Posted by Bolat14 7 hours ago
Everyone I know at Anthropic is miserable. It’s not a fun place to work. There’s a reason you never see Anthropic employees talking online.
Wanting to make a lot of money is offense ?
I'll keep what you said in mind though. Grass greener and all that
Don’t get me wrong, my friends are all making killer money…but they are also all out of therapy sessions, many are back on ADHD and SSRI meds, and the company seems to be full of egos and heavy handed mid management. I get the joy of meeting up with friends and their coworkers so I get to hear…a lot.
More to life than money!
That's why I want to make enough to retire early!
In my 20s I wanted to retire by 40.
In my 30s I want to retire by 45.
Although I'm starting to understand the journey is just as important as the destination. I do have a fantastic low stress job currently.
Tech culture preys on making you feel inferior if you aren't loaded with RSUs and equity, but so many of these people hoarding wealth are miserable in real life but will never admit it as it’s their identity they’ve built up. They buy Porsches or homes just to feel something, or have something to show people.
Money at some point has diminishing returns, and once you have enough to be whatever your version of secure is, you should stop before you can’t even enjoy happiness. Until then, enjoy the process and do not look to others as it’s the theft of your own happiness.
I've already committed to pay for a friend's kid to attend college( within reason though, I'm thinking about 15k as that's a good headstart).
Another I occasionally help with nominal amounts. In exchange he's shown me around the world. He's basically a genius who is fluent in like 4 languages. I always respect others who can do what I can't.
That's the dream anyway. Sell your soul, then take care of your friends in an attempt to buy it back.
And here’s the core tension. The models keep getting better. GPT 5.5 improved. But it also got more expensive. Opus 4.7 to 4.8 has become outrageously priced too, up 50%, and 4.6 was already brutally expensive to begin with. API pricing is a real pain.
What’s missing is any meaningful supply of affordable, democratically priced models you can actually embed into your own service. For me that’s playcode.io, whether it’s the website builder or the app builder. The moment we give users access to these models, the cost becomes a serious blocker. There’s no way around it.
The same dynamic explains Cursor. Why did they go build their own Composer 2.5 model? Because relying on third-party models is simply too expensive for users unless they’re carrying a Claude Code or Codex subscription. So Cursor had to roll their own. It’s a real mess, honestly.
And Chinese models don’t close the gap either. They’ve improved, the free-tier ones especially, which is great to see. But the limitations are significant:
• No multimodality. They don’t accept image input. • You can’t attach a screenshot, show a UI, or hand it a PDF. • They feel heavily stripped down overall. • They’re just not polished. Not even close.
Opus, by contrast, feels like a finished, deeply refined product. Everything else is still rough around the edges. And that’s exactly why Anthropic can charge what they charge: because they actually deliver. That’s the whole problem in a sentence.