[HN Gopher] I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md...
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I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?
Author : hugodan
Score : 264 points
Date : 2026-01-22 18:38 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hugodaniel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hugodaniel.com)
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| bow down to our new overlords - dont' like it? banned, with no
| recourse - enjoy getting left behind, welcome to the future old
| man
| properbrew wrote:
| I didn't even get to send 1 prompt to Claude and my "account
| has been disabled after an automatic review of your recent
| activities" back in 2024, still blocked.
|
| Even filled in the appeal form, never got anything back.
|
| Still to this day don't know why I was banned, have never been
| able to use any Claude stuff. It's a big reason I'm a fan of
| local LLMs. They'll never be SOTA level, but at least they'll
| keep chugging along.
| anothereng wrote:
| just use a different email or something
| ggoo wrote:
| This happened to me too, you need a phone number
| unfortunately
| codazoda wrote:
| Since you were forced, are you getting good results from
| them?
|
| I've experimented, and I like them when I'm on an airplane or
| away from wifi, but they don't work anywhere near as well as
| Claude code, Codex CLI, or Gemini CLI.
|
| Then again, I haven't found a workable CLI with tool and MCP
| support that I could use in the same way.
|
| Edit: I was also trying local models I could run on my own
| MacBook Air. Those are a lot more limited than something like
| a larger Llama3 in some cloud provider. I hadn't done that
| yet.
| properbrew wrote:
| For writing decent code, absolutely not, maybe a simple
| bash script or the obscure flags to a command that I only
| need to run once and couldn't be bothered to google or look
| through the man page etc. I'm using smaller models for less
| coding related stuff.
|
| Thankfully OpenAI hasn't blocked me yet and I can still use
| Codex CLI. I don't think you're ever going to see that
| level of power locally (I very much hope to be wrong about
| that). I will move over to using a cloud provider with a
| large gpt-oss model or whatever is the current leader at
| the time if/when my OpenAI account gets blocked for no
| reason.
|
| The M-series chips in Macs are crazy, if you have the
| available memory you can do some cool things with some
| models, just don't be expecting to one shot a complete web
| app etc.
| falloutx wrote:
| you are never gonna hear back from Anthropic, they don't have
| any support. They are a company who feels like their model is
| AGI now they dont need humans except when it comes to paying.
| lazyfanatic42 wrote:
| this has been true for a long long time, there is a rarely any
| recourse against any technology company, most of them don't
| even have Support anymore.
| preinheimer wrote:
| > AI moderation is currently a "black box" that prioritizes
| safety over accuracy to an extreme degree.
|
| I think there's a wide spread in how that's implemented. I would
| certainly not describe Grok as a tool that's prioritized safety
| at all.
| munk-a wrote:
| You say that - and yet it has successfully guarded Elon from
| any of those pesky truths that might harm his fervently held
| beliefs. You just forgot to consider that Grok is a tool that
| prioritizes Elon's emotional safety over all other safeties.
| exe34 wrote:
| doesn't he keep having to lobotomize it for lurching to the
| left every time it gets updated with new facts?
| oasisbob wrote:
| > Like a lot of my peers I was using claude code CLI regularly
| and trying to understand how far I could go with it on my
| personal projects. Going wild, with ideas and approaches to code
| I can now try and validate at a very fast pace. Run it inside
| tmux and let it do the work while I went on to do something else
|
| This blog post could have been a tweet.
|
| I'm so so so tired of reading this style of writing.
| red_hare wrote:
| Alas, the 2016 tweet is the 2026 blog post prompt.
| LPisGood wrote:
| What about the style are you bothered by? The content seems to
| be nothing new, so maybe that is the issue, but the style
| itself seems fine, no?
| cortesoft wrote:
| I am really confused as to what happened here. The use of
| 'disabled organization' to refer to the author made it extra
| confusing.
|
| I think I kind of have an idea what the author was doing, but not
| really.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| I had to read it twice as well, I was so confused hah. I'm
| still confused
| rtkwe wrote:
| They probably organize individual accounts the same as
| organization accounts for larger groups of users at the same
| company internally since it all rolls up to one billing.
| That's my first pass guess at least.
| alistairSH wrote:
| You're not alone.
|
| I _think_ the author was doing some sort of circular prompt
| injection between two instances of Claude? The author claims
| "I'm just scaffolding a project" but that doesn't appear to be
| the case, or what resulted in the ban...
| lazyfanatic42 wrote:
| Author really comes off unhinged throughout the article to be
| frank.
| superb_dev wrote:
| Did we read the same article? The author comes of as pretty
| frustrated but not unhinged
| ryandrake wrote:
| I wouldn't say "unhinged" either, but maybe just
| struggling to organize and express thoughts clearly in
| writing. "Organizations of late capitalism, unite"?
| Bootvis wrote:
| The author was frustrated that the error message
| identified him as an organisation (that was disabled) and
| mockingly refers to himself as the (disabled)
| organisation in the post.
|
| At least, that's my reading but it appears it confuses
| about half of the commenters here.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think if one's readers need an "ironic euphemism
| decoder glossary" just to understand the message, it
| could use a little re-writing.
| layer8 wrote:
| It was perfectly understandable to me. Maybe cultural
| differences? You seem to be American, OP Portuguese, and
| myself European as well.
| ashirviskas wrote:
| Another European chiming in, I enjoyed OPs article.
| pjbeam wrote:
| My take was more a kind of amusing laughing-through-
| frustration but also enjoying the ride just a little bit
| insouciance. Tastes vary of course, but I enjoyed the
| author's tone and pacing.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Author thinks he's cute to do things like mention Google
| without typing Google but I wouldn't call him unhinged.
| rvba wrote:
| What is wrong with circular prompt injection?
|
| The "disabled organization" looks like a sarcastic comment on
| the crappy error code the author got when banned.
| darkwater wrote:
| > What is wrong with circular prompt injection?
|
| That you might be trying to jailbreak Claude and Anthropic
| does not like that (I'm not endorsing, just trying to
| understand).
| redeeman wrote:
| i have no idea what he was actually doing either, and what
| exactly is it one isnt allowed to use claude to do?
| falloutx wrote:
| This tracks with Anthropic, they are actively hostile to
| security researchers.
| Romario77 wrote:
| One Claude agent told other Claude agent via CLAUDE.md to do
| things certain way.
|
| The way Claude did it triggered the ban - i.e. it used all
| caps which apparently triggers some kind of internal alert,
| Anthropic probably has some safeguards to prevent
| hacking/prompt injection and what the first Claude did to
| CLAUDE.md triggered this safeguard.
|
| And it doesn't look like it was a proper use of the
| safeguard, they banned for no good reason.
| layer8 wrote:
| It wasn't circular. TFA explains how the author was always in
| the loop. He had one Claude instance rewrite the CLAUDE.MD of
| another Claude instance whenever the second one made a
| mistake, but relaying the mistake to the first instance
| (after recognizing it in the first place) was done manually
| by the author.
| healsdata wrote:
| The author code have easily shared the last version of
| Claude.md that had the all caps or whatever, but didn't.
| Points to something fishy in my mind.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Agreed, I found this rather incoherent and seeming to depend on
| knowing a lot more about author's project/background.
| cr3ative wrote:
| Right. This is almost unreadable. There are words, but the
| author seems to be too far down a rabbit hole to communicate
| the problem properly...
| superb_dev wrote:
| The author was using instance A of Claude to update a
| `claude.md` while another instance B of Claude was consuming
| that file. When Claude B did something wrong, the author asked
| Claude A to update the `claude.md` so that Claude B didn't make
| the same mistake again
| raincole wrote:
| Which shouldn't be bannable imo. Rate throttle is a more
| reasonable response. But Anthropic didn't reply to the
| author, so we don't even know if it's the real reason they
| got banned.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >if it's the real reason they got banned.
|
| I mean, what a country should do it put a law in effect. If
| you ban a user, the user can submit a request with their
| government issued ID and you must give an exact reason why
| they were banned. The company can keep this record in
| encrypted form for 10 years.
|
| Failure to give the exact reason will lead to a $100,000
| fine for the first offense and increase from there up to
| suspension of operations privileges in said country.
|
| "But, but, but hackers/spammers will abuse this". For one,
| boo fucking hoo. For two, just add to the bill "Fraudulent
| use of law to bypass system restrictions is a criminal
| offense".
|
| This puts companies in a position where they must be able
| to justify their actual actions, and it also puts scammers
| at risk if they abuse the system.
| benjiro wrote:
| Companies will simply give some kind of standard answer,
| that is legally "cover our butts" and be done with it.
|
| Its like that cookie wall stuff, how much dark patterns
| are implemented. They followed the letter of the law, not
| the spirit of the law.
|
| To be honest, i can also see the point from the company
| side. Giving a honest answer can just anger people, to
| the point they sue. People are often not as rational as
| we all like our fellow humans to be.
|
| Even if the ex-client lose in court, that is how much
| time you wasted on issue clients... Its one thing if your
| a big corporation with tons of lawyers but small
| companies are often not in the position to deal with that
| drama. And it can take years to resolve. Every letter,
| every phone call to a lawyer, it stacks up fast! Do you
| get your money back? Maybe, depends on the country, but
| your time?
|
| I am not pro companies but its often simply better to
| have the attitude "you do not want me as your client, let
| me advocate for your competitor and go there".
| Aurornis wrote:
| More likely explanation: Their account was closed for some
| other reason, but it went into effect as they were trying
| this. They assumed the last thing they were doing triggered
| the ban.
| tstrimple wrote:
| This does sound sus. I have CC update other project's
| claude.md files all the time. I've got a game engine that
| I'm tinkering with. The engine and each of the game
| concepts I play around with have their own claude.md. The
| purpose of writing the games is to enhance the engine, so
| the games have to be familiar with the engine and often
| engine features come from the game CC rather than the
| engine CC. To keep the engine CC from becoming "lost" about
| features implemented each game project has instructions to
| update the engine's claude.md when adding / updating
| features. The engine CC bootstraps new game projects with a
| claude.md file instructing it how to keep the engine in
| sync with game changes as well as details of what that
| particular game is designed to test or implement within the
| engine. All sorts of projects writing to other project's
| claude.md files.
| schnebbau wrote:
| They were probably using an unapproved harness, which are
| now banned.
| olalonde wrote:
| I don't understand how having two separate instances of
| Claude helps here. I can understand using multiple Claude
| instances to work in parallel but in this case, it seems all
| this process is linear...
| layer8 wrote:
| The point is to get better prompt corrections by not
| sharing the same context.
| exitb wrote:
| Normally you can customize the agents behavior via a CLAUDE.md
| file. OP automated that process by having another agent
| customize the first agent. The customizer agent got pushy, the
| customized agent got offended, OP got banned.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Years ago I was involved in a service where we some times had
| to disable accounts for abusive behavior. I'm talking about
| obvious abusive behavior, akin to griefing other users.
|
| Every once in while someone would take it personally and go on
| a social media rampage. The one thing I learned from being on
| the other side of this is that if someone seems like an
| unreliable narrator, they probably are. They know the company
| can't or won't reveal the true reason they were banned, so
| they're virtually free to tell any story they want.
|
| There are so many things about this article that don't make
| sense:
|
| > I'm glad this happened with this particular non-disabled-
| organization. Because if this by chance had happened with the
| other non-disabled-organization that also provides such
| tools... then I would be out of e-mail, photos, documents, and
| phone OS.
|
| I can't even understand what they're trying to communicate. I
| guess they're referring to Google?
|
| There is, without a doubt, more to this story than is being
| relayed.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The excerpt you don't understand is saying that if it has
| been Google rather than Anthropic, the blast radius of the
| no-explanation account nuking would have been much greater.
|
| It's written deliberately elliptically for humorous effect
| (which, sure, will probably fall flat for a lot of people),
| but the reference is unmistakable.
| fluoridation wrote:
| "I'm glad this happened with Anthropic instead of Google,
| which provides Gemini, email, etc. or I would have been
| locked out of the actually important non-AI services as
| well."
|
| Non-disabled organization = the first party provider
|
| Disabled organization = me
|
| I don't know why they're using these weird euphemisms or
| ironic monikers, but that's what they mean.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Because they bought a claude subscription on a personal
| account and the error message said that they belongs to a
| "disabled organization" (probably leaking some
| implementation details).
| nawgz wrote:
| > I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to
| griefing other users
|
| Right, but we're talking about a private isolated AI account.
| There is no sense of social interaction, collaboration,
| shared spaces, shared behaviors... Nothing. How can you have
| such an analogue here?
| Aurornis wrote:
| Plenty of reasons: Abusing private APIs, using false info
| to sign up (attempts to circumvent local regulations), etc.
| nawgz wrote:
| These are in no way similar to griefing other users, they
| are attacks on the platform...
| Romario77 wrote:
| You are confused because the message from Claude is confusing.
| Author is not an organization, they had an account with
| anthropic which got disabled and Anthropic addressed them as
| organization.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Author is not an organization, they had an account with
| anthropic which got disabled and Anthropic addressed them as
| organization.
|
| Anthropic accounts are always associated with an
| organization; for personal accounts the Organization and User
| name are identical. If you have an Anthropic API account, you
| can verify this in the Settings pane of the Dashboard (or
| even just look at the profile button which shows the org and
| account name.)
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've always kind of hated that anti-pattern in other
| software I use for peronal/hobby purposes, too. "What is
| your company name? [required]" I don't have a company! I'm
| just playing around with your tool on my own! I'm not an
| organization!
| ankit219 wrote:
| My rudimentary guess is this. When you write in all caps, it
| triggers sort of a alert at Anthropic, especially as an attempt
| to hijack system prompt. When one claude was writing to other,
| it resorted to all caps, which triggered the alert, and then
| the context was instructing the model to do something (which
| likely would be similar to a prompt injection attack) and that
| triggered the ban. not just caps part, but that in combination
| of trying to change the system characteristics of claude. OP
| does not know much better because it seems he wasn't closely
| watching what claude was writing to other file.
|
| if this is true, the learning is opus 4.5 can hijack system
| prompts of other models.
| kstenerud wrote:
| > When you write in all caps, it triggers sort of a alert at
| Anthropic
|
| I find this confusing. Why would writing in all caps trigger
| an alert? What danger does caps incur? Does writing in caps
| make a prompt injection more likely to succeed?
| ankit219 wrote:
| from what i know, it used to be that if you want to
| assertively instruct, you used all caps. I don't know if it
| succeeds today. I still see prompts where certain words are
| capitalized to ensure model pays attention. What i mean was
| not just capitalization, but a combination of both
| capitalization and changing the behavior of the model for
| trying to get it to do something.
|
| if you were to design a system to prevent prompt injections
| and one of surefire ways is to repeatedly give instructions
| in caps, you would have systems dealing with it. And with
| instructions to change behavior, it cascades.
| phreack wrote:
| Wait what? Really? All caps is a bannable offense? That
| should be in all caps, pardon me, in the terms of use if
| that's the case. Even more so since there's no support at the
| highest price point.
| ankit219 wrote:
| Its a combination. All caps is used in prompts for extra
| insistence, and has been common in cases of prompt
| hijacking. OP was doing it in combination with attempting
| to direct claude a certain way, multiple times, which
| _might have looked_ similar to attempting to bypass teh
| system prompt.
| mmkos wrote:
| You and me, brother. The writing is unnecessarily convoluted.
| vimda wrote:
| Yeah, referring to yourself once as a "disabled organisation"
| is a good bit, referencing anthropics silly terminology.
| Keeping it for the duration made this a very hard follow
| verdverm wrote:
| Sounds like OP has multiple org accounts with Anthropic.
|
| The main one in the story (disabled) is banned because
| iterating on claude.md files looks a lot like iterating on
| prompt injections, especially as it sounds the multiple
| Claude's got into it with each other a bit
|
| The other org sounds like the primary account with all the
| important stuff. Good on OP for doing this work in a separate
| org, a good recommendation across a lot of vendors and
| products.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| They don't actually _know_ this is why they were banned:
|
| > _My guess is that this likely tripped the "Prompt Injection"
| heuristics that the non-disabled organization has._
|
| > _Or I don 't know. This is all just a guess from me._
|
| And no response from support.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| So you were generating and evaluating the performance of your
| CLAUDE.md files? And you got banned for it?
| alistairSH wrote:
| It reads like he had a circular prompt process running, where
| multiple instances of Claude were solving problems, feeding
| results to each other, and possibly updating each other's
| control files?
| epolanski wrote:
| What would be bad in that?
|
| Writing the best possible specs for these agents seems the
| most productive goal they could achieve.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| I think the idea is fine, but what _might_ end up happening
| is that one agent gets unhinged and "asks" another agent
| to do more and more crazy stuff, and they get in a loop
| where everything gets flagged. Remember that "bots
| configured to add a book at +0.01$ on amazon, reached 1M$
| for the book" a while ago. Kinda like that, but with
| prompts.
| epolanski wrote:
| I still don't get it, get your models better for this far
| fetched case, don't ban users for a legitimate use case.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Nothing necessarily or obviously bad about it, just trying
| to think through what went wrong.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| Could anyone explain to me what the problem is with this? I
| thought I was fairly up to date on these things, but this was
| a surprise to me. I see the sibling comment getting downvoted
| but I promise I'm asking this in good faith, even if it might
| seem like a silly question (?) for some reason.
| alistairSH wrote:
| From what I'm reading in other comments, the problem was
| Claude1 got increasingly "frustrated" with Claude2's
| inability to do whatever the human was asking, and started
| breaking it's own rules (using ALL CAPS).
|
| Sort of like MS's old chatbot that turned into a Nazi
| overnight, but this time with one agent simply getting
| tired of the other agent's lack of progress (for some
| definition of progress - I'm still not entirely sure what
| the author was feeding into Claude1 alongside errors from
| Claude2).
| Hackbraten wrote:
| They were trying to optimize a CLAUDE.md file which belonged
| to a project template. The outer Claude instance iterated on
| the file. To test the result, the human in the loop
| instantiated a new project from the template, launched an
| inner Claude instance along with the new project, assessed
| whether inner Claude worked as expected with the CLAUDE.md in
| the freshly generated project. They then gave the feedback
| back to outer Claude.
|
| So, no circular prompt feeding at all. Just a normal iterate-
| test-repeat loop that happened to involve two agents.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I think it's more likely that their account was disabled for
| other reasons, but they blamed the last thing they were doing
| before the account was closed.
| red_hare wrote:
| This feels... reasonable? You're in their shop (Opus 4.5) and
| they can kick you out without cause.
|
| But Claude Code (the app) will work with a self-hosted open
| source model and a compatible gateway. I'd just move to doing
| that.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Sure, but it also guarantees that people will think twice about
| buying their service. Support should have reached out and
| informed them about whatever they did wrong, but I can't say
| that I'm surprised that an AI company wouldn't have an real
| support.
|
| I'd agree with you that if you rely on an LLM to do your work,
| you better be running that thing yourself.
| viccis wrote:
| Not sure what your point is. They have the right to kick OP
| out. OP has the right to post about it. We have a right to make
| decisions on what service to use based on posts like these.
|
| Pointing out whether someone _can_ do something is the lowest
| form of discourse, as it 's usually just tautological. "The
| shop owner decides who can be in the shop because they own it."
| areoform wrote:
| I recently found out that there's no such thing as Anthropic
| support. And that made me sad, but not for reasons that you
| expect.
|
| Out of all of the tech organizations, frontier labs are the one
| org you'd expect to be trying out cutting edge forms of support.
| Out of all of the different things these agents can do, surely
| most forms of "routine" customer support are the lowest hanging
| fruit?
|
| I think it's possible for Anthropic to make the kind of
| experience that delights customers. Service that feels magical.
| Claude is such an incredible breakthrough, and I would be very
| interested in seeing what Anthropic can do with Claude let loose.
|
| I also think it's essential for the anthropic platform in the
| long-run. And not just in the obvious ways (customer loyalty
| etc). I don't know if anyone has brought this up at Anthropic,
| but it's such a huge risk for Anthropic's long-term strategic
| position. They're begging corporate decision makers to ask the
| question, "If Anthropic doesn't trust Claude to run its support,
| then why should we?"
| lukan wrote:
| I would say it is a strong sign, they do not trust their agent
| yet, to allow them significant buisness decisions, that a
| support agent would have to do. Reopening accounts, closing
| them, refunds, .. people would immediately start to try to
| exploit them. And will likely succeed.
| atonse wrote:
| My guess is that it's more "we are right now using every
| talented individual right now to make sure our datacenters
| don't burn down from all the demand. we'll get to support
| soon once we can come up for air"
|
| But at the same time, they have been hiring folks to help
| with Non Profits, etc.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Claude is an amazing _coding_ model, its other abilities are
| middling. Anthropic 's strategy seems to be to just focus on
| coding, and they do it well.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Anthropic's strategy seems to be to just focus on coding,
| and they do it well.
|
| Based on their homepage, that doesn't seem to be true at all.
| Claude Code yes, focuses just on programming, but for
| "Claude" it seems they're marketing as a general "problem
| solving" tool, not just for coding.
| https://claude.com/product/overview
| Ethee wrote:
| Isn't this the case for almost every product ever? Company
| makes product -> markets as widely as possible -> only
| niche group become power users/find market fit. I don't see
| a problem with this. Marketing doesn't always have to tell
| the full story, sometimes the reality of your products
| capabilities and what the people giving you money want
| aren't always aligned.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Anthropic isn't bothering with image models, audio models,
| video models, world models. They don't have science/math
| models, they don't bother with mathematics competitions,
| and they don't have open model models either.
|
| Anthropic has claude code, it's a hit product, SWE's love
| claude models. Watching Anthropic rather than listening to
| them makes their goals clear.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Interesting. Would anyone care to chime in with their opinion
| of the best all-rounder model?
| WarmWash wrote:
| You'll get 30 different opinions and all those will
| disagree with each other.
|
| Use the top models and see what works for you.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Critically, this _has_ to be their play, because there are
| several other big players in the "commodity LLM" space. They
| need to find a niche or there is no reason to stick with
| them.
|
| OpenAI has been chaotically trying to pivot to more
| diversified products and revenue sources, and hasn't focused
| a ton on code/DevEx. This is a huge gap for Anthropic to
| exploit. But there are still competitors. So they _have_ to
| provide a better experience, better product. They need to
| make people want to use them over others.
|
| Famously people hate Google because of their lack of support
| and impersonality. And OpenAI also seems to be very
| impersonal; there's no way to track bugs you report in
| ChatGPT, no tickets, you have no idea if the pain you're
| feeling is being worked on. Anthropic can easily make
| themselves stand out from Gemini and ChatGPT by just being
| more human.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| > Out of all of the different things these agents can do,
| surely most forms of "routine" customer support are the lowest
| hanging fruit?
|
| I come from a world where customer support is a significant
| expense for operations and everyone was SO excited to implement
| AI for this. It doesn't work particularly well and shows a
| profound gap between what people think working in customer
| service is like and how fucking hard it actually is.
|
| Honestly, AI is better at replacing the cost of upper-middle
| management and executives than it is the customer service
| problems.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > shows a profound gap between what people think working in
| customer service is like and how fucking hard it actually is
|
| Nicely fitting the pattern where everyone who is bullish on
| AI seems to think that everyone else's specialty is ripe for
| AI takeover (but not my specialty! my field is
| special/unique!)
| 0xferruccio wrote:
| to be fair at least half of the software engineers i know
| are facing some level of existential crisis when seeing how
| well claude code works, and what it means for their job in
| the long term
|
| and these are people are not junior developers working on
| trivial apps
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Yeah, I've watched a few peers go down this spiral as
| well. I'm not sure _why_ , because my experience is that
| Claude Code and friends are building a lifetime of job
| security for staff-level folks, unscrewing every org that
| decided to over-delegate to the machine
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Perhaps even more-so given the following tagline,
| "Honestly, AI is better at replacing the cost of upper-
| middle management and executives than it is the customer
| service problems", lol. I suppose it's possible
| eightysixfour is an upper-middle management executive
| though.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Consultant to, so yes. It could have replaced me and a
| ton of the work of the people I was supporting.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Ah I see, that definitely lends some weight claim then.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I was closer to upper-middle management and executives, it
| could have done the things I did (consultant to those
| people) and that they did.
|
| It couldn't/shouldn't be responsible for the people
| management aspect but the decisions and planning? Honestly,
| no problem.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > bullish [...] but not my specialty
|
| IMO we can augment this criticism by asking _which tasks_
| the technology was demoed on that made them so excited in
| the first place, and how much of their own job is doing
| those same tasks--even if they don 't want to admit it.
|
| __________
|
| 1. "To evaluate these tools, I shall apply them to
| composing meeting memos and skimming lots of incoming
| e-mails."
|
| 2. "Wow! Look at them go! This is the Next Big Thing for
| the whole industry."
|
| 3. "Concerned? Me? Nah, memos and e-mails are things
| _everybody_ does just as much as I do, right? My _real_ job
| is _Leadership_! "
|
| 4. "Anyway, this is gonna be huge for replacing staff that
| have easier jobs like diagnosing customer problems. A dozen
| of them are a bigger expense than just one of me anyway."
| pixl97 wrote:
| As someone who does support I think the end result looks a
| lot different.
|
| AI, for a lot of support questions works quite well and
| does solve lots of problems in almost every field that
| needs support. The issue is this commonly removes the
| roadblocks from your users being cautious to doing
| something incredibly stupid that needs support to
| understand what they hell they've actually done. Kind of a
| Jeavons Paradox of support resources.
|
| AI/LLMs also seem to be very good at pulling out
| information on trends in support and what needs to be sent
| for devs to work on. There are practical tests you can
| perform on datasets to see if it would be effective for
| your workloads.
|
| The company I work at did an experiment on looking at past
| tickets in a quarterly range and predicting which issues
| would generate the most tickets in the next quarter and
| which issues should be addressed. In testing the AI did as
| well or better than the predictions we had made that the
| time and called out a number of things we deemed less
| important that had large impacts in the future.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I think that's more the area I'd expect genAI to be
| useful (support folks using it as a tool to address
| specific scenarios), rather than just replacing your
| whole support org with a branded chatbot - which I fear
| is what quite a few management types are picturing, and
| licking their chops at the resulting cost savings...
| danielbln wrote:
| There are some solid usecases for AI in support, like
| document/inquiry triage and categorization, entity
| extraction, even the dreaded chatbots can be made to not be
| frustrating, and voice as well. But these things also need to
| be implemented with customer support stakeholders that are on
| board, not just pushed down the gullet by top brass.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Yes but no. Do you know how many people call support in
| legacy industries, ignore the voice prompt, and demand to
| speak to a person to pay their recurring, same-cost-every-
| month bill? It is honestly shocking.
|
| There are legitimate support cases that could be made
| better with AI but just getting to them is honestly harder
| than I thought when I was first exposed. It will be a
| while.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Demanding a person on the phone use the website on your
| behalf is a great life hack, I do it all the time. Often
| they try to turn me away saying _" you know you can do
| this on our website"_, I just explain that I found it
| confusing and would like help. If you're polite and
| pleasant, people will bend over backwards to help you out
| over the phone.
|
| With "legacy industries" in particular, their websites
| are usually so busted with short session timeouts/etc
| that it's worth spending a few minutes on hold to get
| somebody else to do it.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Sorry, I disagree here. For the specific flow I'm talking
| about - monthly recurring payments - the UX is about as
| highly optimized for success as it gets. There are ways
| to do it via the web, on the phone with a bot, bill pay
| in your own bank, set it up in-store, in an app, etc.
|
| These people don't want the thing done, they want to talk
| to someone on the phone. The monthly payment is an excuse
| to do so. I know, we did the customer research on it.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Recurring monthly payments I set to go automatic, but
| setting that up in the first place I usually do through a
| phone call. I know some people just want somebody to talk
| to, same as going through the normal checkout lines at
| the grocery store, but I think an equally large part of
| this is people just wanting somebody else to do the work
| (using the website, or scanning groceries) for them.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| > but I think an equally large part of this is people
| just wanting somebody else to do the work (using the
| website, or scanning groceries) for them.
|
| Again, this is something my firm studied. Not UX
| "interviews," actual behavioral studies with observation,
| different interventions, etc. When you're operating at
| utility scale there are a non-negligible number of
| customers who will do more work to talk to a human than
| to accomplish the task. It isn't about work, ease of use,
| or anything else - they legitimately just want to talk.
|
| There are also some customers who will do whatever they
| can to avoid talking to a human, but that's a different
| problem than we're talking about.
|
| But this is a digression from my main point. Most of the
| "easy things" AI _can_ do for customer support are things
| that are already easily solved in other places, people
| (like you) are choosing not to use those solutions, and
| adding AI doesn 't reduce the number of calls that make
| it to your customer service team, even when it is an
| objectively better experience that "does the work."
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| >Honestly, AI is better at replacing the cost of upper-middle
| management and executives than it is the customer service
| problems.
|
| Sure, but when the power of decision making rests with that
| group of people, you have to market it as "replace your
| engineers". Imagine engineers trying to convince management
| to license "AI that will replace large chunks of management"?
| munk-a wrote:
| > They're begging corporate decision makers to ask the
| question, "If Anthropic doesn't trust Claude to run its
| support, then why should we?"
|
| Don't worry - I'm sure they won't and those stakeholders will
| feel confident in their enlightened decision to send their most
| frustrated customers through a chatbot that repeatedly asks
| them for detailed and irrelevant information and won't let them
| proceed to any other support levels until it is provided.
|
| I, for one, welcome our new helpful overlords that have very
| reasonably asked me for my highschool transcript and a ten page
| paper on why I think the bug happened before letting me talk to
| a real person. That's efficiency.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| > to send their most frustrated customers through a chatbot
|
| But do those frustrated customers matter?
| munk-a wrote:
| I just checked - frustrated customers isn't a metric we
| track for performance incentives so no, they do not.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Even if you do track them, if 0.1% of customers are
| unhappy and contacting support, that's not worth any kind
| of thought when AI is such an open space at the moment.
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9015913-how-to-get-su...
|
| Their support includes talking to Fin, their AI support with
| escalations to humans as needed. I dont use Claude and have
| never used the support bot, but their docs say they have
| support.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Eh, I can see support simply not being worth any real effort,
| i.e. having nobody working on it full time.
|
| I worked for a unicorn tech company where they determined that
| anyone with under 50,000 ARR was too unsophisticated to be
| worth offering support. Their emails were sent straight to the
| bin until they quit. The support queue was entirely for their
| psychological support/to buy a few months of extra revenue.
|
| It didn't matter what their problems were. Supporting smaller
| people simply wasn't worth the effort statistically.
|
| > I think it's possible for Anthropic to make the kind of
| experience that delights customers. Service that feels magical.
| Claude is such an incredible breakthrough, and I would be very
| interested in seeing what Anthropic can do with Claude let
| loose.
|
| Are there enough people who need support that it matters?
| pixl97 wrote:
| >I worked for a unicorn tech company where they determined
| that anyone with under 50,000 ARR was too unsophisticated to
| be worth offering support.
|
| In companies where your average ARR is 500k+ and large
| customers are in the millions, it may not be a bad strategy.
|
| 'Good' support agents may be cheaper than programmers, but
| not by that much. The issues small clients have can quite
| often be as complicated as and eat up as much time as your
| larger clients depending on what the industry is.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > I recently found out that there's no such thing as Anthropic
| support.
|
| The article discusses using Anthropic support. Without much
| satisfaction, but it seems like you "recently found out"
| something false.
| kmoser wrote:
| If you want to split hairs, it seem that Anthropic has
| support as a noun but not as a verb.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I mean the comment says they literally don't have support
| and also complains they don't have a support bot, when they
| have both.
|
| https://support.claude.com/en/collections/4078531-claude
|
| > As a paid user of Claude or the Console, you have full
| access to:
|
| > All help documentation
|
| > Fin, our AI support bot
|
| > Further assistance from our Product Support team
|
| > Note: While we don't offer phone or live chat support,
| our Product Support team will gladly assist you through our
| support messenger.
| csours wrote:
| Human attention will be the luxury product of the next decade.
| Lerc wrote:
| There is a discord, but I have not found it to be the
| friendliest of places.
|
| At one point I observed a conversation which, to me, seemed to
| be a user attempting to communicate in a good faith manner who
| was given instructions that they clearly did not understand,
| and then were subsequently banned for not following the rules.
|
| It seems now they have a policy of Warning on
| First Offense - Ban on Second Offense The following
| behaviors will result in a warning. Continued
| violations will result in a permanent ban:
| Disrespectful or dismissive comments toward other members
| Personal attacks or heated arguments that cross the line
| Minor rule violations (off-topic posting, light self-promotion)
| Behavior that derails productive conversation
| Unnecessary @-mentions of moderators or Anthropic staff
|
| I'm not sure how many groups moderate in a manner that a second
| offence off-topic comment is worthy of a ban. It seems a little
| harsh. I'm not a fan of obviously subjective banable offences.
|
| I'm a little surprised that Anthropic hasn't fostered a more
| welcoming community. Everyone is learning this stuff new,
| together or not. There is plenty of opportunity for people to
| help each other.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Just stop using Anthropic. Claude Code is crap because they keep
| putting in dumb limits for Opus.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You are lucky they refunded you. Imagine they didn't ban you and
| you continued to pay 220 a month.
|
| I once tried Claude made a new account and asked it to create a
| sample program it refused. I asked it to create a simple game and
| it refused. I asked it to create anything and it refused.
|
| For playing around just go local and write your own multi agent
| wrapper. Much more fun and it opens many more possibilities with
| uncensored llms. Things will take longer but you'll end up at the
| same place.. with a mostly working piece of code you never want
| to look at.
| bee_rider wrote:
| LLMs are kind of fun to play with (this is a website for nerds,
| who among us doesn't find a computer that talks back kind of
| fun), but I don't really understand why people pay for these
| hosted versions. While the tech is still nascent, why not do a
| local install and learn how everything works?
| causalmodels wrote:
| Because my local is a laptop and doesn't have a GPU cluster
| or TPU pod attached to it.
| exe34 wrote:
| Claude code with opus is a completely different creature from
| aider with qwen on a 3090.
|
| The latter writes code. the former solves problems with code,
| and keeps growing the codebase with new features. (until I
| lose control of the complexity and each subsequent call uses
| up more and more tokens)
| joshribakoff wrote:
| Anthropic is lucky their credit card processor has not cut them
| off due to excessive disputes that stem from their non existent
| support.
| languagehacker wrote:
| Thinking 220GBP for a high-limit Claude account is the kind of
| thinking that really takes for granted the amount of compute
| power being used by these services. That's _WITH_ the "spending
| other people's money" discount that most new companies start
| folks off with. The fact that so many are painfully ignorant of
| the true externalities of these technologies and their real price
| never ceases to amaze me.
| rtkwe wrote:
| That's the problem with all the LLM based AI's the cost to run
| them is huge compared to what people actually feel they're
| worth based on what they're able to do and the gap seems pretty
| large between the two imo.
| landryraccoon wrote:
| This blog post feels really fishy to me.
|
| It's quite light on specifics. It should have been
| straightforward for the author to excerpt some of the prompts he
| was submitting, to show how innocent they are.
|
| For all I know, the author was asking Claude for instructions on
| extremely sketchy activity. We only have his word that he was
| being honest and innocent.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > It should have been straightforward for the author to excerpt
| some of the prompts he was submitting
|
| If you read to the end of the article, he links the committed
| file that generates the CLAUDE.md in question.
| foxglacier wrote:
| It doesn't even matter. The point is you can't just use SAAS
| product freely like you can use local software because they all
| have complex vague T&C and will ban you for whatever reason
| they feel like. You're force to stifle your usage and thinking
| to fit the most banal acceptable-seeming behavior just in case.
|
| Maybe the problem was using automation without the API? You can
| do that freely with local software using software to click
| buttons and it's completely fine, but with a SAAS, they let you
| then ban you.
| ta988 wrote:
| There will always be the "ones" that come with their victim
| blaming...
| mikkupikku wrote:
| It's not "victim blaming" to point out that we lack
| sufficient information to really know who the victim even is,
| or if there's one at all. Believing complainants uncritically
| isn't some sort of virtue you can reasonably expect people to
| adhere to.
|
| (My bet is that Anthropic's automated systems erred, but the
| author's flamboyant manner of writing (particularly the way
| he keeps making a big deal out of an error message calling
| him an organization, turning it into a recurring bit where he
| calls himself that) did raise my eyebrow. It reminded me of
| the faux outrage some people sometimes use to distract people
| from something else.)
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Skip to the end of the article.
|
| He says himself that this is a guess and provides the
| "missing" information if you are actually interested in it.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I read it, and it's not enough to make a judgement either
| way. For all we know none of this had anything to do with
| his ban and he was banned for something he did the day
| before. There's no way for third parties to be sure of
| anything in this kind of situation, where one party
| shares only the information they wish and the other side
| stays silent as a matter of default corporate policy.
|
| I am _not_ saying that the author was in the wrong and
| deserved to be banned. I 'm saying that neither I nor you
| can know for sure.
| exe34 wrote:
| we don't know your true motivations for making this
| series of posts and doubling down - and yet we give you
| the benefit of the doubt.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Asserting that somebody is "victim blaming" isn't giving
| somebody the benifit of the doubt, and in the context of
| a scenario were few if any relevant facts are known
| reveals a very credulous mindset.
| hotpotat wrote:
| I understand where you're coming from, but anecdotally the same
| thing happened to me except I have less clarity on why and no
| refund. I got an email back saying my appeal was rejected with
| no recourse. I was paying for max and using it for multiple
| projects, no other thing stands out to me as a cause for
| getting blocked. Guess you'll have to take my word for it to,
| it's hard to prove the non-existence of definitely-problematic
| prompts.
| jeffwask wrote:
| What's fishy? That it's impossible to talk to an actual human
| being to get support from most of Big Tech or that support is
| no longer a normal expectation or that you can get locked out
| of your email, payment systems, phone and have zero recourse.
|
| Because if you don't believe that boy, do I have some stories
| for you.
| heliumtera wrote:
| Well at least they didn't email the press and called the FBI on
| you?
| onraglanroad wrote:
| So you have two AIs. Let's call them Claude and Hal. Whenever
| Claude gets something wrong, Hal is shown what went wrong and
| asked to rewrite the claude.md prompt to get Claude to do it
| right. Eventually Hal starts shouting at Claude.
|
| Why is this inevitable? Because Hal only ever sees Claude's
| failures and none of the successes. So of course Hal gets
| frustrated and angry that Claude continually gets everything
| wrong no matter how Hal prompts him.
|
| (Of course it's not really getting frustrated and annoyed, but a
| person would, so Hal plays that role)
| staticman2 wrote:
| I don't think it's inevitable often the AI will just keep
| looping again and again. It can happily without frustration
| loop forever.
| gpm wrote:
| I assume old failures aren't kept in the context window at all,
| for the simple reason that the context window isn't that big.
| rsync wrote:
| You mean the throwaway pseudonym you signed up with was banned,
| right?
|
| ... _right_ ?
| quantum_state wrote:
| Is it time to move to open source and run model locally with an
| DGX Spark?
| blindriver wrote:
| Every single open source model I've used is nowhere close to as
| good as the big AI companies. They are about 2 years behind or
| more and unreliable. I'm using the large parameters ones on a
| 512GB Mac Studio and the results are still poor.
| f311a wrote:
| Why are so many people so obsessed with feeding as many
| prompts/data as possible to LLMs and generating millions of lines
| of code?
|
| What are you gonna do with the results that are usually slop?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| If the slop passes my tests, then I'm going to use it for
| precisely the role that motivated the creation of it in the
| first place. If the slop is functional then I don't care that
| it's slop.
|
| I've replaced half my desktop environment with this manner of
| slop, custom made for my idiosyncratic tastes and preferences.
| blindriver wrote:
| There needs to be a law that prevents companies from simply
| banning you, especially when it's an important company. There
| should be an explanation and they shouldn't be allowed to hide
| behind some veil. There should be a real process with real humans
| that allow for appeals etc instead of scripts and bots and
| automated replies.
| writeslowly wrote:
| I've triggered similar conversation level safety blocks on a
| personal Claude account by using an instance of Deepseek to feed
| in Claude output and then create instructions that would be
| copied back over to Claude (there wasn't any real utility to
| this, it was just an experiment). Which sounds kind of similar to
| this. I couldn't understand what the heuristic was trying to
| guard against, but I think it's related to concerns about prompt
| injections and users impersonating Claude responses. I'm also
| surprised the same safeguards would exist in either the API or
| coding subscription.
| lukashahnart wrote:
| > I got my EUR220 back (ouch that's a lot of money for this kind
| of service, thanks capitalism).
|
| I'm not sure I understand the jab here at capitalism. If you
| don't want to pay that, then don't.
|
| Isn't that the point of capitalism?
| exe34 wrote:
| that's not what capitalism mean. you might be thinking of a
| free market.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Another instance of "Risk Department Maoism".
|
| If you're wondering, the "risk department" means people in an
| organization who are responsible for finding and firing customers
| who are either engaged in illegal behavior, scamming the
| business, or both. They're like mall rent-a-cops, in that they
| don't have any real power beyond kicking you out, and they don't
| have any investigatory powers either. But this lack of power also
| means the only effective enforcement strategy is summary
| judgment, at scale with no legal recourse. And the rules have to
| be secret, with inconsistent enforcement, to make honest
| customers second-guess themselves into doing something risky.
| "You know what you did."
|
| Of course, the flipside of this is that we have no idea what the
| fuck Hugo Daniel was actually doing. Anthropic knows more than we
| do, in fact: they at least have the Claude.md files he was
| generating and the prompts used to generate them. It's entirely
| possible that these prompts were about how to write malware or
| something else equally illegal. Or, alternatively, Anthropic's
| risk department is just a handful of log analysis tools running
| on autopilot that gave no consideration to what was in this guy's
| prompts and just banned him for the behavior he thinks he was
| banned for.
|
| Because the risk department is an unaccountable secret police,
| the only recourse for their actions is to make hay in the media.
| But that's not scalable. There isn't enough space in the
| newspaper for everyone who gets banned to complain about it, no
| matter how egregious their case is. So we get all these vague
| blog posts about getting banned for seemingly innocuous behavior
| that could actually be fraud.
| jitl wrote:
| I always take these sorts of "oh no I was banned while doing
| something innocent" posts with a large helping of salt. At least
| the ones where someone is complaining about a ban from Stripe,
| usually it turns out they are doing something that either
| violates the terms of service or is actually fraudulent. None the
| less its quite frustrating dealing with these because either way.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It would at least be nice to know exactly what you did wrong.
| This whole "You did something wrong. Please read our 200 page
| Terms of Service doc and guess which one you violated." crap is
| not helpful and doesn't give me (as an unrelated third party)
| any confidence that I won't be the next person to step on a
| land mine.
| jordemort wrote:
| Forget the ethical or environmental concerns, I don't want to
| mess with LLMs because it seems like everyone who goes heavy on
| them ends up sounding like they're on the verge of cracking up.
| omer_balyali wrote:
| Similar thing happened to me back in November 19 shortly after
| GitHub outage (which sent CC into repeated requests and time outs
| to GitHub) while beta testing Claude Code Web.
|
| Banned and appeal declined without any real explanation to what
| happened, other than saying "violation of ToS" which can be
| basically anything, except there was really nothing to trigger
| that, other than using their most of the free credits they gave
| to test CC Web in less than a week. (No third party tools or VPN
| or anything really) There were many people had similar issues at
| the same time, reported on Reddit, so it wasn't an isolated case.
|
| Companies and their brand teams work hard to create trust, then
| an automated false-positive can break that trust in a second.
|
| As their ads say: "Keep thinking. There has never been a better
| time to have a problem."
|
| I've been thinking since then, what was the problem. But I guess
| I will "Keep thinking".
| bastard_op wrote:
| I've been doing something a lot like this, using a claude-desktop
| instance attached to my personal mcp server to spawn claude-code
| worker nodes for things, and for a month or two now it's been
| working great using the main desktop chat as a project manager of
| sorts. I even started paying for MAX plan as I've been using it
| effectively to write software now (I am NOT a developer).
|
| Lately it's gotten entirely flaky, where chat's will just stop
| working, simply ignoring new prompots, and otherwise go
| unresponsive. I wondered if maybe I'm pissing them off somehow
| like the author of this article did.
|
| Now even worse is Claude seemingly has no real support channel.
| You get their AI bot, and that's about it. Eventually it will
| offer to put you through to a human, and then tell you that don't
| wait for them, they'll contact you via email. That email never
| comes after several attempts.
|
| I'm assuming at this point any real support is all smoke and
| mirrors, meaning I'm paying for a service now that has become
| almost unusable, with absolutely NO means of support to fix it. I
| guess for all the cool tech, customer support is something they
| have not figured out.
|
| I love Claude as it's an amazing tool, but when it starts to
| implode on itself that you actually require some out-of-box
| support, there is NONE to be had. Grok seems the only real
| alternative, and over my dead body would I use anything from
| "him".
| syntaxing wrote:
| Serious question, why is codex and mistral(vibe) not a real
| alternative?
| bastard_op wrote:
| I tried codex, using my same sandbox setup with it. Normally
| I work with sonnet in code, but it was stuck on a problem for
| hours, and I thought hmm, let me try codex. Codex just
| started monkey patching stuff and broke everything within
| like 3-4 prompts. I said f-this, went back to my last commit,
| and tried Opus this time in code, which fixed the problem
| within 2 prompts.
|
| So yeah, codex kinda sucks to me. Maybe I'll try mistral.
| pixelmelt wrote:
| The Claude models are still the best at what they do, right
| now GLM is just barely scratching sonnet 4.5 quality, mistral
| isnt really usable for real codebases and gemini is kind of
| in a weird spot where it's sometimes better then Claude at
| small targeted changes but randomly goes off the rails.
| Haven't tried codex recently but the last time I did the
| model thought for 27 minutes straight and then gave me about
| the same (incorrect) output that opus would have in 20
| seconds. Anthropics models are their only moat as
| demonstrated by their cutting off of tools other then Claude
| code on their coding plans.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Anthropic has been flying by the seat of their pants for a
| while now and it shows across the board. From the terminal
| flashing bug that's been around for months to the lack of
| support to instabilities in Claude mobile and Code for the web
| (I get 10-20% message failure rates on the former and 5-10% on
| CC for web).
|
| They're growing too fast and it's bursting the seams of the
| company. If there's ever a correction in the AI industry, I
| think that will all quickly come back to bite them. It's like
| Claude Code is vibe-operating the entire company.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Well, they vibe code almost every tool at least
| tuhgdetzhh wrote:
| Claude Code has accumulated so much technical dept
| (+emojis) that Claude Code can no longer code itself.
| wwweston wrote:
| What's the opposite of bootstrapping? Stakebooting?
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Hmm... VC funded?
| outside1234 wrote:
| Sell to Google and run away
| sixtyj wrote:
| They whistleblowed themselves that Claude Cowork was coded by
| Claude Code... :)
| notsure2 wrote:
| Whistleblowed dog food.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| normally you don't share your dog food when you find out
| it actually sucks.
| throwup238 wrote:
| You can tell they're all vibe coded.
|
| Claude iOS app, Claude on the web (including Claude Code on
| the web) and Claude Code are some of the buggiest tools I
| have ever had to use on a daily basis. I'm including
| monstrosities like Altium and Solidworks and Vivado in the
| mix - software that actually does real shit constrained by
| the laws of physics rather than slinging basic JSON and
| strings around over HTTP.
|
| It's an utter embarrassment to the field of software
| engineering that they can't even beat a single nine of
| reliability in their consumer facing products and if it
| wasn't for the advantage Opus has over other models, they'd
| be dead in the water.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| You're right.
|
| https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues
|
| Codex has less but they also had quite a few outages in
| December. And I don't think Codex is as popular as Claude
| Code but that could change.
| spike021 wrote:
| > where chat's will just stop working, simply ignoring new
| prompots, and otherwise go unresponsive
|
| I had this start happening around August/September and by
| December or so I chose to cancel my subscription.
|
| I haven't noticed this at work so I'm not sure if they're
| prioritizing certain seats or how that works.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Have a max plan, didn't use it much the last few days. Just
| used it to explain me a few things with examples for a ttrpg.
| It just hanged up a few times.
|
| Max plan and in average I use it ten times a day? Yeah, I am
| cancel. Guess they don't need me
| bastard_op wrote:
| That's about what I'm getting too! It just literally stops at
| some point, and any new prompt it starts, then immediately
| stops. This was even on a fairly short conversation with
| maybe 5-6 back and forth dialogs.
| hecanjog wrote:
| > I've been using it effectively to write software now (I am
| NOT a developer)
|
| What have you found it useful for? I'm curious about how people
| without software backgrounds work with it to build software.
| bastard_op wrote:
| I started using claude-code, but found it pretty useless
| without any ability to talk to other chats. Claude
| recommended I make my own MCP server, so I did. I built a
| wrapper script to invoke anthropic's sandbox-runtime toolkit
| to invoke claude-code in a project with tmux, and my mcp
| server allows desktop to talk to tmux. Later I built in my
| own filesystem tools, and now it just spawns konsole sessions
| for itself invoking workers to read tasks it drops into my
| filesystem, points claude-code to it, and runs until it
| commits code, and then I have the PM in desktop verify it, do
| the final push/pr/merge. I use an approval system in a gui to
| tell me when claude is trying to use something, and I set an
| approve for period to let it do it's thang.
|
| Now I've been using it to build on my MCP server I now call
| endpoint-mcp-server (coming soon to github near you), which
| I've modularized with plugins, adding lots more features and
| a more versatile qt6 gui with advanced workspace panels and
| widgets.
|
| At least I was until Claude started crapping the bed lately.
| bastard_op wrote:
| About my not having a software background, I started this as
| I've been a network/security/systems
| engineer/architect/consultant for 25 years, but never dev
| work. I can read and follow code well enough to debug things,
| but I've never had the knack to learn languages and write my
| own. Never really had to, but wanted to.
|
| This now lets me use my IT and business experience to apply
| toward making bespoke code for my own uses so far, such as
| firewall config parsers specialized for wacky vendor cli's
| and filling in gaps in automation when there are no good
| vendor solutions for a given task. I started building my mcp
| server enable me to use agents to interact with the outside
| world, such as invoking automation for firewalls, switches,
| routers, servers, even home automation ideally, and I've been
| successful so far in doing so, still not having to know any
| code.
|
| I'm sure a real dev will find it to be a giant pile of crap
| in the end, but I've been doing like applying security
| frameworks, code style guidelines using ruff, and things like
| that to keep it from going too wonky, and actually working it
| up to a state I can call it as a 1.0 and plan to run a full
| audit cycle against it for security audits, performance
| testing, and whatever else I can to avoid it being entirely
| craptastic. If nothing else, it works for me, so others can
| take it or not once I put it out there.
|
| Even being NOT a developer, I understand the need for
| applying best practices, and after watching a lot of really
| terrible developers adjacent to me over the years make a
| living, think I can offer a thing or two in avoiding that as
| it is.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| My use is considerably simpler than GP's but I use it anytime
| I get bogged down in the details and lose my way, just have
| Claude handle that bit of code and move on. Also good for any
| block of code that breaks often as the program evolves,
| Claude has much better foresight than I do so I replace that
| code with a prompt.
|
| I enjoy programming but it is not my interest and I can't
| justify the time required to get competent, so I let Claude
| and ChatGPT pick up my slack.
| thtmnisamnstr wrote:
| Gemini CLI is a solid alternative to Claude Code. The limits
| are restrictive, though. If you're paying for Max, I can't
| imagine Gemini CLI will take you very far.
| Conscat wrote:
| Gemini CLI regularly gets stuck failing to do anything after
| declaring its plan to me. There seems to be no way to un-lock
| it from this state except closing and reopening the
| interface, losing all its progress.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Kilocode is a good alt as well. You can plug into OpenRouter
| or Kilocode to access their models.
| bastard_op wrote:
| I tried Gemini like a year or so ago, and I gave up after it
| directly refused to write me a script and instead tried to
| tell me how to learn to code. I do not make this up.
| mkl wrote:
| That's at least two major updates ago. Probably worth
| another try.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Have you tried any of the leading open weight models, like GLM
| etc. And how does chatGPT or Gemini compare?
|
| And kudos for refusing to use anything from the guy who's OK
| with his platform proliferating generated CSAM.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| > I'm paying for a service now that has become almost unusable,
| with absolutely NO means of support to fix it.
|
| Isn't the future of support a series of automations and LLMs? I
| mean, have you considered that the AI bot _is_ their tech
| support, and that it's about to be everyone else's approach
| too?
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| Support has been automated for a while, LLMs just made it
| even less useful (and it wasn't very useful to begin with;
| for over a decade it's been a Byzantine labyrinth of dead-
| ends, punji-pits and endless hours spent listening to smooth
| jazz).
| syntaxing wrote:
| While it sucks, I had great results replacing Sonnet 4.5 with GLM
| 4.7 in Claude code. Vastly more affordable too ($3 a month for
| the pro equivalent). Can't say much about Opus though. Claude
| code forces me to put a credit card on file so they can charge
| over usage. I don't mind they charge me, I do mind that there's
| no apparent spending limit and hard to tell how much "inclusive"
| opus tokens I have left.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Having used both Opus 4.5 and GLM 4.7, I think the former is at
| least eight months ahead of the latter, if not much more.
| kosolam wrote:
| Hmm so how are the alternatives? Just in case I will get banned
| for nothing as well. I'm riding cc with opus all day long these
| days.
| daft_pink wrote:
| As a Claude Max user, that generally prefer's claude, I will say
| that Gemini is working pretty well right now and I'm considering
| setting up a google workspace account so I can get Gemini with
| decent privacy.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| is there a benefit of using a separate claude instance to update
| the CLAUDE.md of the first? I always want to leverage the full
| context of the situation to help describe what went wrong, so
| doing it "inline" makes more sense.
| rbren wrote:
| This is why it's worth investing in a model-agnostic setup. Don't
| tie yourself into a single model provider!
|
| OpenHands, Toad, and OpenCode are fully OSS and LLM-agnostic
| tomwphillips wrote:
| The post is light on details. I'd guess the author ended up
| hammering the API and they decided it was abuse.
|
| I expect more reports like this. LLM providers are already
| selling tokens at a loss. If everyone starts to use tmux or
| orchestrate multiple agents then their loss on each plan is going
| to get much larger.
| prmoustache wrote:
| It should be mentionned in the title that these are just
| speculations.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| I had my Claude Code account banned a few months ago. Contacted
| support and heard nothing. Registered a new account and been
| doing the same thing ever since - no issues.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Did you have to use a different phone number? Last time I tried
| using Claude they wouldn't accept my jmp.chat number.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Why is the author so confused about the use of the word
| "organization"? Every account in Claude is part of an
| organization even if it's an organization of one. It's just the
| way they have accounts structured. And it's not like they hide
| this fact. It shows you your organization ID right on your
| account page. I'm also pretty sure I've seen the term used when
| performing other account-related actions.
| miohtama wrote:
| Luckily there is little vendor lock in and likes of
| https://opencode.ai/ are picking up the slack
| kordlessagain wrote:
| > My guess is that this likely tripped the "Prompt Injection"
| heuristics that the non-disabled organization has.
|
| Is it me or is this word salad?
| infermore wrote:
| it's you
| afandian wrote:
| It's deliberately not straightforward. Just like the joke about
| Americans being shoutier than Brits. But it is meaningful.
|
| I read "the non-disabled organization" to refer to Anthropic.
| And I imagine the author used it as a joke to ridicule the use
| of the word 'organization'. By putting themselves on the same
| axis as Anthropic, but separating them by the state of
| 'disabled' vs 'non-disabled' rather than size.
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| The future (the PRESENT):
|
| You are only allowed to program computers with the permission of
| mega corporations.
|
| When Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini have banned you, you must leave the
| industry.
|
| When you sign up, you must provide legal assurance that no LLM
| has ever banned you (much like applying for insurance). If true
| then you will be denied permission to program - banned by one,
| banned by all.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| We need local models asap.
| indiantinker wrote:
| Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that
| this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with
| machines to enslave them. Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965
| xtracto wrote:
| That's why we should strive to use and optimize local LLMs.
|
| Or better yet, we should setup something that allows people to
| share a part of their local GPU processing (like SETI@home) for a
| distributed LLM that cannot be censored. And somehow be
| compensated when it's used for inference
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