They would have to trade off building new features for refactoring. It seems they consider shipping more important, and that as long as the existing features mostly work, that’s good enough. As customers, we have to ask: do we agree? Do we want features over stability? I think the answer is yes, at least for me (and the market seems to agree). But it’s certainly a risk Anthropic is taking.
I will note that this strategy only really makes sense because Anthropic controls the compute. If open-source harnesses could also use Claude max plans, then they’d have to focus much more on stability and quality, or just build an open-source harness themselves, or probably better yet, get out of the harness-building business altogether. So they’re gambling on staying ahead of open-source models, which seems like it’s been a good bet so far, but we’ll see.
I will note that this strategy only really makes sense because Anthropic controls the compute. If open-source harnesses could also use Claude max plans, then they’d have to focus much more on stability and quality, or just build an open-source harness themselves, or probably better yet, get out of the harness-building business altogether. So they’re gambling on staying ahead of open-source models, which seems like it’s been a good bet so far, but we’ll see.