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Can Anthropic Write Software?

Tales From the Organization Settings Page

4 min read

It is somewhat in vogue right now to criticize Anthropic. In particular, much ink has been spilled over the color of the Claude Status page and the corresponding lack of reliability, as well as accusations of fear-mongering about their latest model, Mythos. In these and many other domains, I have great sympathy for Anthropic. It is a hugely challenging problem to try and accommodate the pace of growth in agentic coding, made worse by their limitations in compute.1 Furthermore, although they are certainly financially incentivized to espouse a belief in the overwhelming power of AI, I have found their employees to be genuine in their concern about its impact.2 I wasn’t looking for an excuse to pile on. Nonetheless, when I accidentally found myself administrating my startup’s Claude subscription, I found myself a little shocked by the experience.

Lamentations

Let me briefly list out a few of the problems I’ve had in the “organization settings” page off the top of my head:

  • UI updates usually require a page refresh. If I change an employee’s status, the page will print a success message, but continue showing the old status.
  • Adding employees to the plan does not reliably succeed. After enough people telling me they didn’t get my invites, I’ve found myself refreshing the page to check the status after each invite so that I can retry if it wasn’t registered.
  • Downgrading users is nigh impossible. If I attempt to downgrade someone, I’m told I must schedule for it to occur at the end of the month, but then when I take any other action (e.g. adding or upgrading anyone else) I’m required to cancel any scheduled changes.
  • Employees are identified by first name only. If someone requests to increase the limits on their usage, I have no way to disambiguate (e.g. by their employee email they were added with).

Don’t even get me started on the janky broken scrolling experience that exists on certain pages.3 I’d report these issues properly if their process for such issues weren’t notoriously slow and painful.

Why I’m Surprised

To me, there are two main reasons for this to be so shocking:

  1. Incentive: This is the bread and butter of the company’s revenue. They sell Claude Code to enterprises. I’ve focused my complaints here on the pages I can use in order to send them more money. Shouldn’t that be the very place they want the experience to be smoothest?4
  2. Capability: This is also the key thing their product is considered best at. Claude Code makes beautiful web UIs faster than the most experienced humans. Presumably Anthropic engineers should have the most access to and be the most adept at using their own product?

Anthropic should be uniquely able and motivated to fix this. So why haven’t they?

Root Causes

So far I have two main theories to explain this:5

  1. Carelessness: It is possible that, although important, this sort of work sanding down rough edges in the UX is simply seen as low status within the organization compared to the sort of research that might lead more directly to the goals of recursive self-improvement and super-intelligence. There’s so much else exciting going on that it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks. If that were the case, I would be a little bit worried about Anthropic, and its ability to maintain its enterprise advantage as it scales into a bigger organization.
  2. Kool-Aid: It is possible that rather than appearing despite the power of Claude Code, these sorts of issues are in fact symptomatic of the ways that language models can now intermediate between developers and their products, and of an organization uniquely enamored with this capability. Perhaps a human more tightly integrated with internal testing might have caught these before they reached me. If this is instead the case, then I worry not for Anthropic, but for all of us who’ve begun to rely on agentic coding more heavily, and may soon face the costs.

I won’t claim to know which of these or the many other possibilities is more true, but I certainly hope it’s something closer to the former, and that Anthropic can assign a few more people to tighten all this up and prove that to us.

Footnotes

  1. I’m even amenable to Dario’s arguments that, given what they knew at the time, aggressively acquiring more compute earlier would have been irresponsible. ↩

  2. Many had similar beliefs before any of this was profitable, and it’s only sensible that they’ve updated them to be more aggressive given the pace of advancements. ↩

  3. But not others, since there is limited consistency to the UI even when representing seemingly similar-shaped data. ↩

  4. Perhaps admin pages are universally secondary to those for the end users, but they’re still an important stakeholder to have on board. ↩

  5. A third possibility could be that organizations like ours doing our own administration are simply too small to matter compared to the biggest customers. ↩

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