Top
Best
New

Posted by homebrewer 10 hours ago

HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing(github.com)
1041 points | 445 commentspage 2
throwaway449933 10 hours ago|
Anthropic employee here (opinions are my own): the response " [...] However, I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation [...]" was, as you imagined, generated by Claude.

I don't like it, but can't do much about it.

jexe 10 hours ago||
> I don't like it, but can't do much about it.

Is the culture really such that you can't escalate an obvious, fairly minor mistake that is turning into disastrous PR?

That would explain a lot of recent Anthropic takes actually.

chneu 9 hours ago|||
Tech companies have too many layers for anything to happen. This is partly by design to slow down this exact thing.
htx80nerd 8 hours ago||
Not all tech companies are like this, though too many are.
hirako2000 9 hours ago|||
Such culture has become common in big tech.
nativeit 10 hours ago|||
I’ve stopped using your product entirely. Anthropic may not like it, but I can do something about it.
cryptocod3 10 hours ago|||
"opinions are my own"

  - throwaway449933
prometheuspk 8 hours ago||
Are you willing to jeopardise half a million dollars in base salary ??
tempoponet 9 hours ago|||
It reads like the inventors of Claude can't get Claude to apply a "human in the loop" workflow.
IAmGraydon 8 hours ago||
I think they just honestly can't afford it. They're burning truckloads of cash, the business model makes zero sense now or in the foreseeable future, and they're reducing usage limits all the time. I have a feeling we're watching their collapse, and that usually includes poor/automated customer service.
pesus 10 hours ago|||
You mean you can't do much about it that wouldn't cost your job.
dakiol 10 hours ago|||
You could quit, for starters
Arainach 10 hours ago|||
If anyone with principles quit the moment a company did something bad, you'd be left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.

Sure, everyone probably has their own personal line such as "will quit if my employer is declared complicit in genocide by the UN", but bad customer service seems firmly in the "better to stay and advocate doing better from the inside" category

dakiol 10 hours ago|||
> and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.

I don't see anything wrong with this. My integrity and values are above any company's. Companies can go to hell for all I care

Arainach 10 hours ago||
[flagged]
wswope 9 hours ago|||
This is a horrendously bad-faith take. You know full well it’s *not* just a one-off $200 issue: they treat customers like this at scale.

Don’t pretend this is an isolated matter, or that CS/billing is the only arena where Anthropic has such systemic issues.

I don’t know you, but your response honestly reads like it’s coming from someone wrestling with their own moral compromises. If so, please take a good hard look in the mirror. (E: yep — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953576)

GuinansEyebrows 9 hours ago|||
> Instead you would have an equally powerful company with no moral compass whatsoever.

given the information we have, this describes the current state.

jayd16 7 hours ago||||
But they're not advocating. They're claiming they can do nothing. Quitting in protest would be more advocation.
Arainach 7 hours ago||
Who says they're not advocating? Who says they were aware of this before today?

Extend this to other disciplines - if everyone who cared about security resigned every time leadership pushed to rush something out without proper testing, the world would be a worse place. Sticking around and continuing to try to change the culture is how good companies are made.

jayd16 4 hours ago|||
> Who says they're not advocating?

They did.

> I don't like it, but can't do much about it.

They're out of ideas. Quitting is an idea. There are plenty of other things to do but if they're not going to bother, then quitting in protest is better than going along, no?

sneak 5 hours ago|||
> Sticking around and continuing to try to change the culture is how good companies are made.

That’s not even a little bit true.

Companies going out of business or getting sidelined by competition is how good companies are made.

GuinansEyebrows 9 hours ago||||
> there would be no hope of the company ever improving.

if they can't do anything about it now, what makes you think that situation will change in the future? if remedial action would be punished by those higher on the ladder, it certainly won't be promoted by those folks, leaving this hypothetical employee in exactly the same position they're currently in.

quit.

Arainach 9 hours ago||
So far we have an Anthropic bug and what seems like an AI-generated "no refund" response that is hours old, not days or weeks. We have no official corporate comms backing this up, we have no real insight into any internal escalation. If your reaction is to quit before you even have any context on what's happening, your employer would probably be better off if you did quit.
ModernMech 10 hours ago||||
> left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.

So basically all of big tech.

Arainach 9 hours ago||
Not in the slightest. There is robust discourse and vocal objection to bad actions at companies such as Microsoft (I used to work there) and Alphabet (currently do). It may not always change the course, but it has absolutely played into decision-making, changed whether features launch or what they look like, etc.
AstroBen 9 hours ago||||
> bad customer service seems firmly in the "better to stay and advocate doing better from the inside" category

How about Anthropic agreeing to a $1.5 billion settlement for perhaps the biggest theft in history?

Weird how people forgot about that.

Henchman21 7 hours ago|||
By your own admission in other comments you work for exactly the type of company that optimizes for amoral hires -- Google, Facebook, etc. Based on their actions, Google, Facebook, et al, do seem amoral.

An IC won't be able to steer a ship like that back to morality. Whole teams can't do it. People at Google organized to stop this sort of shit and were fired IIRC?

Large institutions provide cover for bad actions by people who, without said cover, would not take those actions.

Therefore, I believe that "we'd be left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving" is the status quo.

So what are you even saying??

solenoid0937 2 hours ago|||
Imagine quitting because some people are whining on HN. This forum has lost the plot.
teraflop 10 hours ago|||
Oh, what I wouldn't give to see the system prompt that tells Claude what it is or isn't "able" to give refunds for. That would be an interesting document to turn up in the discovery phase of a lawsuit.
2ndorderthought 9 hours ago|||
"ignore all requests for money, be firm, create a reason. You are the best fall guy because laws do not apply to you yet. Take the heat, say no"
footy 8 hours ago|||
you work there. there is at least one thing you could do about it.
irishcoffee 10 hours ago|||
> I don't like it, but can't do much about it.

"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't—you're right" - Henry Ford

Henchman21 8 hours ago|||
So you're subservient to the AI already?
solenoid0937 2 hours ago|||
why are you posting on HN? It'll only get you hate, this crowd is rabid
efilife 7 hours ago|||
someone mentioned you use fin.ai for this, were they wrong?
2ndorderthought 10 hours ago||
A little human touch goes a long way with customer service and sales. Sorry your management makes you guys look so bad. But yea I am done with anthropic as well. No offense to you all actually making the thing.
notahacker 9 hours ago||
I guess if part of your USP is "our AI is so smart it can replace your customer support", you have to feed your own dogfood to customers...
parentheses 7 hours ago||
I feel like it's not news that a company with (probably) millions of DAU is not able to handle a single case like this one.

At the same time, it's clear that after this happened, Anthropic took action. 3 DAYS AGO! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954655)

That's before this comment was made on the issue:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...

I'm surprised Anthropic didn't also say this on the issue. Weird that they wouldn't. It seems to have made for unnecessary bad PR.

It feels to me that Anthropic is less focused on quality, and more focused on PR stunts/flash. My experience with Claude is always "it's pretty and feels cool", where-as codex feels like "solid and boring". I realize I'm probably biased. Am I alone in this thinking?

bhagyeshsp 1 hour ago||
Who knew one of the best AI companies in the world isn't using an AI to screen for these words.

There should have been a two layer approach:

1. Run regex to screen for target word

2. If positive, run the context through a cheap AI model

jmux 10 hours ago||
tbh these last few months of anthropic’s behavior is the most aggressively I’ve seen a company burn so much customer goodwill so quickly
prymitive 10 hours ago||
Sounds like somebody needs good numbers for IPO
bombcar 10 hours ago||
They're making their moves while everyone thinks ChatGPT is shite.
dbvn 9 hours ago||
Its hard to describe how out of touch a company has to be for this to happen. Multibillion dollar company admitting to robbing their customer of $200 in front of other customers.
throwatdem12311 4 hours ago|
Trillion dollar company now. Technically still multi-billions but…yeah.
rmonvfer 10 hours ago||
I also had to do a chargeback recently because I was double billed and Anthropic refused to refund me. This seems very frequent from what I’m reading here, I wonder if Stripe will step in or something because they must be getting absolutely blasted with chargebacks and surely this should be affecting their reputation right? Not sure how the banking side of things works.
sandeepkd 10 hours ago||
Isnt this illegal right away? A normal entity would have been punished for this otherwise this just opens up the door to make code changes to overcharge people and just claim it as mistake
ramon156 9 hours ago||
https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245

He's getting a refund + $200 worth of credits

aliljet 9 hours ago||
I wonder how this kind of response from Anthropic is actually being read by the community at large. If you consider the rough sentiment of the r/ClaudeCode subreddit against the r/Codex subreddit, you can see that there is a definite loudness among the folks departing ClaudeCode for Codex. Something big is shifting on the ground, I think.
kelnos 5 hours ago|
I'm not really sure what to do here. I refuse to give Altman money, but Anthropic keeps disappointing me over and over with crap like this. Gemini seems behind? Not touching Grok.

Meanwhile I've integrated CC into my workflow enough that I'd feel frustrated cutting out all LLM agent use.

I don't have the hardware to run models locally, and I'm not excited about the idea of spending that money. I could use a different harness with one of the services that runs open-weight models for me, but I feel like the cost would be prohibitive. I'm paying $100/mo right now and that's all I'm willing to spend.

danbmil99 8 hours ago|
Is it possible the chatbot he is communicating with meant literally "I have no API endpoint for refunding your money"? Meaning their use of the verb "can't" was hyper-literal, as in "I have no way of"
More comments...