Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles. Yet look at the positions they’re hiring for in marketing, finance etc.: https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs
Why aren’t they dogfooding their own products to replace such roles?
I've seen this at work. Giving Claude Code to a mediocre programmer gets you mediocre results. The really effective engineers with coding agent can accomplish a lot. Thousand monkeys...
I've also seen this. But I'll extend it to saying that giving Claude to a bad programmer gives bad results.
And seeing how people use it: good programmers review output and iterate to get better output. But bad programmers simply trust the output is good: they have no ability to review it themselves and often don't try.
As a mostly non-programmer it got me a lot done.
With about 5-10h over the weekend using free tier Claude and ChatGPT I managed to put together a scraper for a particular thing on a website I’m interested, grab the item images, do an initial pass with local OCR, if it hit some keywords, run openCV to crop for better OCR and dump the hits for further investigation.
Nothing particularly advanced but it would have taken me a horrendous amount of time without it to be half as good, like it did when I built a similar scraper 10 years ago.
Neither were very good code quality i’m sure.
> giving Claude to a bad programmer gives bad results.
On average, the output is still better than what a bad programmer would produce.
...And then they train their next generation models with these elite engineers' skills.
AI can let you downsize the number of employees that you have and maintain the status quo or it can let you maintain the number of employees, reduce technical debt, improve products, and services.
Do the economics work out ? You can downsize the devs you have, but you need to maintain a smaller stable of very expensive devs, and then factor in the token usage.
For example, a recent story about the openclaw creator using $1.3M of tokens/month. And let's assume he's getting paid $5M/yr which is probably a vast under estimate.
Is he providing value that a traditional software development org with normal developers couldn't provide for $20M/yr?
The issue is there’s non linearities involved. Although I don’t know I would use the open claw guy, but let’s take Isaac Newton. You can’t sum up people and arrive at an Isaac Newton worth of talent. He’s singular, unique, and irreplaceable at what he did. There were others similarly outsized in their ability to change things, and there are today as well. But you can’t funge talent at some level with more people - in fact as we know there’s a rapidly diminishing return on people investment.
Finally in some ways agentic workflows magnify the power of the individual who is adept at harnessing them, they don’t have to argue (much) with the agents to effect their ideas. I’ve found a lot of very bright engineers spend their days fighting to be heard by managers and peers who can’t / won’t understand them. By unshackling them from trying to debate down idiots, they deliver way way more, and of the right things, than they otherwise could have.
You can replace Newton with Leibniz.
| Newton... He's Singular, unique, and irreplaceable at what he did.
Leibniz, literally parallel.
Was Newton just a smart guy at the right place and the right time. These smart folks require other smart folks to understand and verify what they did. There are many who have amazing pedigrees in history.
I feel like using $1.3M/year is a wild outlier. A $200/month Max sub is a pretty cheap way to get quite a lot of benefit.
His usage is actually 12x that ...
The $1.3 million doesn't mean much. The article stated he could've switched to a significantly cheaper option and cut the bill to $300k. That's still a lot but since he worked for the company that sells the tokens it isn't as though they were paying the retail cost.
For those who, like me, had to do a double take on that number: https://www.businessinsider.com/openclaw-peter-steinberger-a...
Yes, $1.3M in token cost in less than 30 days and some days were even off-peak, if you can call it that with that insane scale that likely hides quite a lot of tokens in the lower bars.
HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159227
I honestly believe that most Silicon Valley developers could have their pre-AI output replaced by 10 dollars/day in Gemini 3 pay as you go spend.
I don't think existing companies will bite that bullet, but I think you'll see AI native companies in five years with like, a baffling small number of people.
Why in five years? Where are these hyper productive small companies running laps around bigger ones right now?
But Anthropic is adding employees
Maybe smart to convince everyone else to fire and slow down while you hire and speed up. I don't think it is actually planned, but perhaps smart in hindsite.
They most certainly are. This is Jevons paradox.
>Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles.
Who claimed that?
Their customers will be happy if their product replaces all the junior positions and midwit developers off the payroll. then that's already a huge saving to any company's bottom line.
Even if it doesn't directly replace workers, reducing the bargaining power of those spoiled SW devs and not having to give them huge raises all the time or they leave, is still enough. That's the whole point of layoffs and offshoring anyway.
> that's already a huge saving to any company's bottom line
Possibly not if they are paying the full cost of inference
> Who claimed that?
Dario Amodei