Certainly most of us know we are just in it for the money, and the soul-grinding profit machine will continue to grind souls for profit regardless of what we want.

So that's why it is surprising to me when my (fairly senior) grizzled ex-FAANG friends, that share the same view, start waxing poetic about Anthropic being different and genuine. I think "maybe it is" and decide to interview. IDK, I guess some part of me wants to believe that nice things can exist.

FWIW I have two(!!) close friends working for Anthropic, one for nearly two years and one for about 4 months.

Both of them tell me that this is not just marketing, that the company actually is ethical and safety conscious everywhere, and that this was the most surprising part about joining Anthropic for them. They insist the culture is actually genuine which is practically unicorn rarity in corporate America.

We have worked for FAANG so I know where they're coming from; this got me to drop my cynicism for once and I plan on interviewing with them soon. Hopefully I can answer this question for myself.

The detractors are so bizarre to me. I think it's because I work at a big tech that has so thoroughly wired AI into everything we do, and the benefits are so undeniable and totally perspective changing, that it's like arguing with someone that thinks the sun revolves around the earth.

So if you aren't doing something cool with AI, it's probably because you aren't empowered to at your company, or because you simply aren't taking the initiative. Seems like a pretty even split on HN.

All that said, I've already set up a few of my non tech close friends with Cowork and they are huge fans of it now. It's somewhat shocking how much menial repetitive work the average white collar job entails.

100% feeling this divide as well.

People that deny the benefit of AI in 2026... I can't even engage with them anymore. I just move on with my life. These people are simply not living in reality, it will catch up to them eventually (unfortunately.)

If everyone thought like you we'd be stuck in the pre-Industrial phase. How miserable that would be!

Sure, it might hurt me personally. I'm not selfish enough to put that over what will be an incredibly empowering development for our species.

Many things are orders of magnitude bigger than AI in the energy usage problem that bring less comparable value.

Strangely enough, I don't see you calling to end the consumption of meat which would have a far larger environmental impact while not slowing global progress at all.

At my big tech, AI is every conversation with everyone, every day. Becoming AI native is a huge deal for us. Literally everyone is making AI usage a core part of their job and it's been a big productivity accelerator.

Perhaps it's different where you work, so you don't see the sentiment.

The Cloud happened as well, as you've pointed out

AI adoption is well past Quantum and Web 3. Comparing it to those two is nonsensical.

Consider this: you are Anthropic. There are some Claude Code used cases that will have poor caching performance. Let's say these are 10% of your use cases.

You explicitly don't count cache misses right now because it would make the UX poor for these use cases. It's no big deal since the remaining 90% of use cases can subsidize the 10%.

Now open source clients become a thing. Instead of 10% of usage having poor caching, it grows to 50%. You can no longer subsidize those users because the economics don't work.

You have to start counting cache misses and the UX goes to shit for everyone.

This is terrible from a product perspective. Right now they can subsidize workflows with poor caching performance.

If OSS hacked clients become a big thing, they can't do this anymore.

It's a PR stunt. They'll eat the costs for a bit, once they've cornered the market they'll do the same thing as Anthropic.

Absolutely not, you are not thinking from a product perspective at all.

You might not want to capture cache % hits in usage limits because there may be some edge cases you want to support that have low hits even with an optimized client. Maybe your caching strategy isn't perfect yet, so you don't count hits to keep a good product experience going.

OSS clients that freeload on the subscription break your ability to support these use cases entirely. Now you have to count cache hits at the expense of everyone else. It is a classic case of some people ruining the experience for everyone.

> Why is the 'Apple electric company' selling cheaper electricity to households with Apple devices?

Why does Netflix not let you use your OSS hacked client of choice with your subscription?

Yes. That is all that matters. That is the contract you've signed with the business, end of story.

They have their reasons (3P clients suck at caching, this is a subsidized tier to create subscription lock in, etc) but that's besides the point. If you sign a contract, you abide by its restrictions or you categorically abusing the offering.

> There is another alternative, which is to keep using it against their ToS and risk a ban.

No one working on a project of value and no sane business would do this. The people doing this are not serious/mature people. Frankly any dev that intentionally does this at a real company would be fired.

Reading through his X comments and GitHub comments he is behaving immaturely. I don't trust what he's saying here. Ripping out Claude API support was just throwing a tantrum. Weird given his age - he's old enough to be more mature.