, etc, it wouldn't be a big deal.
Claude Code as a harness was never likely going to be for 10 years, because there would be so many of these harnesses, all different, the direction may change, etc.
As I understand someone internally quickly vibecoded for themselves only as a productivity tool, and then they realized internally how productive it can be, they decided to release it and people found it so productive they got hugely popular now thanks to that while otherwise would have been eaten out by OpenAI.
Also if requirements for this had to came from product it would have never even happened in the first place. As it was engineer trying to optimize their own workflow.
The only reason they decided to hide source code is to delay competitors imo and it wasn't related to security or anything, but by now OpenCode etc are objectively better tools anyway.
Wasn't it CC itself the one that leaked, well, itself? It's completely vibe-coded, which I assume means it does its own build step too, which means it leaked itself.
The only breach of best-practice I see here is using an LLM for coding.
Seems wrong. Devs will whine, moan and nitpick about even free software but they can understand failure modes, navigate around bugs and file issues on GitHub. The quality bar is 10-100x amongst non-techno-savvy folks and enterprise users that are paying for your software. They’re far more “picky”.
It's creators clearly care not for the efficiency of how it is built, which translates directly into how it runs.
This blog post is effectively being apologetic about the fact that this is alright, since at least they got product market fit. Except Anthropic is never going to go back and clean up the mess once (if) they become profitable.
I doubt anyone will like how things will be in 5 years time if this trend of releasing badly engineered spaghetti continues.
When I say “it doesn’t matter” I mean more in an existential sense, and that people don’t seem to care. On the other hand people should do things because they care, which is why I personally still review the code that goes into my apps and spend the time to refactor and improve the stability and foundation rather than slopping like there’s no tomorrow.
Maybe I’m growing cynical but I understand why a business doesn’t care (at least until it comes back to bite them — which may take longer than some have assumed). And most of what you read about the subject is ultimately being driven by business needs of the desire of businesses.