2025-06-05
llms
anthropic
claude
vibe-coding
ai
Probably a bit late to the conversation on this one as I'm currently between jobs and so I don't have 40 minute gaps whilst tests run to read Hacker News, but Anthropic have just released a video discussing Claude Code.
Honestly this is a cool piece of tooling and this is the direction that I'd like to see LLM/AI stuff continue to move. Having something that keeps out of your way until you want it is great, as opposed to things like Microsoft forcing Copilot down every GitHub user's throat. A CLI tool that I can use only when I want it is great! It also sets the incentive up to build something that's actually useful. If Claude Code isn't useful I just wont use it and it won't get in my way. In other words, I am glad that we have moved away from autocompletes.
I haven't had the chance to give Claude Code a proper once over, but already I can see a few issues.
In the video, Boris is saying that you can probably get away with 5$ for the weekend, but if you want to use Claude Code routinely then you're looking at at least 50-100$ per month. 100$/month is enough money that it's inacessible to most people and I think this is probably going to exacerbate issues that we're already having with inequality.
Maybe I just have anxiety, but letting Claude run wild on my personal machine seems
crazy. Does it do any kind of sandboxing or anything like that? It's unclear to me, but
at face value it doesn't seem like there's anything stopping Claude from hitting me with
an rm -rf /. I don't think it's going to exfiltrate my secrets anywhere, but I just
don't trust it not to do silly things to my system that it ought not to. In fairness,
seems like they have quite granular
controls over what Claude can
be allowed to do in your system, so maybe I do have anxiety.
Of course I wouldn't necessarily expect this out the gate from Anthropic as they stand to make money off Claude Code, but I struggle to be super happy about tools whose only backend is a paid service with no option of moving over to self hosting something. It's not that I disagree with Anthropic's model, it's just a shame to build what looks like such a good UI and give it only a proprietary backend. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before there's a really good open source alternative anyway.