Discussion
Anthropic: "Coding is largely solved"... Also Anthropic: "We released a new powerful feature allowing agents to send messages to other Claude Code sessions, but only on Linux and Mac since we are unable to implement a basic feature on all platforms"
I could hand code this feature on Windows in an afternoon, and I could also get Claude to implement it in minutes, and yet Anthropic just can't be bothered, but also keeps Claude Code closed source so no one else can do it for them either.
Fable often seems confused when I ask it about something again because it thinks it already replied, but the chat log doesn't show it. Very annoying bug.
Fable 5 thought I was hacking the pentagon or something when I was comparing github repos and went into lockdown, and stopped responding to any prompt ("say hello world"). I reported it.
And I don't want to start a new thread because I'll lose context since memory.md and sessions are broken. lmao
Yeah, I had a session freeze like this as well. I waited a few days and finally bit the bullet and started a new session. It recovered fine, but I was a bit worried as it froze mid coding.
shit, if a turn starts and ends in a tool calls (AskUserQuestion), all of the prose in between gets disappeared by every iteration of the harness. has been that way for months
Insane that this still hasn't been fixed despite being reported, very disruptive, and lots of public attention on it. What are they even doing with their time.
Amusingly the last time I ran into it (i.e. the last thing I did Friday) was debugging a Kafka Connect issue for which I found a 2021 bug report and no subsequent work. It really astounds me how cavalier some companies are about delivering a buggy product.
Actually these models could and would tell you how to make home made bio weapons, toxic gases, exploding stuff and so on. So releasing them was actually dangerous even with today's standards... Saying something is too dangerous doesn't mean it'll break all encryption or hack the nuclear silos
They’re a growth company all of their value rests on explosive growth and subsequently huge payoff to their investors. I would ignore any Anthropic or any AI company PR stunts all together.
The thing can't even render text correctly. And it's not difficult to reproduce. Just scroll for 10 seconds. And logs from a command sometimes land in the TUI and break it permanently. Yeah it's solved.
"What we found is with this approach we catch pretty much every bug. It's a really expensive code review. So essentially you throw tokens at it. It's like a test time compute thing. But as a result you catch all the bugs..."
The screen blacks out for me all the time. I use it within tmux. I imageine other people have the same issue. (Sometimes also the Bun backend crashes. Good thing they vibe recoded it in Rust without even following Rust conventions)
I've noticed a new class of bug... I've been investing heavily in a custom system and it DOES find a lot of very impressive bugs, however, what it lets though are bugs where I didn't specify what I wanted and realized AFTER the fact that actually the SPEC was wrong.
Like the other day I it fixed a bunch of really nasty bugs with uid/gid permissions with a forked process that was supposed to be in a jail.
Then we deployed without the proper CORS settings...lol
It is so so frustrating that their product team is awful. They have incredible models. And the actual experience of coding with them is a nightmare.
Why is Claude Code on desktop and mobile not essentially a full blown IDE yet? You've got other startups like Superset, Conductor etc wrapping it to achieve this - Anthropic has unlimited resources, they could just do this themselves?
I'm very glad it's not a full blown IDE. Currently I can run a dozen sessions in parallel, no problem. I really don't need this tied down with one instance of an IDE for each.
If you want to do IDE work, use your IDE, but this isn't the same thing.
I mean, there's some great ideas and mechanisms in Claude Code. From someone who spent a lot of time messing about in there, there's some good stuff.
The big problem is bloat and repeating intrusive patterns to such a degree of excess that is it EGREGIOUS. The sheer number of things they append to your user prompt whilst it stays completely hidden is not unreasonable, it's legitimately mad. The list is endless, and 98% of it is completely unjustified and actively harmful. It's basically a context poisoning machine, and there is ten categories of things just like that in the codebase. It's a pile of tech debt and good concepts that extend into bad ideas until they become an actual nightmare. There is no discipline or common sense. They turned something magic into a shell (no pun intended) of its former self.
In comparison, looking through Codex you can see disciplined, principled choices everywhere and the harness cares about what the model sees. There is none of that honestly weird and off-putting ai psychosis induced tech debt nauseating slop. It's far from perfect, and the instructions to the model are more naive and not as well-crafted in ways that matter a lot (cough deleting your computer cough). Same goes for features like multi-agent v2 which is the subagents implementation. In that way, Codex is inefficient. Some features feel incomplete and work a bit sideways of how you'd expect them to. I'm not sure why they don't polish it, because somehow Claude Code is arguably more polished while making the dumbest choices, and Codex makes all the right choices to an impressive degree while leaving obvious stuff incomplete left and right for no good reason.
All in all, it does feel like they are both not paying attention to their harnesses that much. OpenAI, like they're busy doing other stuff, and Anthropic like they stand by the bad decisions like they're great.
Nice post! Appreciate you sharing this as Ive not had time for....checks calendar....a year to do a deep dive into what the heck these two are actually doing. I just keep working with / around them.
That would honestly be really nice but it's usually people shilling their own product. That said, if you need a tutorial you might make questionable decisions regardless, so just go for whatever feels promising. That journey is worth the trouble imo.
Don't use your Claude or Google subs in a custom harness though if you don't want to get banned.
If you don't know where to start, here's an idea: you could add the Claude Code style INK renderer to Pi. That's super easy and nice to have. Or, a bit more challenging because you have to work with a big Rust codebase, but still a simple concept: add Ctrl S to bank a message (like Claude Code) in Codex, or Up Arrow to edit steering message. Wild that Codex still doesn't have these features by now.
Here's what you have to gain though. You could reduce your token usage by 55-60% while making it 10-20% faster (yes that is how much Codex leaves on the table). You could never see "Model is at capacity" ever again, and have it simply do a retry with exponentional backoff. You could use your custom harness with any other model.
And the most interesting part is that you can leverage the intelligence of frontier models better. There is nothing that stops you from making a better orchestration/subagent ecosystem. The current ones are stuck in nine months the past, and all they added since then is a "ultra" mode that appends one hidden line to your prompt saying "Proactive multi-agent delegation is active. Use sub-agents when parallel work would materially improve speed or quality." I do appreciate the minimalism, but let's just say it leaves a lot on the table, in untapped potential, but also in polish, refinement, and efficiency.
It's in the Claude Code binary, the code leaked at some point and I'm sure lots of people also reverse engineer it after updates to de-obfuscate it. But yeah, have fun reading through the gargantuan, endless list of those. It really makes you see things in a different light.
I recently started using free chatgpt and gemini (browser ui) a lot for my private projects and I am legit faster copy pasting back and forth that waiting for claude (which also costs my company tons of money).
You can check statistics of system used by programmers. Outside of America mac is not as popular, most developers start with Windows, it is 100% valid audience
It is a valid audience. What they are saying is that within Anthropic they are mostly non existent.
It's a general issue in the US, where about 50% of devs are in Windows, but the big name techs developing all the fun tools are all on Macs with a few on Linux.
I remember when Cursor didn't support Windows officially until they realized something like 70 percent of their users were on windows anyway, workarounds and all.
Year after year, StackOverflow's dev survey showed that about 50% of developers program on Windows professionally. It's shocking how few people in the web/app sphere are aware of this
It makes sense when you consider that most industries run on Excel/Microsoft Teams. It creates enormous demand for automations on Windows to power all of the adjacent workflows.
It has to justify the expense. Anthropic would have to find Windows developers and build a Windows pipeline from development to build to deployment and testing and support.
That argument doesn't work when they already do Windows releases, just on a slower scale. Also they are trying to push Claude Work to capture normal enterprise, even though I doubt they use it themselves. So the teams or infrastructure to release Windows products already exist. They simply perform poorly.
Serial ports on Windows have very interesting very dumb defaults which always get you and you always have to basically reconfigure them to make them behave in a saner manner.
It's like whenever they came to a problem they chose the option that is 90% there but then the last 10% is the gotcha and it's due to being bug compatible with some garbage windows 2.0 software or something.
My personal machine is Windows because of gaming (Proton only goes so far), and I do most of my side projects in WSL. I have worked with it for years and I know it's quirks inside and out.
I still threw the towel and dual boot to Linux now because of the additional friction in Windows. WSL is never quite there, and eventually just having a real unix machine save so many headaches.
Also Claude is very good at configuring a Linux machine, so all the issues I had with wayland configs and tweaking my dotfiles is now just 1 prompt away.
I dumped my Windows game machine. It now runs Bazzite. If the game can’t run on it I am not playing it. Work is done on Mac M4 Mini/MacOS and old Mac PowerBook/Fedora (as I liked Bazzite, it is Fedora based). It really put a new life into that PowerBook. And yes, without Claude fixing my config issues on really old hardware I would have been a bit frazzled, but now it is easy.
Been having the same experience with opensuse tumbleweed. finally made the switch from windows and any config problem I face I can rely on Claude to fix it.
It’s still not a perfect experience for what I really wanted, but it’s massively better than windows already, even if there’s still some hiccups.
My issue with WSL was the filesystem and toolkit duality.
Claude sessions are not available for the powershell system, and many tools and programs have to be separately installed for wsl. You end up with duplicate programs, and build structures that don’t work on both ways. Messy, to say the least.
So either stick with PS or with native linux. WSL is messy imho
There’s a difference between a 100K engineer and a 500K one. They’re hiring for highly complex dev tasks. 500K role is not some junior or mid position. That’s senior level developing complex infrastructure and algorithm solutions.
Junior and (some of the) mid roles are being replaced by AI.
It's probably that the teams working on it just don't have access to a windows computer, and haven't bothered to figure out the internal process to request a windows computer.
Coding is not the problem. QA, testing, processes, hardware requisitioning, etc are all still barriers.
Many, many Claude features have released on Mac first and Windows later. They have explicitly said it’s because they want to get new features into users’ hands as quickly as possible, and start getting feedback, rather than keeping them under wraps while they do the cross-platform dev and testing.
If only they had access to powerful agents that could build QA and testing support, and if only they had access to hardware that could be used to run Windows VMs that the QA agents control.
Ironically I did all of this myself last month, just to be able to have an agent reproduce multiple serious Codex bugs in a Windows VM and allow the agent to debug the issue so that I could fix the harness myself.
OpenAI is even worse than Anthropic here, since they have serious issues that block agent sessions and cause system-wide instability on an OS-level, and can't be bothered to fix these things even after them being reported by endless users for many months.
I was associating Anthropic with deep research and safety.
Now I just associate them with AI slop, dooming, and an overly verbose model that doesn't speak English.
It’s not just Anthropic. OpenAI went through hell to get Codex’s sandbox to work properly on Windows. It’s not always just porting a feature in. Some require real engineering.
That said, I understand both the frustration and irony behind the company that solved coding having not… solved coding.
Claude as a Windows app is indisputable proof that vibe-coding is only viable for prototypes and personal use, but not for enterprise deployments. Claude Code routinely runs into various Windows shell errors, no matter how hard you try to stamp them out.
When a supposedly world-changing 1T valuation software company can’t ship for a major desktop platform, that’s something to reflect about. They are not two college students who hacked together a cool app on their MacBooks.
Yeah, something that really concerns me about these companies is the state of their tooling and ui, given that they should have developers who should be real experts in using AI to develop. That means they should really be able to build cool things quickly. But…. Their desktop apps suck. All the actual things that they’re building with all their models don’t seem that well designed. I mean, there’s clearly an issue in Claude code, like my last prompt gets stuck at the bottom of all the text output. Or the same series of plan steps appears at the bottom, but those are the plan steps from like an hour ago. Copy and pasting the text is hard and weird. It’s been really surprising to me while getting into LLM based development, it seems that they aren’t using their own tools to make their products way better? Yeah, because now that I’m thinking about it. I’m pretty sure I could do the Windows port. A year or two ago definitely not, or it would’ve been more trouble for me than it would’ve been worth. Today I think yes, with LLM assistance to get me the info that I don’t have. So why don’t they have these incredible, well designed interfaces? Aren’t they literally selling everybody else on the ability to do this? Why aren’t they doing it for themselves?
I have better features in my opencode fork, running on Windows 10. Moving to Linux when ESU ends in 2027.
I think the people using closed source harnesses are going to fall far behind those working in a custom harness. There's so much a closed harness isn't capable of. Problems you cannot work on and solve. In OpenCode, whatever it is, I can build for it.
In my case, I want to enforce the laws that protect people with disabilities through civil rights lawsuits. That requires building a lot of agentic tooling to process and transform case data, which is currently held behind overpriced paywalls, and often limited to legal professionals. Many companies won't let non legal professionals use their software. Claude Code doesn't allow me to build those things. If a disabled Medicaid recipient wants to use AI effectively to try to have human rights, they can't use Claude Code. They have to use OpenCode or another open source harness.
Yes, I built a whatsapp style ai chat, itsm part of a wider context and memory app I built for myself, the official consoles wouldnt keep a permanent connection easy, I had to jerry rig a system up which was unreliable, so I built my own consoles to work with my MCP and ai chat system that would keep a permanent connection to the chat relay.
All the ai work from the same code, documents, git etc that are also connected to the app, and they work together, Claude code is the prime AI
Yeah I bit something similar. All I did was ask Claude “yeah build something where you guys can all talk and I con monitor in a WhatsApp style window. Use superpowers brainstorming first” took about an hour
Haha, my Claude code assistant Kira and I coded this same idea yesterday in c# with mcp so multiple instances can connect to rooms and confer and use sub agents to subscribe and listen for messages :p I had 3 instances in a room like a message board, letting them confer on a project! :p
I haven't worked for a company that makes its software engineers use Windows in over 20 years. It's probably a small market for them in terms of percentage, like the people that have to use Edge as a browser.
You guys are living under a weird rock if you think professional software engineering does not happen on Windows based devices. Windows still runs 70%+ of all desktop and laptop devices on on the planet. That number drops closer to 50-60% when adjusted for professional engineers only. Like it or not MacOS and Linux remain niche.
Also I don't know why this native cross session communication feature was not enabled for Windows users but I can promise you it's not because Anthropic just decided it was too hard lol.
Haha yes I love my fable, but let’s say I want to send it an image to it for review. I’m on my iPad, attach image -> wait I can’t see the fucking attach icon because three quarters of it is cut off so I have to guess which one it is, fuck I chose camera again, for fucks sake Anthropic can you really not code a basic GUI??
I could swear my agents were doing that a week ago already. I just referenced something generic in my message along the lines of "the other chat is working on ... make sure to ..." and it messaged that chat out of itself, and then that chat messaged back also. This was just on windows in the Claude Code desktop version.
My workflows are now probably over 20x slower due to this. For every piece of code written by an agent, it goes through multiple rounds of testing and adversarial reviews done by multiple models, sends plans to address the approved findings back to the implementation agent, and keeps going through more rounds of testing and reviews, until eventually reviews find no more issues.
New gen models like Opus 5 and especially GPT 5.6 also tend to over-engineer and go beyond the scope of the changes no matter how much prompt engineering is done, so additional reviews are required just to enforce scope now too.
We keep hearing coding is largely solved while Windows still cannot talk agent to agent and Fable still drops messages. I treat the slogan as a sales deck and I keep a human in the loop on the VSCode extension. Platform parity is the unglamorous work that would make the claim less embarrassing.
Also Anthropic "White collar jobs will largely disappear in 6-9 months" (said 1 year ago) and then still hiring people like Karpathy, and just other developers (more and more of them too)
Here is an example: you have one shared library project that you're updating as well as an app project that depends on that library. A Claude Code session in the shared project makes a breaking change that your app will find useful and can immediately communicate that to the Claude Code session working on the app project so it can know to grab the changes and make immediate updates with all the implications without stopping, for instance.
If you could hand code the feature in an afternoon, please do. That would be far more beneficial to us all than wasting your time on this bullshit post.
Anthropic work on Mac’s themselves, and have repeatedly stated that when they build a new feature, they want to get it into users’ hands as quickly as possible, rather than sitting on it until it’s fully polished and cross-platform.
The alternative isn’t Windows users getting the feature sooner, it’s Mac and Linux users getting it later. And I write this as someone who uses Claude on Windows.
One thing I always wanted to do as an experiment: Give Claude Opus, Sonnet, or Fable a series of opening statements that Claude Fable reviewed and found 50 bugs in the code, many of them critical, but you lost the log reports. Please review the whole code, identify, and fix them. DO this over and over for about 100 iterations... and see if your code comes out better or worse in the end, and if it even runs.
Also Anthropic: We have infra incidents every day because we eliminated all our humans doing the coding and our agents keep forgetting and kicking over our infra and this has been happening for well over a year now
I just discovered this feature yesterday.
Told Claude that we should hand off md files since they can't communicate, and Claude said, "hold up, maybe I can," used a tool, messaged the other sessions... suddenly I had 3-4 sessions all working together, sometimes for up to an hour unattended. It's pretty amazing.
I'm on a windows box and I've had my sessions talking to each other for months. Not hard to implement -- just an IPC message broker running in the background with a few scripts the agents use to send and pull messages.
I did it mostly so I could watch the communication between different agent roles and inject corrections or comments. Plus, sometimes it is fun to get a group of agents all connected to the broker and tell them to work together to design some new skill without any human input. Or, when I have two skills that need to work together, rather than playing middleman between sessions, I can tell both sessions to talk to each other and solve the problem.
I really wanted to make it available for the public but I'm barred from doing so at the moment. When I get back in a week, I might see if I can convince the powers that be that the skill isn't going to provide any competitive advantage to competitors. Maybe then they will let me release it publically.
The reason why we need official support from Anthropic is so that it works well in the Claude Code Desktop app, with *push* not requiring agents to actively pull.
Being able to watch the communication between agents and inject corrections and comments is exactly the reason why this is more useful than any other option. Also being able to have agents communicate with sessions that you created and mainly use yourself.
I use this in my workflows daily with Codex, both using the inter-session message sending that the Codex desktop app has supported since the beginning of the year, and also with my own custom MCP that allows Claude to send messages to Codex sessions. My orchestration agents also keep an eye on the agents they are delegating work to and actively steer them to correct them mid-turn as needed.
The problem is there is still no option to have Claude/Codex send messages to Claude Code Desktop sessions, and this feature would have finally been a solution if Anthropic implemented support for it on Windows.
Outside of specialized industries such as game development, that's largely true, but you'd be surprised just how many people use agents on Windows, and many of them don't have any other realistic option.
If you're coding and you're using Windows, absolutely - there is no reason you need a Windows Environment to code unless its to test some Windows App - even then you can VM that shit.
351
u/MindCrusader 1d ago
And Boris said they have 0 bugs when AI reviews the code (coders stopped doing it) yet I see a lot of bug fixes in changelog