Think Twitter's fail-whale problems. Sometimes you are lucky, sometimes you aren't. Why? We won't know until Anthropic figures it out and from the outside it sure looks like they're struggling.

The design is still a problem though, precisely because I am not a designer. I don't know what's actually good, I only know what's good enough for me. I can't tell the difference between "this is actually good" and "this is vibe-designed slop" but I have enough experience to at least make sure the implementation is robust.

That means they are going to be far more constrained infrastructurally than some of the competition. I think this is some of the constraints that we are seeing.

There's nuance here. Every project/team/org is different.

What I'm responding to the the notion that "no action you can take matters." Specifically this:

>Individual human beings acting individually are totally irrelevant when it comes to the behavior of large organizations.

I just don't believe that. Small actions do matter and are necessary because they enable the big actions later. You have to start somewhere. Even if it feels insurmountable. No major change ever just happened in isolation, it always happens when enough people have had enough and fought back enough that the change was inevitable.

I don't necessarily agree with the OPs approach. He could have filed a complaint or done any number of things that may have been better. But in the heat of the moment nobody is making perfectly rational decisions.

Regardless, we need to fight back against abusive systems on the big and on the small. We won't always get it right but the act of fighting is what matters.

I don't have an answer. I just know that my empathy is too strong. I could never be so rigid and would not thrive in a career requiring that level of disconnect.

You can make it work. You can also save yourself a lot of headache by using other CAD tools. Personally I value "Freedom" so I will continue to use it despite the difficulties but that may not be the right path for others.

The only obvious bit you didn't cover was extensive documentation including historical records of various investigations, debug sessions and technical decisions.

Best part, it's good for people too.

I'm convinced Amazon has many teams crapping out new features but they don't have the political clout (or manpower) to create a comprehensive product. They are mandated by management to use existing services, and thus we the users suffer because we have to manage all this extra crap and noise just to enable basic functionality.

It's maddening. And then also it's maddening to see another service from a different team that was able to throw off these shackles and actually make a product that is self contained. You get a taste of how good things could be, and then you're thrown right back into the IAM/SQS/Cloudwatch/Cloudformation/Policy/everything else under the sun soup.

Just to be clear, I'm responding to the parent comment not the article.

They at least put the effort into having the retreat and putting this together. Would other consultancies (who we know little about) have of done the same?

This is a fairly easy to read doc discussing some of the challenges with using AI tooling in a forward thinking and disciplined way. Coming from Thoughtworks it also gives a bit of gravitas and legitimacy.

There's good stuff in here. It would be a shame for the larger HN community to miss out on this conversation.