Most of the world isn't perfect, and trying to be perfect means you get nowhere. In most places, excessive perfection is implicitly avoided through resource constraints.
In the end, what matters is whether something fulfills its purpose, not how it does it. Code quality, understanding code, etc. are just a means to this goal.
Some level of poor quality is acceptable, and I assume they are hoping that model development (i.e. its capability to fix and clean up an increasingly convoluted mess) will outpace the tangledness of the code.
So far, it seems like they are winning. Yes, the UI is often broken (e.g. for a long time switching away from an ongoing conversation lost it), but it wasn't broken enough for people to switch to other companies that may have had a better UI but in exchange for that a less developed product. If Anthropic instead spent its resources on making the UI not janky and code reviewing everything, the overall product would have likely been worse because they couldn't build and improve features as quickly.
I've seen the flip side where "code quality" becomes its own independent goal and more time is spent gratifying various linters than writing the code, and the inability to get anything done in such an environment is a lot more depressing than janky UX that can probably be fixed by prompting the next generation model to clean it up.
In the end, what matters is whether something fulfills its purpose, not how it does it. Code quality, understanding code, etc. are just a means to this goal.
Some level of poor quality is acceptable, and I assume they are hoping that model development (i.e. its capability to fix and clean up an increasingly convoluted mess) will outpace the tangledness of the code.
So far, it seems like they are winning. Yes, the UI is often broken (e.g. for a long time switching away from an ongoing conversation lost it), but it wasn't broken enough for people to switch to other companies that may have had a better UI but in exchange for that a less developed product. If Anthropic instead spent its resources on making the UI not janky and code reviewing everything, the overall product would have likely been worse because they couldn't build and improve features as quickly.
I've seen the flip side where "code quality" becomes its own independent goal and more time is spent gratifying various linters than writing the code, and the inability to get anything done in such an environment is a lot more depressing than janky UX that can probably be fixed by prompting the next generation model to clean it up.