> But then the clean room implementations started showing up. People had taken Anthropic’s source code and rewritten Claude Code from scratch in other languages like Python and Rust.

Seems like the phrase "clean room" is the new "nonplussed"... how does this make any sense?

Seems equally valid to come out of this with the takeaway that code quality _does_ matter, because poor coding practices are what led to the leak.

Sure, the weights are where the real value lives, but if the quality is so lax they leak their whole codebase, maybe they are just lucky they didn’t leak customer data or the model weights? If that did happen, the entire business might evaporate overnight.

> Many software developers have argued that working like a pack of hyenas and shipping hundreds of commits a day without reading your code is an unsustainable way to build valuable software, but this leak suggests that maybe this isn’t true — bad code can build well-regarded products.

The product hasn't been around long enough to decide whether such an approach is "sustainable". It is currently in a hype state and needs more time for that hype to die down and the true value to show up, as well as to see whether it becomes the 9th circle of hell to keep in working order.

I wonder what happened to the person that wrote "Coding as Creative Expression" (https://build.ms/2022/5/21/coding-as-creative-expression/)?

I'm not (just) being glib. That earlier article displays some introspection and thoughtful consideration of an old debate. The writing style is clearly personal, human.

Today's post is not so much. It has LLM fingerprints on it. It's longer, there are more words. But it doesn't strike me as having the same thoughtful consideration in it. I would venture to guess that the author tried to come up with some new angles on the news of the Claude Code leak, because it's a hot topic, and jotted some notes, and then let an LLM flesh it out.

Writing styles of course change over time, but looking at these two posts side by side, the difference is stark.

They just said this was an April Fools joke.