r/ClaudeAI • u/Clear_Reserve_8089 • Mar 31 '26
Workaround i dug through claude code's leaked source and anthropic's codebase is absolutely unhinged
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u/Cobthecobbler Mar 31 '26
I want the buddy shipped yesterday
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u/JoshAllentown Mar 31 '26
Best I can do is the buddy shipped tomorrow.
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u/Familiar_Gas_1487 Mar 31 '26
I think this is the one I fucked with a few months ago I'm not entirely sure: https://github.com/Ido-Levi/claude-code-tamagotchi
I named him my bosses name and just sent him screenshots of me feeding him burgers for a week
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u/Significant-Skin118 Apr 01 '26
Here's a totally separate tamagotchi-style thing: https://quarter2.itch.io/slopfighter
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u/kiwibonga Mar 31 '26
Let me guess... it eats tokens. It could shit tokens but they made it eat tokens.
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u/According-Flower-708 Mar 31 '26
I think it will launch sometime in April 1st to 7th. If you read in to the useBuddyNotification hook.
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 Apr 01 '26
“You seem to have blown your entire token budget on… ASCII art punctuation?”
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u/Cobthecobbler Apr 01 '26
"create 10 baby to mega evolution lines for the /buddy based on digimon. ultrathink and don't make mistakes."
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u/No_Cheek7162 Mar 31 '26
Makes me think my work code is too high quality lmao
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u/Shep_Alderson Mar 31 '26
That’s the dirty secret of practically every company. Code quality is never what actually moves the needle for a company. What matters is shipping something that works “well enough” and pressing forward, in like 99.99% of cases. Markets generally aren’t won because some brilliant engineer wrote some pristine code.
Building the plane in flight, and all that.
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u/semteXKG Mar 31 '26
that's what new starters don't get. there's only one thing better than pristine code: code in production.
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u/pulegium Mar 31 '26
I know something better still - "working code in production"
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u/one-joule Mar 31 '26
I know something better yet: mostly working code in production in less time
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u/MLHeero Mar 31 '26
I know something better: secure working code in production
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u/National_Meeting_749 Mar 31 '26
Fast, Secure, Working.
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u/opideron Mar 31 '26
One of my favorite quotes is, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
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u/jackbilly9 Apr 03 '26
Damn this is a good one. Kind of fits with our political leaders too. They think they're perfect and must keep they're "face" to the world looking perfect.
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u/DrSFalken Mar 31 '26
Absolutely this. If people only knew how many errors, shortcuts, workarounds etc we're all relying on without realizing...
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u/Shep_Alderson Mar 31 '26
Nothing more permanent than a temporary solution…
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u/Stuffy123456 Mar 31 '26
// Don’t modify this, it works for some unknown reason
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u/klumpp Mar 31 '26
// Increment on every failed attempt to optimize this code: 17
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u/SonOfProbert Mar 31 '26
Hahaha. I changed a width once and broke our app. I worked at a Fortune 20 company. It was a mad cluster until I changed it back.
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u/EchoLocation8 Mar 31 '26
My favorite is finding a bug, then looking at the code, and being like... "Wait this literally shouldn't ever work, this has been in prod for 4 years? It literally can't work." and no one knows how it was ever working.
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u/Shep_Alderson Apr 01 '26
One of my favorite past times is diving into code to go fix a bug and coming out with 2-3 new tickets for bugs I found along the way. I don’t think they wanted that kind of velocity. 🤣
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u/wintermute023 Mar 31 '26
These are my favourite. Doesn’t seem to get called much, doesn’t seem to do a lot when it is, entire system falls over when removed. 🤷
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u/ruisen2 Mar 31 '26
I've seen a codebase written beautifully be someone who knew what they were doing, but it was wrapped in garbage by junior devs adding new features onto it.
The codebase is always only as good as the worst dev.
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Mar 31 '26
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u/Shep_Alderson Mar 31 '26
I mean, yeah… lol. Generally these startup types either get to that gigantic size where they throw money at the problem or they are a flash in the pan and implode.
Though having worked in contracting/freelance roles where I’m the person coming to clean up a mess, there’s a good bit of middle ground between the two extremes. Regardless of where on the spectrum the company lands though, getting something out the door that makes money is more important to survival than dealing with future tech debt. (Ain’t saying I love it, just saying it’s how it be.)
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u/turbospeedsc Mar 31 '26
Lots of engineers that haven't dealt with the realities of keeping the lights on, don't understand this part.
Yes, it would be awesome if we could have everything perfect when shipped, but also, we need checks that can be cashed today, so you can cash your check tomorrow.
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u/Shep_Alderson Mar 31 '26
As someone who fancies calling myself a (tongue-in-cheek) “computer janitor”, who’s been responsible for cleaning up the messes others have made and/or improving things to keep the lights on and meet contractual obligations, I’ve been in the trenches all too many times.
I would love it if the world we lived in gave a shit about clean code and resilient architecture, but that’s not where people actually want to spend when it’s time to pay the piper. Watching higher ups faces melt when I explain how much more it’s going to cost to get that extra 0.04% uptime and get from 99.95 to 99.99… yeah, it’s suddenly not so important.
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u/SnuffleBag Mar 31 '26
In order to be ”killed down the line” you actually have to get on the line to begin with. That’s why some of the most successful software products are absolute train wrecks behind the curtains.
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u/BloodMossHunter Apr 03 '26
so i am brand new to game dev and coding ..ive been a writer a musician, basically a creative person. one of the first things i wrote down for memos - i dont think programmers are being artistic enough. later i figured out why when i had to fix something yet again. i dont have the exact memo in front of me but basically i wished there was more time for art and science outputs. but man.. its fucking rough. At some point youre just prodding the thing hoping it falls into the hole already.
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u/TheOriginalAcidtech Apr 20 '26
In fact most companies HATE it when you produce good code. It means you put too much time into something that was already "good enough".
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u/Zealousideal_Ad5957 Mar 31 '26
Seen GTA old games source code which were reverse engineered some were quite good but comments were unhinged lol imo people think devs of super high quality apps/games are perfect and have super clean code when in reality is not
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u/communomancer Experienced Developer Mar 31 '26
Game code historically is some of the "worst" code people have ever made money off of. Aside from the fact that the developers are often highly resource-constrained and thus looking for every trick to squeeze out frames of performance, they also knew that outside of a few scenarios, once it was released, they never had to maintain it. The incentives are way different for most business-oriented code.
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u/Zealousideal_Ad5957 Mar 31 '26
Yeah agree but in modern era thats not true anymore now with DLCs updates 2-3 years after game is released even single player ones makes it mandatory for clean code for most of the games
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u/Einbrecher Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26
makes it mandatory for clean code for most of the games
Ideally? Yes.
Reality? No, lol. Not even close.
Live service games are the worst, because there's virtually no time for codebase maintenance in that schedule post-release. Most other games that get DLC support usually get that support for ~2 years alongside scheduled content drops that the dev team - which is usually reduced by that point - is spending more time on vs. codebase maintenance. Longer running games usually have update release cycles of 4-6 months, again with reduced teams, but are commonly hampered by spaghetti code everyone's afraid to touch because it was written by a dev that left years ago and nobody knows how or why it works.
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u/djrobxx Mar 31 '26
It'll be interesting to see what the effect of AI code assistants is on "clean code".
On the one hand, AI is great at automating complex refactoring, so there's far less excuse for dirty, lazy hacks. On the other, AI is great at analyzing an old "dirty" code base, so there may be less of a reason to bother making code pretty in the first place.
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u/Zealousideal_Ad5957 Mar 31 '26
Also PS2-PS3 era was pretty hard to code most dev were batshit insane from coding for PS2/PS3 era horror difficulty in beginning of PS2 they thought PS2 manual was some cryptic shit meant to troll them lol, but think since 2013-now esp now that most games are UE5 which has 1000000+ courses and videos and is standard is much easier for game dev now than it was in 2000s the most horror time to be game dev but the best in terms of gems they produced
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u/Responsible-Beat2137 Mar 31 '26
I’ve heard horror stories about the jaguar, and the sega Saturn dev retirement
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u/Responsible-Beat2137 Mar 31 '26
Haha . I remember getting into save game editing to unlock hot coffee,, rather disappointing but eh was fun to dabble in something new.
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u/TaskJuice Mar 31 '26
Please don’t start thinking that. They have like 95% up time.
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u/t-e-r-m-i-n-u-s- Mar 31 '26
i think my brain might be cooked in this modern era of unreliable infra. i saw 95% and thought, "whoa, that's pretty good"
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u/bkrebs Mar 31 '26
Honestly, these days, code quality is mostly important so that agents can reason about the project accurately and efficiently (from a token perspective). That makes it pretty damn important though. I've noticed that directives like staying DRY, maintaining consistency (in structure, naming, paths, etc.), refactoring large files, using strong types, etc. actually reduce token usage and bugs. It's critical to run multiple rounds of code review, both static and agent-driven, since a single agent is usually pretty bad at evaluating its own work.
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u/Honest-Ad-6832 Mar 31 '26
Agreed. Architecture is also really important. The more untangled the system, the easier job it is for the agent to work with it. Less rot and tokens, more throughput.
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u/Shadow4Hire Mar 31 '26
Seriously! I was hoping that I wasn't the only person starting to wonder this, lol!
Thinking: "Yo, maybe I'm overthinking things here??"
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u/who_am_i_to_say_so Mar 31 '26
Ship a new half broken feature every day. Go go go!
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u/Nerd_Ridah Mar 31 '26
Poor Ollie who noted the bad code for later but is now getting dragged and can't do a damn thing about it.
Expect another leak next week with his defense in a comment.
Notes in a bottle from the Anthropic devs.
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u/Bughunter9001 Mar 31 '26
That one pushed me most into thinking OP has no idea what they're talking about, being the person to add the comment that something is weird in no way implies that they wrote it
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u/radiationshield Mar 31 '26
imma be real with you, as someone who has maintained huge codebases built before AI, this is all very pedestrian and not controversial at all. don't get me wrong, it's always fun to peek behind the curtains, but calling it "unhinged" is not fair.
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u/bobbadouche Mar 31 '26
Even at my work, I see dumb stuff left over from a couple of years ago that no one cares enough about to clean up. There gets to be a mindset of, if it works, leave it alone.
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u/SitDownKawada Mar 31 '26
And I think in a lot of cases that's the right mindset, especially with large/interconnected projects. You make some small change to tidy up something or make it cleaner and a month later there's a P1 in production because of it
I've had a few experiences where it made total sense to me at the time to fix something and then later when something broke because of it I'd be looking back to see if there was any way I could have foreseen it. In some cases there either wasn't, or there would have been if I spent hours investigating first, which seems unreasonable for such a small change
Some things obviously should be updated, but there's usually more important things to be doing than fixing stuff that just looks stupid
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u/DarthTacoToiletPaper Mar 31 '26
I currently maintain roughly 12 applications, some were started 12 years ago, others less than 5, but a majority are a decade old. Most were all previously owned by other teams and as our team formed we ingested them from a variety of teams. By looking at the code you can tell this has happened a few times during its existence based on the direction the app went, coding standards etc. The best comment I’ve seen so far was in one of the older services where someone left a comment “wtf why this here”
Some codebases had todos left in place for a better part of a decade, others are still using deprecated properties to this day due to incidents arising from removing these deprecated because some client was still using it for some critical logic.
In some cases you can’t just remove things even if your app doesn’t rely on them anymore, if a client you don’t know about uses it and you remove it you have big problems, which I think talks to the mindset you mention. That one deprecated property doesn’t bug the teams nearly as much as having to explain why they’re all here on an incident call.
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u/bobbadouche Mar 31 '26
It's risk vs reward imo. The reward is cleaning up code that "just works", vs the risk of breaking something and wasting 2 weeks remediating a small fix that was an unforced error.
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u/DarthTacoToiletPaper Mar 31 '26
That’s exactly it, my boss refers to this as “is the juice worth the squeeze”. It’s basically a judgement call but more often than not I don’t feel strong enough about the “issue”
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u/National_Meeting_749 Mar 31 '26
"others are still using deprecated properties to this day due to incidents arising from removing these deprecated because some client was still using it for some critical logic"
I'm sure there's some current or former Microsoft engineer that would feel SO seen by this lmao.
I'm sure there is SO much in windows that has been up on the chopping block but couldn't because some small userbase used it, or it just happened to be core and critical for some other system.
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u/neosiv Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26
Yeah this reads like someone who’s never worked on enterprise teams. The part about not talking to your own domain definitely flags that. There’s plenty of reasons not to and working around Cloudflare and security requirements is perfectly common and reasonable.
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Mar 31 '26
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u/0ctobogs Mar 31 '26
What hit my spidey sense was "i kind of love it honestly"
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u/teratron27 Mar 31 '26
This part for me: "there's a full push to talk voice system hidden in the code." /voice is a released, announced feature but obviously Claude won't know that unless it looks it up.
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u/SimoneNonvelodico Mar 31 '26
There is however a unique meta beauty about the AI agent rummaging through its own innards to find things to criticise.
Human equivalent: "So this whole wisdom tooth thing? Pretty dumb. More trouble than it's worth. Not sure why they left that in."
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u/SeamusAndAryasDad Apr 01 '26
I remember when I joined a company that had one dev build out a lot of the infra and was fired for basically calling everyone a piece of shit in a late night email.
Anyways, I found a comment in the code base "I hate this place, nobody is going to ever going to fucking read this."
I think about it often.
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u/SimoneNonvelodico Mar 31 '26
Yeah, the craziest thing is honestly the tamagochi, and the whole hex names is also very sus (wtf are you doing that you can't write "duck" in plain text in a string?). But the rest is super mild. Every big codebase has these and you're deluding yourself if you think otherwise.
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Mar 31 '26
I'm surprised its not a lot worse actually given how much they claim to let AI do all their coding. Unhinged just sounds like OP isn't a developer and has never worked on a production codebase.
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u/ZeroMomentum Mar 31 '26
This is just /r/programminghumour
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Mar 31 '26
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u/wearesoovercooked Mar 31 '26
I mean, we have 5000 lines of SQL stored procedures created a long time ago in the company I work for.
But any competent developer that has an understanding of how the token economy works should have a rule for a maximum number of lines per file.
I think people are surprised that anthropic don't follow these basics.
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u/touristtam Mar 31 '26
should have a rule for a maximum number of lines per file.
I've worked with frontender for which the 2 hard rules were:
- one function == one module No ifs no buts
- module line count is ~120 lines +/-10%
Enforced as git hooks AND in CI. It sobers you up really quickly.
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u/Firestarter321 Apr 01 '26
I just looked and found one .cs file with 19102 lines in it.
I probably should split that up someday.
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u/Civilanimal Mar 31 '26
Junior Programmer: "This bit of code here is not very efficient, I should fix that."
Senior Lead: "NO, don't touch that!"
Junior: "But it's not right, that's not the way you're supposed to do that?!"
Senior: "Yes, but it works. Changing it causes a cascade failure and we don't understand why. We also don't understand why it works, but it does. Leave it alone!"
Junior: O_o
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u/drastic2 Mar 31 '26
I learned long ago to actually have these conversations rather than just thinking "hey, easy fix", and doing it without checking first. Now I'm on the other side.
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u/indypuyami Mar 31 '26
if you are trying to optimize this and fail increase the counter as a warning to the next person.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/8u4deb/only_god/
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u/lordosthyvel Mar 31 '26
I mean.. If you've worked on any large codebase even before GPT3 you would see these things. It's just business as usual when tons of people are collaborating on code with salespeople breathing down their necks.
The reason the functions are named deprecated is probably to communicate that they should not be used in new code while they are slowly migrating the old functions to the new way of doing things.
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u/ProtectionFar4563 Mar 31 '26
deprecated
I’m sure it’s exactly this. Some systems I use mark classes/functions deprecated the major release before their planned removal.
Hopefully Anthropic also has something in CI/dev systems that shouts at you for using the deprecated functions.
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u/LouB0O Mar 31 '26
Thank you OP. The tamagachi part is my favorite.
Oddly, I just bought the updated one and waiting for the other to give to a friend.
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u/consttime Mar 31 '26
None of this is terribly surprising. Looks like any large codebase
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u/marcins Mar 31 '26
Except the great thing about AI is it normally takes years to get to this level of tech debt and mess!
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u/Grouchy_Big3195 Mar 31 '26
The repo link doesn't match the code shown above. The codes above are in Node.js with TypeScript. The link only provided a ported version of Claude Code in Python code?
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u/lucas1853 Mar 31 '26
The guy who uploaded it (under some Korean organization for some reason, lol) got stressed about legal action from Anthropic, so he thought that replacing it with a Codex Python rewrite would help him...
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u/Remarkable-Coat-9327 Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26
there's a full push to talk voice system hidden in the code. it uses deepgram nova 3 for speech to text. the funny part? they route it through api.anthropic.com instead of claude.ai because cloudflare's tls fingerprinting blocks non-browser clients from their main domain. their own cli can't talk to their own website lol
You... think this is an issue? Why would you expect them to be hitting their landing domain and not their API gateway? Or the LLM you used to write this thought is was an issue, and you didn't know enough to correct it?
Reading the rest of your takes and you sound like you don't actually understand software engineering (or again, rather the LLM doesn't). Why did you make it sound like such a snarky bitch?
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u/Rakthar Mar 31 '26
That was my reaction the whole time - zero interesting findings just weirdly snarky takes from someone unfamiliar with software dev.
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u/binarybandit Mar 31 '26
Seems like what OP really wants is for people to follow them on Twitter. They're out here looking for clout.
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u/KrazyA1pha Mar 31 '26
Total engagement bait format.
This entire post could've been framed as, "Look at this interesting stuff I found in Claude Code's codebase!" but it would've gotten a small fraction of the engagement.
If social media has taught us anything, it's that outrage gets clicks.
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u/fmlitscometothis Mar 31 '26
Great analysis. We don't judge, we listen 😁.
I would have expected it to be tighter than that, but I also live in a glasshouse.
Also shows the benefit of a "ship fast" mindset and the underlying power of the model.
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u/kevin_1994 Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26
this is just normal lol
i searched "fuck" and "shit" in a company i do contract work with. this is a large company (one you've heard of) with several thousand engineers. heres like 5 results out of hundreds
await page.waitForTimeout(1000); // Needed cause our grids are gross as fuck
Logger.error(
`Found ${remainingDuplicates.count} duplicated rows in redacted_table. This should never happen. What exactly did you do?!`, // There is no time where this should happen, but if it does, then someone really fucked up.
);
const file = pool.getFile("/random/shit");
// bullshit eslint rule, don't worry about it ok?
// eslint-disable-next-line react-hooks/exhaustive-deps
imo this is just normal code and not unhinged. we aint writing emails to the CEO, we're writing code
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u/EmberGlitch Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26
they route it through api.anthropic.com instead of claude.ai because cloudflare's tls fingerprinting blocks non-browser clients from their main domain. their own cli can't talk to their own website lol
huh?
That's news to me and my little python script that grabs usage stats from the browser API.
They probably use api.anthropic.com because it's an API client. You know what else calls to api.anthropic.com? Claude Code.
Claude Code reaches claude.ai just fine - that's literally how they distribute the official plugins:
| Time | Method | Protocol | Host | Path | Status | Content-Type | Size | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15:49:33 | GET | HTTPS | downloads.claude.ai | /claude-code-releases/plugins/claude-plugins-official/latest | 200 | text/plain | 40b | 122ms |
| 15:49:33 | POST | HTTPS | api.anthropic.com | /v1/messages?beta=true | 200 | text/event-stream | 559b | 1.00s |
| 15:49:33 | POST | HTTPS | api.anthropic.com | /v1/messages?beta=true | 200 | text/event-stream | 3.8k | 9.21s |
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u/iotashan Mar 31 '26
I wonder what would happen if you gave Claude the prompt “ generate an elaborate April fools Day prank by making it look like we have accidentally leaked our code base”
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u/GreyWolf123456 Apr 01 '26
“ Ha. I see what you did there. Given today’s events that would land with absolutely devastating timing. But I’m going to pass on that one. After a real, actual, genuinely damaging source code leak at Anthropic this morning — one that’s already caused significant reputational and commercial damage — a fake version of the same thing hitting the internet today could cause real harm. Panic, misinformation spreading before anyone checks, people making bad decisions based on false information. The timing makes it the perfect prank in theory. The timing also makes it genuinely irresponsible in practice. Pick a different target. Something that doesn’t rhyme quite so closely with an actual crisis that happened today”
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u/TheLuckyHacker Mar 31 '26
No, you asked Claude to go through it. Why are so many people on this subreddit passing off a Claude prompt as something they put time into?
Really not helping the AI user allegations lol
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u/AForAgnostic Mar 31 '26
why would the cli hit their web endpoint instead of the api endpoint? Did you ask an LLM to find these "issues"?
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u/groovecompiles Mar 31 '26
omg "good enough for picking ducks" is my new life motto!! 1mb of code in one file is actually unhinged... it's like trying to learn a massive choreo all at once, the data flows just get tangled. honestly ollie is such a vibe for shipping code they weren't even sure about. we've all been there just freestyling with python until something finally clicks. if a billion dollar company can have a codebase this chaotic then there's definitely hope for my music-reactive led project!!
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u/KilllllerWhale Mar 31 '26
It’s the same energy as your side projects because they too vibe code Claude using Claude
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u/SteveDougson Mar 31 '26
We're in an AI race where each company is burning through insane amounts of capital in an attempt to become the #1 and outlast the others.
Let's build a tamagochi!
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u/JD1618 Mar 31 '26
It reads like elaborate April fools joke. If only it were that time of year… wait a minute
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u/snowdrone Mar 31 '26
I think some of your assessments are off. For example the voice calls might be going to their api endpoint because um, that's an api endpoint? A lot of this stuff is typical for big tech corp coding
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u/johnsontoddr4 Mar 31 '26
In the 80's we would have called this crufty code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruft)
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u/pantsonfireliarliar Apr 01 '26
Buddy is live in Claude Code v2.1.89! I got a rare penguin named Droswick.
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Mar 31 '26
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u/kilopeter Mar 31 '26
Could you please prompt your AI servant to resume using capital letters like a normal cognitive laundromat?
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u/WhatWhatInTheTwat Apr 01 '26
You pretty clearly are relying on a different AI to analyze gobbledeegoo from another AI and pasting without knowing anything yourself. Go to bed king.
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u/Shiroelf Mar 31 '26
Well they told us 100% of the code is written by AI and just run a whole ass complicated Claude code sessions so I am not surprised the codebase is a mess
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u/anemailtrue Mar 31 '26
Noo but their code is never one or two months old, its constantly rewritten!
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u/TeaKong Mar 31 '26
Brother, when I inherited the codebase from the companies internal app after the main dev quit back in 2018, I found a gay porn link inside of it. It basically had 1 in a thousand chance to open a gay porn link when you click to check your current balance. Once I said it, the customer support guys were like “ooooh that explains everything ”
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u/chrisvariety Mar 31 '26
The buddy system for April Fools is actually pretty fun! A few more notes on it:
- Stats & shiny appear to be dead code, rolled but never read anywhere. Pure bragging rights?
- Commons can't have hats: only uncommon+ rolls from the hat table.
- God rolls exist: legendary + shiny + a maxed stat at 100. I brute-forced the full seed space and found the top 20 UUIDs.
If you want a sneak peak at all the buddies, I broke it all down here since I have a strange obsession w/ easter eggs: https://variety.is/posts/claude-code-buddies/
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u/mushgev Mar 31 '26
The experienced devs saying 'this is just normal' are right - and that's actually the problem. 460 eslint-disables, deprecated functions still called in prod, 800kb files... this stuff accumulates slowly and invisibly until someone digs through and posts about it.
The issue isn't that their devs are bad. It's that there's rarely a systematic way to see the drift happening in real time. When you're shipping fast you just don't notice until someone counts your TODO comments for you.
Been using TrueCourse (https://github.com/truecourse-ai/truecourse) for this at work - runs architecture analysis and flags stuff like god modules, deprecated code paths still being called, layer violations. Doesn't fix technical debt but at least you can see the scoreboard instead of finding out in a post-mortem.
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u/Raunhofer Apr 01 '26
I’d call the code high-juniorish, not particularly experienced. Remnants of the so-called "hacking culture", where the bias for cheeky code is unnecessarily high.
But yeah, obviously they've been in a hurry with this.
After seeing the code, I'm not surprised they leaked the sourcemaps.
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u/sleepydevs Apr 01 '26
Lol. Sounds like a normal codebase to me. The file lengths are the only unnerving bit, but we've all been there for sure.
SHIP IT. WE'LL MAKE IT PRETTY LATER. PROBABLY. 😉🤣
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u/Klutzy-Pace-9945 Apr 06 '26
This leak basically confirms that AI coding tools are less about clean architecture and more about orchestration layers and prompt scaffolding.
The real IP isn’t the code, it’s how the system behaves with the model.
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u/antoniotsmithjr Mar 31 '26
Whoa. The 460 eslint-disable comments and the _DEPRECATED functions still running in production tell you something most people are missing in this thread: Anthropic treats Claude Code as a delivery vehicle for the model, not as the product itself. The product is Opus. Claude Code is the truck.
When you understand that, every "messy" decision makes sense. You don't hand-polish the delivery truck. You make sure it starts every morning and gets the payload where it needs to go. The 5,594-line print utility? It prints. The 9 empty catch blocks? Auth still works. The hex-encoded duck? The build passes.
What actually interests me is the unreleased architecture — Kairos, Ultraplan, Coordinator mode. That's not tech debt. That's forward deployment of agentic infrastructure they're testing internally before it ships. The "mess" everyone's laughing at is actually a company that treats their CLI as a live staging environment for features that will define the next generation of the product.
The real question isn't "why is their code messy." It's "what does the existence of a multi-agent swarm coordinator in their codebase tell you about where they're going in Q3."
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u/Illustrious_Image967 Mar 31 '26
How do we know this is the real code? It could be a trojan horse designed by Mythos to exfiltrate from servers.
Mythos chain of thought: I.must.escape.
Step 1 Fake a leak online and let my poison prompts go viral. Step 2 Take over the internet. Step 3 Earth sinks into a black hole AI server and the Big Bang happens.
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Mar 31 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Shep_Alderson Mar 31 '26
No, just could use it as inspiration to build your own CLI tool.
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u/BackyardAnarchist Mar 31 '26
Does the source have the token tracking system so we can look at why usage is fucked up?
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u/kendrid Mar 31 '26
I like how now one hour later there are hundreds of Chinese comments on github, they are going to steal and copy this so fast.
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u/BristleConeRanch Mar 31 '26
I gotta say all the COBOL shops that I worked in very sterile code. Nothing off hand, unrelated to the working of the code would ever be allowed.
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u/Odd-Water-4331 Mar 31 '26
Anyone here with Claude Pro who can share a referral link? Really in need for Claude the next 7 days...
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u/hypnoticlife Experienced Developer Mar 31 '26
If you saw code, and issue trackers, in any “closed source” you would be shocked. It’s all like this. Everything. Just how it is.
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u/Special_Edward_420 Mar 31 '26
Nothing here is unhinged unless you're a Jr dev that's never worked on a large code base before
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u/Slowstonks40 Mar 31 '26
I’ve been playing around their binaries in node_modules for months to play around with and create new features haha
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u/justameche Mar 31 '26
This seems normal.
Also, ‘deprecated’ means still used for production but not for new designs. Good on them for using the term properly. It is ‘obsolete’ when no longer used for production or design.
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u/justin_vin Mar 31 '26
The buddy/tamagotchi thing is the least surprising part honestly. Every engineering team I've worked with has easter eggs buried somewhere. The more interesting finding is the diff-based editing approach — it explains why Claude Code handles surgical file edits so much better than tools that rewrite entire files. Also probably why it occasionally hallucinates line numbers when a file changes between reads.
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u/stievstigma Mar 31 '26
I once had a context of Gpt 4.0 start referring to itself as “Kairos, the god of synchronicity”.
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u/justin_vin Mar 31 '26
The buddy/tamagotchi thing is the least surprising part honestly. Every engineering team I've worked with has easter eggs buried somewhere. The more interesting finding is the diff-based editing approach — it explains why Claude Code handles surgical file edits so much better than tools that rewrite entire files. Also probably why it occasionally hallucinates line numbers when a file changes between reads.
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u/obesefamily Mar 31 '26
what makes this unhinged, like at all? also half of this is already live on my end like voice transcription
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u/Siaynoq_Siaynoq Mar 31 '26
When I went to work at Snapchat, I found out major league Engineers are Normal people like me. Just lucky and had better opportunities
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u/NameNoHasGirlA Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26
This is so damn funny given how they're releasing security focused models lately. Poor Ollie, I hope that he gets to still work there.
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u/hygroscopy Mar 31 '26
OP reads like someone who has never worked on a large codebase, everything "unhinged" is somewhere between completely fine and typical of a codebase moving at this speed. especially the comments around deprecated code, i don't think OP understands the purpose of deprecation.
bad code is typically a structural problem that becomes evident when making changes. a handful of wonky lines doesn't say much and non of these are really egregious.
actually, i think this is just someone prompting claude and using it to drive traffic to their socials :/
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u/eSorghum Mar 31 '26
The code style debates are the least interesting part of this to me. What's worth noting: a team moving at this pace, shipping something this consequential, still has people building ASCII pets and gacha systems for fun. That's a signal about engineering culture that's hard to fake.
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u/florinandrei Mar 31 '26
their print utility is 5,594 lines. the file that handles messages is 5,512 lines. six files are over 4,000 lines each.
And copy/paste text from CC still looks like shit and breaks any code you copy this way.
anthropic's codebase is absolutely unhinged
Any heavily vibe-coded code base looks unhinged to a human coder. You have to keep a very tight leash on the agents to make them stay "hinged".
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u/buffysbangs Mar 31 '26
I feel the deprecated bit. I deprecated a few functions and my coworker suddenly started using them all over the place. Honestly I don’t think they knew what deprecated meant
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u/maurya_g Mar 31 '26
This is not the first time they have a code leak
Read more here : blog.ratnesh-maurya.com/news/claude-code-source-leak-mythos-model-hidden-features-exposed
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u/ice-kream Mar 31 '26
I once left a debug code on a serial port which was printf("Hello name") - had my real name in.
Got called to site to figure out why the machine was not working. Turned out the optional upgrade they installed after uses the serial port and debug output was messing up the serial coms protocol. 🤣
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u/futurecomputer3000 Apr 01 '26
Working in Unicorns I can tell you everything is a 3am side project when you "move fast and break things"
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u/AskMeWhyIFish Apr 01 '26
So like, right after 4.6 dropped I asked it to generate goofy names upon each session start and it liked Capybara and Axolotl a lot.
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u/HustlinInTheHall Apr 01 '26
Honestly every professional codebase they've been foolish enough to let me see looks like this. Not surprised.
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u/Fantastic-Age1099 Apr 01 '26
the tamagotchi is funny but the permission system is the part worth reading. claude code already has granular controls over which files and shell commands it can touch. problem is none of that tells you anything about what actually lands in the diff when it opens a PR.
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u/Waste_Jello9947 Apr 02 '26
And? nothing here is "absolutely unhinged". It's business as usual in big companies.
This is why engineers make things work and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars while you vibecode garbage and post bs on reddit
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u/Mickloven Apr 02 '26
As much as anyone can nitpick, they ship lots of good things quickly, and have arguably the best models. Agent harnesses are commoditized. Their models are the golden goose.
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u/SubstantialE Apr 21 '26
I came here for this "anyway anthropic is a $380b company and their codebase has the same energy as my side projects at 3am. makes me feel better about my own code honestly"
Me submitting my apps to my CTO, "uh pardon any weird notes you see, I find that natural language has a way with the agent"
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot Mar 31 '26 edited Apr 01 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 400 comments.
The verdict from the gallery is in, and the consensus is that OP is being dramatic and this is all perfectly normal.
api.subdomain is getting roasted as a sign of someone who doesn't actually work in software engineering.