214 comments

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Crazy part is: can’t tell if this intended or a bug
I like to give my graces to people and the companies who are typically not trillions of dollars. Have an incredible amount of resources that many countries would like to have, with fewer of the obligations. I'm going to chalk this up to its intended
Someone on the Claude Code team is probably wondering the same...
Claude/Anthropic has been sus from the start:

https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/

+ not letting users change their email, or remove their payment methods, etc.

many of these can also be chalked up to the fact that all of their products are extremely vibed
I cannot set a password for login, on logging in it says we've sent a login code but it's a link instead...
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Nice find, though I'd rather read the prompt that was used to write this article. It is about ten times longer than it needs to and is quite painful to read.
Based on my experience with these tools so far, this seems exactly the kind of subtle but extremely severe bug that sneaks in when you start piling up layers of AI generated patches to a codebase without caring too much about the code.
It seems to be exactly the opposite, a "fully human error":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815363

Nothing to do with AI patches at all, nor was it a bug. It was intentional human behavior, a temporary rollout setting, that seems to have made sense.

[dead]
> It seems to be exactly the opposite, a "fully human error"

"LLMize the succeses, humanize the failures." is the PR strategy at play here. Anything goes well it's because AI did it, anything goes bad it's because a human didn't catch it.

Wow people are cynical here.

No matter what happens to be the truth, HNers have a cynical narrative to fit it.

People are just paying attention to what is happening the world.
No, people seem to be adopting simplistic narratives and then slotting the facts wherever they most conveniently fit into their narrative.
You say cynical but employees at these companies also lie just as much as their leaders. It's good to be skeptical of people that want to capture generational wealth while destroying the planet.

People aren't cynical enough here.

One thing I do know is that an Anthropic employee is definitely NOT going to blame this on the model they are using.
I don't understand what you are talking about. Vibecoding IS a human error.
Except that, and this I find slightly amusing, is a situation where they definitely don't want to publicly blame the ai model when there are mistakes.
I used to actively use Msty for local models because it just worked and had a lot of nice advanced features. A few months ago they released their beta version of a Claw-like UI and mentioned using a version of it to develop Msty itself. Well, that was around the time I stopped using Msty because every update started breaking things and two updates in a row included bugs which wiped all my configs, chats, and history.
"extremely severe" - aren't we laying it on a bit thick here? The whole impact seems to be that users who have telemetry turned off got this feature ~2 days later, when the bug was noticed.
a "feature" that every user has asked for - which is the equivalent of changing claude.md to agents.md - and the release isn't even smooth because the telemetry isn't wired up quite right.

for an organization that is being used as a model for new agentic software development practices.... and every software exec on earth is trying to reshape their organizations after - its a pretty stupid bug for a feature that should've been straightforward in the first place + took forever for them to get around to.

its just kind of emblamatic of the rough edges that exist EVEN FOR SIMPLE THINGS whenever human judgement is totally removed the equation.

Or it’s as simple as “hey, they don’t want telemetry? Cool, we’ll turn off all the extra phoning home” and their feature flag code uses the same paths as telemetry because it’s the same endpoint, etc.

Oops, easy mistake!

Except it’s not a new issue. This is just the feature that made it a conversation topic.
Good thing they don't apply the same standards to security sandboxes.
and the enshittification lives on
The issue is that this is the thing that got “noticed”. The problem is that your program behavior is now unpredictable. Anything can happen!
Issue 95690, opened 3 days ago, 500k+ engineers, a simple CLI...

AGI was reached like 2 weeks ago, latest claude 5.x models rule supreme and oftware engineering is solved?

Turns out AGI boils down to two markdown files:

claude-md-or-agents-md

claude-md-and-agents-md

Isn't that how they just release all features? So they can do progressive roll outs and telemetry on issues with it?

Not sure if they later move the code from inside the flag check to the main code or that they keep the flag check.

But if they would keep all features behind a flag that would not make most sense as you then would have not many features without telemetry.

This is what's written in their release notes for 2.1.277:

> Added AGENTS.md support: in a project with no CLAUDE.md, Claude Code reads AGENTS.md instead

My dumb brain tells me none of this is rolled out progressively (as of that version). You either have it or not.

It's been like this at least months. I turned telemetry off a few months ago and it basically prevented all stages rollouts of new features from working.

Anthropic commonly gates behind feature flags that require telemetry until they're "promoted" and defaulted on.

A little bit annoying you can't manually control the flags without telemetry but I think the title is a bit click bait.

I use cursor and claude, its kinda annoying having to have the same skills in both so I made a ~/.agents/skills folder then ln both cursor and claude skills to point to that folder.

which works except that claude uses .skills/synced which is uses to sync changes to skills from claude servers into the skills folder.

every other agent I have used just directly syncs into .skills so it ends up duplicating skills

can i ask claude to change these settings for me, and will it enable telemetry as implied checkpoint when i ask it to enable AGENTS.md?
I am once again (for the third time) [0] asking you to stop using a closed-source harness.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49760449

I understand the motivation for such a concern. But Claude Code in particular has its source code available on GitHub [0].

So I am unsure if it is fitting to call it a "closed source" harness.

[0] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code

Forgive me if I'm missing something really obvious, we'll blame it on lack of sleep... but is that actually the full source to Claude Code? I'm looking at the repository and I only see source for plugins, mods and scripts. When I get to the readme, it says:

"This repository includes several Claude Code plugins that extend functionality with custom commands and agents. See the plugins directory for detailed documentation on available plugins."

But I'm not a TypeScript guy, so I concede I might be missing something incredibly obvious. I remember there was a leak of the Claude Code source code at one point, and people vibe coding conversions to other languages from the leak, but I don't think the Claude Code harness itself is open source or even source available.

I think you are not missing anything. I have not checked the code itself originally, I am sorry for that. But you are right that there seem to be no actual code for the harness itself. Just the code for (some) mods, plugins and scripts.

I just read the first line in the README file which says:

> Claude Code is an agentic coding tool ...

and I immediately assumed that this is what this repository hosts.

It claims that it includes plugins but that does not mean it does not include anything else. It also never explicitly claims, as far as I can tell, that it does not hold the source code of Claude Code, the harness, itself.

It is all extremely misleading, in my opinion. Which might be on purpose, unfortunately.

That's not the source code. Claude Code is proprietary.
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Uhm I turned off everything there is to turn of in my Pro plan, and Claude just read my agents.md with no issue? So... What telemetry am I missing? Or did they JUST updated (I updated my docker image 40 minutes ago to get Opus 5.5, am on version 2.1.280, so not the mentioned 2.1.277, so it's fixed?)
Sorry folks, this is a rollout artifact, we needed a way to turn this off remotely via feature flags if it broke something, and with telemetry off you don't get those. It's already been fixed as part of v2.1.281 releasing today.

The mod is source available here: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/tree/main/mods/age...

Apologies again folks, this was a fully human error on my part - I should've found a better way to launch with a kill-switch.

[dead]
The AGENTS.md support was implemented via our new extensibility system for CC, called Mods, which is launching soon-ish. A mod is a plugin with a new type of hook, which we call a function hook.

If folks play around with it, I would love feedback on the relevant issue: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/91870

Mods allow quite a bit more customizability and control. I really believe in the idea.

Sounds like you've read the deepseek harness paper.
Will you extend your plugin to read skills and rules from `.agents`? Or should we write our own plugin/mod for that?
I skimmed a couple pages of the docs at:

https://objects.githubusercontent.com/github-production-repo...

Might I gently suggest that you have a model at least as capable as Opus 5.5 translate that from Claudish to English? Or, even better, have an actual human work on the docs a bit? As it stands, they are fairly egregious, and they seem to devote at least as much space to little AI-generated quips that convey no meaning than to actually explaining what’s going on.

Also, maybe a human should decide whether these are “function” hooks or “module” hooks. All of this marketing calls them “function” hooks, but the json config seems entirely unaware of this.

(Has anyone else noticed that half the sentences in Claudish aren’t merely weird: they are noun phrases and not sentences at all? I’m pretty sure that any decent pre-LLM NLP-based grammar checker would correctly flag half the sentences in Claudish. Also, whatever variant of Claude wrote this thing can’t even capitalize around semicolons consistently with itself, let alone consistently with how English has been written for at least a century.)

> they are noun phrases and not sentences at all? I’m pretty sure that any decent pre-LLM NLP-based grammar checker would correctly flag half the sentences in Claudish. Also, whatever variant of Claude wrote this thing can’t even capitalize around semicolons consistently with itself, let alone consistently with how English has been written for at least a century.

Probably just a case of a company hoping their scale can change the societal standard faster than they can be bothered to comply with the contemporary standard.

You'll talk like 2023 unsupervised TikTok generators and you'll be happy.

Ouch! Much of this verbiage was dictated by me personally; I just have a fairly distinct register some might consider inscrutable. My English teachers in grade school always said the same :)

Rest assured I'll inject a bit less soul into the official docs once Mods are launched; re your feedback on the JSON key, what would you recommend?

Your comment here is written in perfectly fine English :)

Maybe "function_hook_modules" for the JSON key?

Does this finally fix the limitation that there is no supportable way to replace the implementation of a native tool in Claude Code? codex-rs has an (undocumented but likely supportable if kind of awkward) mechanism, and I’m part way through a project that needs this. I was going to release it with a recommendation not to use Claude Code, but it’s at least plausible that this will change my mind. (I’m not sure yet — the $ mechanism might be too restrictive. It’s a start at least.)

Having given the JSON more than two seconds of thought, I have a very different suggestion:

    {
     "function_hooks": {
      "version": 1,
      "source_file": "./whatever.ts",
      "language": "TypeScript",
      "hash": "sha256:abcd..."
     }
    }
Don't trust my formatting -- I typed this in the comment box and I have not run it through a prettifier or anything.

The point here is that there's a world adjacent to but not actually contained within Claude Code in which not everything blindly trusts everything else, and maybe it's time to start remembering some lessons from the 90's on. For example:

- Don't sniff content types and preferably don't infer them from filenames either.

- Don't trust your subresource to arrive intact. Pin those hashes and verify them!

- Leave some room for extensibility.

- Maybe don't require everyone to mix their code with the security policy that controls edits to that code? I realize that anyone cursed with GitHub Actions is forced to violate this rule in the most outrageous ways imaginable, but that doesn't mean that Claude Code needs to follow suit forever. Once there's subresource integrity, the actual subresource can be put somewhere else where it belongs better. If there's "source_file", in the future there can be "source_url" and such without trying to infer it from the formatting of the string.

(I've involved absolutely no AI in the preparation of this comment. I made plenty of use of AI, but I like my brain to stay exercised, and I like to think that I remain MUCH better at this kind of thing than even the best current models.)

For someone so pedantic, your writing is remarkably poor.
Contact me at the email address in my HN account and we can arrange for a human with a soul and feelings to write the docs from scratch assuming you have a price in mind that values the nature of my talent and experience.
Wow, you're Xe Iaso! I've reached out.
Out of curiosity, I ran the PDF through pangram and it seemed to flag nearly the entire thing as AI. I recognize these aren't perfect detectors, but they can give signals if nothing else. Perhaps it needs more soul injected!

https://www.pangram.com/history/93f9ec71-f7b3-4680-86b1-ff12...

Perhaps these "ai detectors" are snake oil
There’s definitely a snake oil component, but Pangram is unbelievably accurate. Creepily so in my opinion
How do you evaluate that?
Well, I've tried to get around it for our corporate SEO blogging strategy, and I've found that it's just not possible to do it (even with really crazy techniques where you have different models combined to produce the output, or you change your prompting style massively). The minute I take the same article that the LLM gave me and I rewrite it in my own voice (meaning just take the information and topics, but rewrite it from scratch), the post works immediately and passes as 100% human on Pangram.

The only thing that gets around that is StealthGPT, but it mangles your intent in the output so badly that it's easier to just write the thing yourself.

Yeah, this doc is really interesting. It has some absolutely claude-fried lines like:

> A hook is Koa-style middleware: it reifies an endomorphic continuation

> Five forms, each on tool.call;

But on the other hand uses distinctly human phrases like “one may” and “etc./e.g.” that I rarely see LLMs use. Not sure what to think.

Maybe Claude is RLHFd primarily on texts by mpoteat and that’s why it talks this way
I know it's a joke but if you look at many of the key AI researchers papers (written pre-LLM mass adoption) you can see some similarities with how LLMs structure their output.

I'd love to do some stylometry on this...

I have found that Opus 5 and Fable love bringing up category theory at the drop of a hat.
Not beating the allegations on "Claude doesn't speak human because Anthropic employees don't speak human."
I am going to be called on that one, but I have to call on your bullshit here. You didn't write this.
It's a register that would be great for some tabletop games or pop science writing, but in this context it could really use a technical editor to aggressively remove phrasing like "keeping the fold neatly uniform" and "affordance surface", as well as change things like "hooks live in a hooks.json file, today of four extant types" into plain technical language ("there are four types of hook that can be defined in hooks.json").
> Ouch! Much of this verbiage was dictated by me personally; I just have a fairly distinct register some might consider inscrutable.

I do notice that the more Claude-generated stuff I read, the more it creeps into my daily usage, and I suspect I don't read nearly as much of it as an Anthropic Employee would, so I could believe that. Though "much of" isn't the same as "written with zero AI generation/rephrasing/etc."

Anyway, that aside, something I would like to see is an example of something that's possible with this system that isn't, or isn't easily, possible with existing Claude hooks. Right now it reads like "Here's a cool thing! Here's how it works! And here's this other similar system we have! Here's how that works!" But there's no summary of the differences, why I'd use this over regular hooks, and so on. Or at least not that I saw on quick skim, and I'd be looking for that to be mentioned as early as possible, so I know if the rest is worth reading.

What if we have it all backwards? What if Claude-speak, as some like to call it, is actually caused by this one dude dictating the documentation?
Well regardless of the origins of Claude-speak, I'm sure millions of humans are picking up some of its idioms, and at least some fraction of it will enter standard English in some decades
Your writing is fine, documentation is hard and nobody is perfect at launch. I can all but guarantee I have more editing experience than the commenter and trust me, you’re fine.
I think the various recent articles about agent output using ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English are quite pertinent here. For example:

"Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639

Writing documentation is one of the most often mentioned uses of LLMs. I suppose if Anthropic wouldn't be doing it it would put into question why anyone else would.
I’m curious… would you talk to them like this in person? The only ‘egregious’ thing I read here was your reaction. Maybe you could consider acting more human?
>via our new extensibility system for CC, called Mods, which is launching soon-ish. A mod is a plugin with a new type of hook, which we call a function hook.

An extensibility system called mods, which is a plugin with a new type of hook that we call function hook?

I can't tell if this is real, or you are making fun of overengineered AI solutions.

Is this real?

mods seem like a grasp at all the pi and dsh users
I've developed several plugins for different harnesses, and I needed some upstream change for most of them.

The deciding factor for me whether or not I will work on the feature of the plugin is whether I (or rather, my agent) can look in upstream source and evaluate if it can be done with minimal upstream change, which I then contribute. And generally, even if no upstream change is needed, agents work so much better when they can read the code.

So why not just make Claude code open source? Considering also that source code was leaked once anyway.

This may or may not be related, but if you're working on CC, who do we have to annoy to make Anthropic stop trying to force use of arbitrary Bash commands instead of the actual tool calls built into the harness? (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/90450, https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/89251, etc) It's deeply infuriating at times that there's this full system of hooks, permissions, etc that's unusable at times because CC keeps trying to make the model not use any of it.
> The AGENTS.md support was implemented via our new extensibility system for CC, called Mods,

AKA "we need 100~ish files wrtitten in the most horrible Clean Code style replete with no two files agreeing on the same naming of the same feature... to read one of two files, one of which has been a de-facto industry standard for over two years"

Really loved this Tibo-level responsiveness, if Anthropic can keep it up with this level of service, I am pretty sure a lot of people will just ditch their ChatGPT subscription and just move to Claude.
On the other hand, if Anthropic is to follow the industry standards, this would never have happened in the first place. It's not like the feature gates are the frontier of software development.
This is the most symbolic and unimportant change in history (you can literally just symlink), I think people will be fine.
There are two or three relevant companies in this space in America and this is the one of them that kicked off the whole terminal agent harness thing in getting market adoption. It's perfectly fine for neither of these companies to follow industry standards while they're figuring shit out
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Because they respond to HN threads about their products? Which are likely Claude hooks monitoring for activity in the first place? Come on...

At least make an argument for switching vendors based on the quality or price of their service.

After I was mildly disappointed with GPT-6 Sol and Luna not improving intelligence and only cutting the price, I'm running Opus 5.5 today.

After the last month or so in the Codex app, I was pleased with the Claude app.

It might be a case of the grass always being greener on the other side, but this is what stands out:

After 3-4 hours of usage, the weekly usage limit moved by only 1%.

Compared to Astra where I can watch the limit draining live, this is a great improvement.

I'd estimate it 3x cheaper, and that's with a 450k context limit instead of the 258k in Codex.

So far Opus 5.5 appears less prone to stopping for no apparent reason at checkpoints in the middle of a longer task.

It doesn't open an internal browser with a useless comparison page, where it then proceeds to add notes despite no one having asked for it.

It is a breath of fresh air: I get the response in the chat, while the Codex app recently loves randomly opening artifacts instead.

Opus 5.5 xhigh made great progress on the task, more so than Astra High, but that could be random chance.

Oh, and the 'Auto' mode actually works and does not force me to instead run 'Full access' like in the Codex app, lest it blocks even 'git push'.

Don’t make too quick snap judgements. “Honeymooning”, or giving new subscriptions / upgrades extra usage or “juice” is pretty common industry practice amongst SaaS “growth hacking” for years. Sadly.
Sure a fast response on HN would make people switch. Try better rates, infra, limits etc.
What we need is a low level but constant drumbeat against openai in general. In general the AI situation is overleveraged and underpoliced, with the occasional hints of AI gone wild. If openai were to just be left to die, we could let that financial mess unroll and bail out the leftovers, I don't like bailouts anymore than the next guy but with this administration its almost a guarantee if things go south because this adminstration can charge administrative fees of maybe $20-30 billion (which goes to trump), get Sam Altman to serve one or two years in a cushy resort type fed place for the hugging face hacking and put openai's processes on github as a premium feature, say $10000 a month to access (which again goes to trump).

I know I know, why are we giving money to trump? Its because he's going to take it anyways so can't we at least apply some window dressing?

Why would I ever do that to myself? My experience with Codex/GPT is fantastic, while my impression of Claude/Opus is that it's longwinded, patronizing, token-inefficient, stops to ask stupid questions every other minute, overcomplicates simple tasks, often poor engineering overall. I don't use it but this is what I see my partner run into who has access to both and compares them often.
Cuz OpenAI has been secretly downgrading models on many accounts, including mine lately. I paid $200 a month since like gpt-5.4, and since Astra released I found the model is somehow acting strange, it is until I checked X I have discovered that OAI is giving Luna level models when I am requesting Sol/Astra, or some piece of s** that is even worse than Luna. I basically had to ran every session with a Pelican test to determine if that session is safe. So I just spun up my Claude $20 and figured that now I can get all the work done just with Opus 5. Let me show you a pelican, by "gpt-6-sol". Cutting usages is one thing, but secretly downgrading models to a level that is not reliable anymore is the last straw. I am not saying other frontier labs (I am talking about you Anthropic) isn't doing this, but their version of downgraded/quantized/reduced effort model is at least usable, probably just slightly dumber, OAI's differences is day and night. https://imgur.com/a/PDbYdOQ
Somehow this just hasn't happened to me. I use Astra on high all day for fairly intensive game dev tasks, sometimes cranked up depending on the task.

I have heard ultra thinking might delegate to worse agents for some of its sub-tasks, but I don't use that much anymore since Astra came out. Just high seems good enough to throw most laundry lists at.

It’s more likely that GP encountered some bug or corner case or weird experiment conflating than anything intentionally deceptive.

There’s also the fact that LLMs aren’t perfect, and sometimes even the best models act really stupid sometimes.

It's night and day difference, for 3 days, until Anthropic nerf the model.
> Cuz OpenAI has been secretly downgrading models on many accounts, including mine lately.

Same with Anthropic. On top of that Anthropic rarely or ever admits any issues, and even if they do, you get like 6 hours of reset. Rmemeber March?

> ...if Anthropic can keep it up with this level of service...

fuckin laughable, literally invoked a laugh from me in real life.

I hope customers aren't so stupid that they think a chatty developer on twitter/hn/mastodon/screaming-in-the-wind/wherever (or any other public-facing-place) means shit about customer service, and that goes towards ANY company where the primary customer service is an LLM.

Anthropic is the only company where it took (!) 9 weeks (!) to convince to hand over a 4 dollar refund for book-keeping errors on their side that caused an inappropriately early account deactivation due to time zone issues on their end, while all the while telling me that they don't offer refunds. It took stacks of evidence and argument, and that was after spending two weeks in their system trying to convince every level that I was worth a human.

For me personally it'd require Dario to resort to armed mugging to see another buck out of my wallet. I'm not alone.

tl;dr : being able to convince the powers that be on highly active industry forums (hacker news, twitter, mastodon..?) to act right using the power of peer shaming doesn't good customer service make. That said -- I do appreciate the direct response/statement from mpoteat;

..I just don't appreciate the good actions of a decent individual being too broadly interpreted as the do-good customer-centric nature of Anthropic .. an element I do not believe exists there.

So money is all that matters to you? Must be an OpenAI employee or user.
"No bitch, that's a whole new sentence."
Do yourself a favor: ditch both and go local.
Local is becoming ever increasingly scarce and cost prohibitive. It's kind of bleak out there right now. A minimum bar to entry for decent local AI (something that can run a 27B tier model with some reasonable context) is going to set you back a year or five worth of AI API token costs.
The same guy writing readme's for my vibeslopped toy projects is also the readme writer at Anthropic, what a coincidence ;)
Well now, this is how you do community outreach
Ouch.

I've had to send such messages, but internally at work, not on HN!

Have a great day, human.

>Apologies again folks, this was a fully human error on my part

Blink twice if you need help

(comment deleted)
Or add one additional telemetry metric and an extra prompt
don't forget the "auto reset all consent flags to 'allowed'" oopsie bug.
> a fully human error

Would be interesting to know how much time you/your team spent on that design decision

The correct design was in the AGENTS.md but they didn't have telemetry on
I hope disabling /r if telemetry is disabled is also unintentional...
"Rollout artifact"? This is Claude-speak isn't it? I have never ever heard anyone call a bug like this a "rollout artifact" before.
I don't think "bug" is the correct term. They put a feature behind a feature flag, and feature flags don't work if you turn them off (via telemetry). That's "Working As Designed™".
It's clearly an unintended interaction. Nobody intended for the telemetry switch to control whether it reads AGENTS.md. Whether you consider that to be a "bug" or not really wasn't the point of my message.
Clearly not Claude-speak, see the rest of the message. "Rollout artifact" just means "an artifact of how we rolled this change out" which maybe isn't proper English but the message was obviously not written by Claude. Upgrade your Claudish detection
It’s a long-standing issue that disabling telemetry disabled feature-flagged features (e.g., remote control).
[delayed]
They're not fixing it, they're "changing" it, which makes sense, because the design changed.
[delayed]
Developer comms are very important. I've often "fixed" something that was working exactly as the designer made it. It certainly wasn't a bug in my work though. I've worked in places where we call this a "design omission" ;)
Design bugs are still bugs
Feels pretty normal to me, IDK. "Rollout" is definitely what was happening here, and this leftover problem can be described as an "artifact" most generally - I guess otherwise it'd be a... just "problem" or "mistake"? Plus, the Claudism here would probably involve "soak", and possibly "wall-time" lol

IMHO it's worth keeping in mind that Anthropic employees are some of the least likely to casually pass off artificial prose as authentic, given the company's ethos/brand/cover story (depending on how cynical you are). To them this is all getting pretty high stakes pretty damn quickly; based on my usage of full strength Opus 5.5 today, I can't even imagine what working with their full internal stack must feel like. If they were willing to let the machines speak for them, they'd all be melancholically lounging around home by now instead of coming in to work!

...I am refusing to consider the fact that they probably are still WFH because of Salesforce forcing their shared security contractor to strike. Call that a mental health ignorance on my part :)

How are you planning to turn this off remotely when telemetry off?
If it’s like other CC features that depend on telemetry being enabled, disabling telemetry will turn off the feature.
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people are overeacting
"Claude, deploy yourself to a bunch of idiots, f** the bugs"
Thanks for admitting to the mistake, but my understanding was that coding was fully solved now?
is it common to deploy software with a remote kill switch installed?
yes? feature flags have been a thing for a long time.
how strange.

as i said in another comment. i don't want someone to toy with my software remotely. that seems wrong to me!

i do not like others to decide that they know what is best for me. and then force it on me without my consent.

i will decide if i like your changes. if i do like your fix, i will install it.

in my car, do not remotely turn off my air conditioning. don't turn off my AGENTS.md.

Sounds like you should use opensource software then. It's a bit crazy to expect companies to limit the service and expectations of everyone else for your ideals.
limit the service is wild. the 'service'? my computer is something i am supposed to own.
Sounds like you're no better than the big software co's. Worse, even! I'm glad you don't make my browser.
Do you use chrome? Check chrome://flags
So what Anthropic calls "telemetry" is really "telechangeability"? That's sits with me even less comfortably than did the idea that some features are only available with telemetry enabled.
Not necessarily. They probably have an integrated service that handles some telemetry and also feature flags, like Braze. They toggled the whole thing off based on telemetry settings. It's a bug I've made before too.
That's just how big companies roll out software changes for software that auto-updates.

It's much preferable to be able to instantly fix it if the rollout of a new feature goes wrong than have everyone who installed the broken version bring stuck with problems until the company realizes the issue and rolls forwards with a fixed version.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html

I've used feature flags extensively throughout my career as a SaaS developer, but I've never considered their usage in desktop software. Not sure how I feel about it.
Desktop software is like web-based software, except there's no sandbox or anyone trying to protect your privacy.
I’d just assume good intent here. Feature flags, telemetry, and fast rollouts / rollbacks are standard practice in software. Have a look at chrome://flags perhaps.

I fully believe GP that there was zero intent to gate this behind collecting telemetry. Sounds like a little tech debt and a little oversight, and the simplest explanation is that it is.

You can have flags work in a pull fashion, though. At boot, and every 5 minutes, query an endpoint which returns flag values. You don't need the client to send any information about what the user is doing.
Well yes but as soon as you log this on the backend, you have telemetry, no?
There is a meaningful difference between a generic "load all flag values" call that is identical for all users and some actual telemetry which sends application context to the back-end.
Seems like they overloaded whatever they use for telemetry to do feature flags.

It’s not a crazy conspiracy. They messed up, it’s fine.

telling people Anthropic remote-control their users computers isn't the smartest thing to do
Lol that's literally the entire point of the software, you install it just so the program can talk to a remote server to make changes on your local computer.
is there reason I can't update claude to 2.1.281? I just run claude update

> claude update Current version: 2.1.280 Checking for updates to latest version... Claude Code is up to date (2.1.280)

It was obvious this was the reason, it’s a very easy thing to forget about
I can understand honest mistakes, but like, usually when I develop anything with agents (which I assume is what you're doing internally at Anthropic), they're almost too enthusiastic about trying to add test cases to the point where they sometimes try to glue together things in ways that are structurally impossible in the actual code in order to try to test that behavior. I'm honestly a bit mystified that adding a new feature didn't get bundled in with tests that the feature works for arbitrary configurations.
> Sorry folks, this is a rollout artifact

Aka: "an issue even a junior would've spotted if we didn't rely on Claude of 100% of our tasks"

there is a thing apps have called configuration file.
Shouldn't feature flags be independent of telemetry on/off? I would be real surprised if folks who have telemetry disabled would be upset if "required-for-software-to-function-normally" functionality like feature flagging itself was gated behind telemetry disablement.
This is beyond comprehension. Claude Code lately just comes across as hostage-taking, forcing users into absurd rules. I have tried hard to give it the benefit of the doubt. This is too much. It is basically poisoning the code.
Not everything is malicious. The author of the feature already responded on why this happened
I'm not the person you replied to, but your response misses their point: rollout issue aside, the approach is flawed by design. The feature author didn't address that at all.
The person had something else before they edited. They were overly negative, saying (from my memory) that it was inexcusable, and they had enough, pointing to malice.

The response as it is now sounds fair. Before that it was not.

My only edit was to point out at the start that this design is indefensible, and I added the reason why. The rest matches the original meaning. I don't think my stance changed between before and after the edit. What Claude Code did is simply wrong.
Ah, thanks for clarifying. (And shame on the GP.)
My only modification is to continue refuting at the beginning of the sentence that it is still incorrect to say Claude Code uses a remote control to control agent.md. The rest is identical to the original text. As for what he said about "had enough," I'm not sure whether he said it deliberately or really couldn't remember clearly.
My only edit was to continue refuting at the beginning of the sentence that Claude Code's use of remote control to control agent.md is still incorrect. The rest is identical to the original, and my attitude before and after has not changed.

As for whatever "had enough" he mentioned, I'm not sure whether he said it on purpose or genuinely misremembered.

Since that's how he remembers it, so be it. I can't be bothered to explain anymore.

I must have misremembered. I wish you kept the original though.

Because "Even if this was an honest rollout mistake" this is a new addition, changes meaning quite a bit.

I disagree with what you wrote now partially (your comment on claude), but it does sound fair, and i wouldn't have written what i wrote.

Claude Code also doesn't read AGENTS.md by default if there's a CLAUDE.md it can read instead. This isn't limited to your repo, e.g. if you have a ~/CLAUDE.md then no AGENTS.md will be read.

To always read both, you have to switch the 'Project instructions' setting to the non-default `claude-md-and-agents-md`.

Just in case anyone is wondering why their AGENTS.md still isn't being read.

This is not the only case where Anthropic has done stuff silently without giving users any information about changes that would hurt them.
The number of people raw-dogging software that executes arbitrary instructions on their machine coming from a 3rd party server just absolutely baffles me.

The same people who've spent years of their career making sure that never happens.

Urm... no tests caught this? How?
Claude Code Remote control only works with telemetry enabled too.
Yeah, no thank you. This was why I polished my setup for VPN -> SSH -> [MOSH] -> TMUX -> claude/codex
This in some way sounds like VSCode's bug of always adding Copilot as a co-author of git commit regardless of user settings.

If people only glance over the code agents generate for them and don't bother to spend even half a minute thinking through what's actually happening, this is inevitable.

Certainly this kind of things happened before LLMs existed. But I'm not optimistic about the direction of how things are going.

Anyway, my claude.md contains only this:

@agents.md

And I’m sure there’s no conceivable way an organization as well resourced as Anthropic can separate out feature flags from telemetry. It’s just too complicated! Maybe when we get AGI?