1. A lot of people already have Claude Code set up, and it's easier to keep using that than to install something new.
2. Lots of people are used to Claude Code's interface/commands/etc. and don't feel like paying the cost of learning something new. The benefits would have to outweigh those switching costs, and it's unclear that they do.
3. Claude Code already works with your Claude MAX subscription[0], which gives you an incredible amount of usage of the top-tier models for cheap, which can't be matched by any open-source options. And most people won't exhaust this usage, so they have no real need to use open-source models.
4. Although it's hard to 100% confirm this, there's reason to believe that Claude itself works better with Claude Code than with other harnesses.
5. There's no real lock-in. If tomorrow you decide you don't want to use Claude Code, you can just switch to something else ezpz. So there's no reason to worry that you're digging a hole and locking yourself in. Thus, there's no urgency to switch away.
[0] Yes, open-source harnesses can use your Claude MAX subscription, but does this "benefit" of open-source harnesses really outweigh the costs of #1, #2, and #4 above?
Yeah I thought so too, just didn't want to overstate it. So actually, a pretty big reason not to use an open-source harness if you're using a big lab's model.
I created hlock https://docs.hlock.ai/ to exactly tackle some of these problems: it lets you port your harness configuration across the different harnesses (open source and proprietary)
I'm responding to a comment, not to article, and the comment is asking about open source harnesses, presumably in comparison to all non-open source harnesses, not just in comparison to Cursor.
If that's all true then it's almost certainly because you work at a large, mature, bureaucratic, unusually privacy-focused company. Verrrrry few companies work like this when they're small and new. I'd round down to ~0%. And I would bet that, if your company was ever a small startup, it didn't work like this back then, either.
Also, this idea that it's bad or weird to anonymously discuss customers is strange. I've known cops, doctors, dentists, and all sorts of other people who routinely share stories about weird things that happen with people and customers at work, anonymously. This is the norm in the world and always has been.
It's also the norm for the companies who own your data to look at it, when asked to. What do you think customer support even is?
It's only really a small corner of the tech world that treats these things as strange and sacrilege.
1. Product decisions require far more knowledge than coding and architecture decisions, and that knowledge is harder to come by. It often requires research, talking to customers, understanding the organization of the company, the company's mission, the company's employees, their performance, stakeholders, the competitive landscape, funding, growth/sales/marketing strategies and budgets, customer buying patterns, company strategy, etc. Not to mention the code, the coding backlog, etc. Companies have to compete in a hostile, competitive, capitalistic market, which means they're trying to beat other companies, which means a seemingly very good product decision can actually be bad solely because other people are doing it better. Imagine if your perfectly functional code failed to compile simply by nature of the fact that better programmers exist.
2. Product design requires taste, and taste is partly a function of novelty, but there aren't that many LLMs, so everyone's using the same few LLMs, therefore everyone's getting the same designs, therefore the designs look like clones of each other rather than novel thoughtful design, therefore they fail the taste bar. In addition, LLMs simply weren't trained on good vs. bad visual or product design nearly as much as they've been trained on good vs. bad, functional vs. non-functional code.
I see these more fundamentally as arising from whether a good feedback loop is possible or not. The same is fundamentally true for human experts; you need validation that your work was good or not, or you cannot improve.
With code, it's fairly easy to have unit or end to end tests. That can be relatively objective and deterministic, and pretty quick.
Architecture is one layer removed, and far harder to test. You're stuck with things that are at least an order of magnitude to prove autonomously; will it scale in terms of performance, will the abstractions be a good fit for future requirements, etc. Testable, but much harder.
Design; well, there's possibly some metrics by which you could measure UX (attention for the viewer, contrast ratios, number of actions needed to achieve something, how far the mouse had to travel), but really the majority of it is subjective. "How does the human feel when viewing this" - I suspect almost by definition needs either a human, or a very good model of it. I don't think we have the latter, making this pretty hard.
> It often requires research, talking to customers, understanding the organization of the company, the company's mission, the company's employees, their performance, stakeholders, the competitive landscape, funding, growth/sales/marketing strategies and budgets, customer buying patterns, company strategy, etc.
You're relying on that information not being in the training data, because you are working with third-party generic models, so your expertise is safe.
It's a movie with at least one surprising twist, which seems to be fairly central to enjoying the experience, and people who've seen it don't want to spoil it for others. Hence they're vague in their descriptions. It's as simple as that.
The general twist is that she doesn’t really come off as the villain of this film (though she certainly does not come off in a flattering light) - her current husband it turns out is actually a pretty terrifying sociopath who seems to possibly have a bit of a cocaine habit (inferred from the excessive sniffles and insane demeanor) - and he really becomes sort of the films main antagonist.
All of this is completely subjective so someone else could come away with a different take, but if there was a twist (which I would not say this is a film with an overt twist) - it would be this.
For me it was a window into insane wealth and privilege and the types of lives these people lead and the engines that power their sense of self importance and delusions. I do think it was a phenomenal documentary.
But the movie also teases that could just be spin to distract from Holmes' villainy. Just as the first half explores how much the villainy of Theranos by some gets pushed off to Sunny. In about the same ways. Or the first half hints that her Dad as a former Enron executive is the exact same sort of person "who never did anything wrong" but "accidentally" happened to be right there when everything went wrong. (Which is related because her Dad is also one of the big voices for "Sunny was the villain and I knew it all along" narrative in the film.)
But yeah, window into insane wealth and privilege.
The big, big "twist" is SPOILER that last second reveal that Nathan did go swim in the ocean with Holmes and might have been compromised (as Seyfried wonders in the last few moments) and the film really is just another case of trying to make it seem like Holmes isn't the villain because Nathan came away liking Holmes.
(But that's also a game Fielder is playing in this film, how much you can trust him to be an "objective" observer, so not necessarily a twist following along from the beginning, but subtext made text in the last few minutes.)
SPOILERs kinda: Notably, it's all in the presentation and form of everything that went on. There were about ten different moments in the packed theater where something was said or happened where the entire audience was... silent. tense. I've never felt that sort of palpable and shared tension anywhere in my life like that.
Corporations are generally protected by limited liability laws, and for good reason, because in the world before that was the case, there was a massive amount of disincentive to ever start a corporation, to do research, to experiment, to release new products and services, etc., because you could be sued into oblivion for the smallest things or even go to jail. Which happened all the time.
Obviously there are upsides to that too. It leads to more accountability. But there are downsides which include having a world with less innovation, less technology, and more expensive technology. Generally, the mass is when, when there's more businesses competing to create ever better and cheaper products. So there's a tradeoff there. And it's very difficult to draw the line at the perfect point.
There are countless cases of executives going to jail when they've crossed that line, beyond reckless experimentation and into willful negligence or harm. Still, I think we would mostly all agree that the line has been pushed too far in the other direction.People are incentivized, if they're running corporations, to lobby and try to push this line as far as possible in order to provide cover for themselves, and that's the problem with money playing such a big role in politics.
But still, it's a bit silly to be comparing this to your own personal responsibilities with your car. There's pretty much no societal benefit to creating laws that protect people from being reckless with their own possessions.
> Never as good pay and many end up on the system.
I mean, every complex large-scale change to society has upsides and downsides. Very few things are purely good. So it makes very little sense just to name the upsides and pretend it's all good, or just to name the downsides and pretend it's all bad. You need to do the actual cost-benefit analysis.
And when you do, net-net, generally speaking, technological progress does does much more good for humanity than bad, even though there is some bad.
We tend to get things that make our lives easier, more efficient, safer, and more comfortable at ever cheaper prices.
2. Lots of people are used to Claude Code's interface/commands/etc. and don't feel like paying the cost of learning something new. The benefits would have to outweigh those switching costs, and it's unclear that they do.
3. Claude Code already works with your Claude MAX subscription[0], which gives you an incredible amount of usage of the top-tier models for cheap, which can't be matched by any open-source options. And most people won't exhaust this usage, so they have no real need to use open-source models.
4. Although it's hard to 100% confirm this, there's reason to believe that Claude itself works better with Claude Code than with other harnesses.
5. There's no real lock-in. If tomorrow you decide you don't want to use Claude Code, you can just switch to something else ezpz. So there's no reason to worry that you're digging a hole and locking yourself in. Thus, there's no urgency to switch away.
[0] Yes, open-source harnesses can use your Claude MAX subscription, but does this "benefit" of open-source harnesses really outweigh the costs of #1, #2, and #4 above?
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