The Great Endumbening

Welcome to another issue of Endnotes! Where we try to figure out how any of this makes sense. It's the end of the world and the guys cosplaying founders on LinkedIn are having little meltdowns, pounding their tiny fists on their standing desks, demanding protein. They need a nap. If you want to yell at me about this issue for some reason, you can find me on Mastodon.

Hereinafter, consider the following:

• Claude is a mess
• The Decade of the Linux Desktop (maybe)
• The myth of Mythos
• Lines of code is a stupid way to measure productivity
• Here's a weird one
• Strays

Let's get to it.

Claude is a mess

Anthropic's flagship product for coding is broken. The "Claude" models were launched in 2023, and many consider them the best out there for writing code, better than OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's gemini. And when Anthropic rolled out Claude Opus 4.6 in February of this year, normies all over LinkedIn and X went wild, raving that it could basically replace software engineers.

Now, however, they are very mad because Claude is broken, it has been for a month, and Anthropic seems either unable or unwilling to fix it.

Users on /r/ClaudeCode and /r/ClaudeAI say Claude is dumber now to the point of useless, and others complain that it burns through their token quotas in a matter of hours, leaving them paying $200/mo. for nothing.

"It collapsed from mostly autonomous senior dev with memory issues to drunk junior on a leash (and as a coding lead it's part of my job to do this type of assessment)," says one user, who is cancelling the subscription.

Some users are doing the Charlie Kelly red yarn thing and coming up with very elaborate theories about how Anthropic is throttling their accounts and limiting the number of tokens they can use. Others are crashing out hard:

Opus 4.6 is VERY CLEARLY nerfed right now.

There's no transparency, no clarity. Just gaslighting people into thinking that what they are getting now is the same as in February, when it's clearly much worse now.

I wouldn't even mind if they were like "Hey, we are losing too much money at $200 for Max, so we have to up the price, or change how we calculate token consumption"

or SOMETHING. ANYTHING!

But secretly making the product much worse while asking everyone to pay the same and gaslighting everyone into thinking they are getting the same product?

Completely unacceptable. Criminal behavior.

If you want to claim to be the moral, responsible, AI company, Anthropic, you need to be better than this!

Criminal behavior!!

A developer for AMD opened a lengthy GitHub issue for Claude Code (written with Claude, obviously) concluding that Claude is measurably dumber. And it's not just performance issues. People are finding serious bugs. This GitHub issue says caching dropped from 1 hour to 5 minutes, not something you would do on purpose if your problem is excessive demand, as it forces users to waste tokens. Another user says API errors have become commonplace, and again, the retries are wasting tons of tokens.

The charitable explanations for the mess are that Anthropic is

• struggling with infrastructure issues;
• shifting resources to a roll-out of a new model; or
• focusing on wealthier enterprise clients at the expense of the hobbyists.

However, there could be a more worrying explanation: Claude's back end is actually just a vibe-coded, broken, buggy product and Anthropic engineers can't fix it.

Let's look at some circumstantial evidence! First, Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei, along with other Anthropic executives, frequently brag that their engineers use Claude to write Claude. Here he is on NBC in January:

I have engineers at Anthropic who say "I don't write any code anymore. I just let Claude write the code and I edit it or I look it over." And of course at Anthropic, writing code means designing the next version of Claude itself. So we essentially have Claude designing the next version of Claude itself. Not completely, not in all ways, but in many ways. That loop starts to close very fast. And so I look at this and I say wow, this is exciting, it's incredible what we can do with the world, but also, it's really speeding up a lot.

Second, they are using that speed to ship more features. Tons of features. Way more features than they can probably manage safely, something like 72 releases in 54 days. As one redditor puts it:

What I do NOT understand is the product strategy.

This is my main frustration. Why are you shipping "fluff" features while the core engine is smoking?

That’s the part I genuinely do not understand. Why are leadership and product pushing out something new every other day when older features still have obvious bugs, reliability issues, and support gaps?

Third, take a look at Claude Code's source code, which leaked in March due to a rookie error that pushed a dev file into a package that is downloaded by the public to install the app. One developer on Mastodon is laboriously analyzing the ~500,000 (!!) lines of source code (thread 1, thread 2). Without getting too far into the weeds, let's just say Claude Code is a huge, insane rats-nest. Human review of the effectiveness and safety of its machine-generated code is clearly not possible anymore.

If the rest of Anthropic's back end looks anything like Claude Code: Ho boy. Yikes. Oh no.

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The Decade of the Linux Desktop (maybe)

The French agency in charge of government information technology policy has announced a transition from the Windows operating system to Linux. Basically, it is requiring government agencies to come up with a plan by the end of the year for reducing dependency on software solutions from outside the EU.

There is lots of speculation about this right now in the anglo tech press, but we just don't know what it means yet. It could mean immediate, full-scale transition to Linux for millions of machines, or it could not, we can't know. Governments and budgets are complicated.

What we do know is that Europe has realized that tech sovereignty is important, and right now, the EU is completely dependent on Google, Amazon, and Microsoft for desktop software and cloud compute. Building out the infrastructure and expertise in Europe to change that is going to be a huge, expensive task and take decades. That process is just getting started.

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The myth of Mythos

I am not a cybersecurity professional, so I don't want to go too far into it, but I suspect Anthropic's whole "Mythos" roll-out boils down to just another over-hyped AI demo that is going to turn out to be not that big of a deal. AI companies have lied constantly about their products' capabilities and I see no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt here. Anyway, here's Marcus Hitchens, a much smarter person who is a cybersecurity professional, giving his very-good take:

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Lines of code is a stupid way to measure productivity

This NYT article about how AI coding assistants are producing an unmanageable mountain of code is making the rounds, and there's one thing I want to highlight:

When a financial services company recently began using Cursor, an artificial intelligence technology that writes computer code, the difference that it made was immediate.

The company went from producing 25,000 lines of code a month to 250,000 lines. That created a backlog of one million lines of code that needed to be reviewed, said Joni Klippert, a co-founder and the chief executive of StackHawk, a security start-up that was working with the financial services firm. (emphasis added)

This is an incredibly stupid way to measure productivity, and it's shocking to me that anyone talks like this. The code itself is not the product, the result of the code is the product. If you solve a problem in 5,000 lines of code, does that make you 10x more productive than the person who solved it in 50 lines of code? No. Possibly the opposite.

Imagine a coworker who produces thousands of extra PowerPoint slides or pages of documents for you to review. You'd tag them with a stapler.

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Here's a weird one

I just love that MeatCanyon can produce a half-hour video full of hand-drawn art, elaborate sets, a crazy script, and incredible practical effects and it gets almost 9 million views in a week. OK, it's a little strange, so what.

Strays

• The blue light from your phone isn't ruining your sleep.
• That kid who threw the firebomb at Sam Altman's house is an AI cult weirdo.
• A scientist published a pre-print about a fake disease and now LLMs are diagnosing people with it.
• Apple eliminated a letter from its iOS Czech language keyboard and now this poor kid can't unlock his phone.