> It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it.
In a sense yes, I think it is actually reasonable to complain that the answer is too human/individualized here because it likely wasn't this individual human who made this decision, but he's making it seem like it is so that we are less likely to blame the company as a whole.
It's counterintuitive but when one singular person owns up to the problems that, at the root, are actually systemic to the decision making of the whole company it plays on the psychology of us as humans.
"I'm in charge of maintaining it" - This is not the same as "I'm in charge of all of the decision-making behind the implementation of how this tool works for users".
I actually agree exactly with your last point that one single person taking blame is counter-intuitive/non-productive here, but it actually seems like what these large companies desire is to have one person be the fall guy to play on people's sympathies.
If this were some small startup it would make sense but this is not that case.
It’s also an unforced error in my eyes for a multi-billion dollar company with competitors in the US and outside. Mistakes happen but no reason to turn a mistake into a revelation about processes that leaves no ambiguity, one that leaves the mythos (pun) of your company less than before.
I did make the decision, and shipped the PR.
Unfortunately this is a sign that the systems by which PRs are shipped need serious inspection.
For example in incident management, the industry settled on blameless postmortems. Blame is pointed at the systems which allowed incidents to occur, never the human(s) who triggered the incident. "Just don't make that mistake again" simply doesn't work. Humans make mistakes!
There are too many stakeholders in a product this large, even if every one of them wishes it were not so. The systems by which this PR shipped need serious inspection.
I don't really care, in a most positive way towards you.
I don't hold you accountable even if you twirled your mustache like a villain. You are not responsible for Claude Code. Why did the leadership set up such a weak, error-prone process?
Again, not asking you directly, because it doesn't matter to me what you say, respectfully.
There has to be a second PR approver. There's no way a company as large this can allow an individual the ability to push to production without a secondary person involved.
When there's at least two people involved you can then start to look at more systematic factors that go beyond any single human mistake.
When both the submitter and approver miss that there's no changelog entry for a PR does that mean a checklist is needed? Should the changelog be automated with the commit message which can be improved for external consumption?
I'd find it very hard to believe that this high profile change just happened to be the only change missing from the changelog.
Bugs are always going to happen but housekeeping like writing something to a changelog when a commit is merged can be quality assured.
I don't know, this is a company that is pushing the narrative of software engineers becoming obsolete. Why do you think they would have respect for Software Engineering processes. As few as they are concerned, a few coders working in isolation with Claude Code is all that you need. (pun unintended)
If there really is no PR reviewer and no separate QA what is Anthropic even doing. I have respect for someone owning their mistake but as others have mentioned it reveals what may be a systemic issue.
Okay I stand corrected then.
Seems strange for a company of your size to have one person push changes that should have easily caught this edge case then. Seems like a change even a small handful of people could have reasonably thought up this side effect of.
This is the kind of weakness I was alluding to… internal information that shows dysfunction is now shown to the public and there is no ambiguity. People pay attention and there is a low tolerance for unforced errors.
Habibi, I don't think anyone is really blaming you personally. We are piling on to the fact that this piece of critical infrastructure many of us depend on day in day out is being built in such a way that a single developer can wake up one morning, ship a change they thought might be nice, and then walk it back the next day.