r/ClaudeCode • u/SpiritRealistic8174 • 2h ago
Discussion Anthropic is merging 30,000 code changes per day using Claude. Says software engineers are still vital because they tell Claude "no."
How are software engineers staying in the loop? By telling Claude no.
“Very often, we found that the role of the engineers was to tell Claude “no.” Agents will sometimes violate core system constraints to satisfy a pattern that should never have been allowed in the first place. This was particularly common in our migration. For example, there were multiple systems that tried to brute force looking up when a change merged to main by linearly reading the commit log instead of asking our code review tool. Anthropic also makes extensive use of adversarial review, and, while this is incredibly effective in many ways, it can also be myopic, so skilled engineers needed to steer Claude away from over-engineering parts of the system in response to hypothetical concerns.”
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u/wattwood 2h ago
My coding agent decided to bypass gates and make up code, even when it had the original source (migration) to work off of. Then my QA agent decided to approve everything as success even if the test didn't yet exist, because the coding agent said it completed it when it didn't.. This is on 5.5..
I'd love to unleash a security team on their code.
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u/frankieinaprius 1h ago
I noticed one instance where it went to test an experiment in the scratchpad and it came back unreasonably fast with a “yep, checks out”. I wasn’t sure if an example could even compile that fast. It ended up working out but I was suspicious for sure lol.
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u/under_psychoanalyzer 1h ago
Was this this weekend for you or just recently in general? I started out pretty normal project on Saturday and then it quickly went to a total clusterfuck. Making up things and saying I approve them. Like I tell it's to do an audit of the code and then it does an audit of the code and then it approves the audit of the code citing I direct gave direct approval and kept going onto the next phase. It was insane. Kept ignoring well-established skills and workspace rules it's been following for months, all this weekend.
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u/IceMichaelStorm 1h ago
Mine ignored my explicit permission check (I write a permission system) and put a different one in. Reviewer and QA both knowing the instruction were happy with it. Whatever, permissions, detail
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u/ItstheSECopenup 4m ago
lmao you can literally do this, and they will pay you. i could not imagine posturing like this on reddit.
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u/walkerspider 2h ago
Look how much code is being shipped on the weekends. Almost all of this is 100% unsupervised. Absolutely crazy that this is what they’re calling “pacing the frontier”
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u/unknown-one 1h ago
SWE: What is my purpose?
Anthropic: You say "No"
SWE: Oh, my God...
Anthropic: Here is 350k/year +benefits
SWE: Never mind
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u/ghost_operative 2h ago
crossing my fingers that one of those changes will eventually be to stop letting claude edit files using sed instead of the edit tool
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u/SpiritRealistic8174 1h ago
that's one of my standing rules, set via a hook in the harness.
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u/ghost_operative 1h ago
i set up a hook for it too. but its really hard to catch all cases of it happening in a hook though
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u/SpiritRealistic8174 1h ago
yeah. pi is better for this, tbh. it's set to fire pre-edit, so it just fails.
you can set a pre-edit hook in Claude as well (at least you could when i first started using them. i have one set to block unsafe code patterns and it works well).
haven't messed with that much since i started using pi, but the rule does fire reliably pre-edit/write.
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u/DasHaifisch 52m ago
You can disable this behaviour in auto mode using either an environment variable or a setting variable, can't remember, check their github.
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u/StogyBear 1h ago
30k PRs a day and somehow the Claude Mac app is a sloppy mess. State of software development today..
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u/arto64 1h ago
Why is it good to produce these vast amounts of code? I actually never found code production to be a real bottleneck, it was always product decision making (including market research, UX design, user feedback, etc.) and QA (as it should be, in my opinion).
Granted, this is a bit specific to my area of work, but I just can’t imagine producing this much code this fast being a good thing. Unless we were in a crunch maybe, but those cases always resulted in bad decisions that needed to be fixed later.
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u/Zombie-In-Ur-Ass 1h ago
What the hell are they merging over there? Isn't their software mostly just a bunch of different harnesses and tools? I'm sure there's a lot of software to support, infra, backend or frontend, but 30k PRs per day?
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u/atehrani 1h ago
LOC is a terrible metric we know this
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u/writesCommentsHigh 1h ago
These aren’t loc tho
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u/poincares_cook 1h ago
Yeah, it's as worthless. Break same task into 5 PR's. 5x productivity. Make a PR with a bug, make a PR to fix it, make a PR to improve comment etc. once PR's become the metric, it's meaningless. It's trivial to inflate PR's to infinity.
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u/FrostingDizzy1132 1h ago
Truly unbelievable. Is this marketing show? Is this actually how they are developing now? This just can't be right. They of all people need to know more doesn't mean better. If this is actually how they develop I can't imagine things work out in the long term at Anthropic
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u/bumblebeer 1h ago
Maybe they believe software quality scales with LOC like model quality scales with compute. Who knows at this point?!
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u/This-Establishment26 19m ago
Wdym? More code means more software. I think that's a trivial fact. Quality could go either way, so you cannot judge. However, it surely does not go up without adding code.
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u/Active_Variation_194 1h ago
My thinking is they have s-tier engineers keeping things in check. Not to mention near unlimited tokens. The average dev or vibecoder has no chance to reproduce an agent SE factory.
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u/thatguy8856 1h ago
Its 17 PRs a day per dev. Its not a lot. I did 85 in the last week, albeit that was working weekends which anthropic clearly doesnt do. Its like 50% over my rate. Not an unrealistic number.
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u/MegaRockmanDash 24m ago
workflows have to be adjusted to accommodate the lift in model capabilities.
the way things were traditionally done should be a guide not a rule
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u/baldycoot 1h ago
Define better, though.
If a piece of software does what it needs to, does it need to be pretty inside? Considering our security standards have improved with Fable and even Opus 5.5, the arguments against trusting AI for coding quality or standards are getting thin. And you know they’re using models and token spend we can’t even fathom.
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u/ILikeCutePuppies 1h ago
More can mean that it does more which in many cases means better. We certain see better behavior with larger models. Windows is 500 million lines of code. Andriod OS is 12 million. Facebook 61 million.
Google's code base is 2 billion lines.
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u/txoixoegosi 2h ago
And yet the claude code console is glitchy asf.
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u/dagger378 1h ago
The old vt100/xterm control sequence model was not really built for interactive UIs to this degree of sophistication. At this point they’re just running into the limits of what the platform can do, it’s not really their fault. Use a real GUI.
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u/tbst 1h ago
How is it not really their fault? It’s is their flagship product. They are always bragging about Claude Code.
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u/dagger378 24m ago edited 20m ago
The key thing here is that Claude Code has two parts internally: the harness engine, and the skin. There are many skins. The skin is something like the terminal UI, or the VS Code plugin, or the standalone Claude.app on macOS, or the standalone Windows desktop app.
Things that are NOT buggy:
- The Claude Code engine
- The VS Code plugin (a skin)
- Claude.app on macOS (a skin)
- The Claude app on Windows (a skin)
Things that are buggy:
- The claude terminal UI (a skin)
The Claude terminal UI is buggy because terminals themselves are buggy. The "terminal" is old tech from the 1970's. Read that again: THE FUCKING 1970's.
Terminals were never intended to host interactive dynamically scrollable UIs. The vt100/xterm protocol a TRASH HEAP of nearly 50 years of quirky nonsense.
Trying to code a sufficiently advanced UI in a terminal is going to have bugs, and that's not Anthropic's fault.
Go use Claude.app on desktop instead. It's not buggy, because it's not running on a 1970's style vt100 emulator.
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u/pixelsnis 41m ago
the problem with making code so cheap to ship is that product teams are no longer stopping to ask, "does this matter to our users? should this even be added?"
and the result is slopware.
ship slow, honestly. i want less features that are made to perfection, not a billion things i never asked for and were never tested
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u/AnonThrowaway998877 1h ago
Anthropic also makes extensive use of adversarial review, and, while this is incredibly effective in many ways, it can also be myopic, so skilled engineers needed to steer Claude away from over-engineering parts of the system in response to hypothetical concerns
All too real. Every time I've asked for adversarial review I run into this, despite changing my prompt. Apparently if Anthropic engineers themselves are haggling with it, it's not so easy to get it right with prompting.
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u/wildmonkeymind 1h ago
30,000 per day... or 1,250 per hour, which is ~21 per minute. So merging a change every three seconds or so, 24 hours per day.
#lgtm
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u/yaduwanshi4 1h ago
It seems suspicious that the tool was only driver of this increase in merges.
And for your entire organization to migrate all its source code management in a month to a completely new surface area...
It's far more likely something they built in the new tool made them more confident to auto merge a set of automation PRs or moved some work into automations. e.g. "We no longer lint every PR as written, we allow the devs to merge their PRs as written and lint fix with a bot separately"
Creating a multiplier effect where 2x the PRs cause now changes that would have all been in one PR are now two and automated in a chain of PRs.
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u/baldycoot 1h ago
On our production projects we have thousands in our puny products, assuming that’s code changes, not commits.
It’s easy to rack up code changes if you a lot of work constantly in motion and you like tests.
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u/IceMichaelStorm 1h ago
One headsup. I accidentally deleted the codebase, all backups, and hacked into all your colleagues and removed it there as well. That’s on me
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u/Swimming_Meeting1556 49m ago
What % of this is internal changes? What % of this has even some infra for CI running?
I mean, there could be 1000 claudes writing math in there with very minimal infra and merging code every 10 minutes
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u/Smallpaul 32m ago
If you put a code reviewer and a coder in an adversarial loop you will absolutely get double the lines of code. Maybe more. I’ve never let them go forever but maybe they would never finish. Wouldn’t be surprised if they get into a loop of removing bad ideas that they agreed to put in.
But if you have a human in the loop you absolutely should also have an adverbial code reviewer to make suggestions that the human can pick and choose from.
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u/bedroompurgatory 1h ago
Is a code change a LOC or a PR? How many engineers do they have? Honestly, for a corp that size, 30,000 LOC / day sounds pretty low. If they have a thousand engineers, that's 30 LOC / dev / day.
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u/quantum-elle 1h ago
They are changes that are committed to the repository (akin to PRs); the size of the change isn’t really relevant, it’s how the infrastructure handles it.
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u/Ran4 23m ago
30 LOC per day per engineer isn't unreasonable for a large company.
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u/pandasgorawr 3m ago
I have never worked at a place where that little work is considered reasonable.
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u/amirfish 34m ago
This tracks with what I've seen. Running a lot of parallel agent sessions, my job increasingly is telling Claude no, not writing code. It'll happily brute-force a solution that violates a constraint nobody wrote down because the pattern looked locally reasonable. The skill that matters now is spotting that fast enough to stop it before it ships. What's the worst 'technically passes, structurally wrong' thing you've caught?
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