markbao

> I really don't get the tendency here from Anthropic to describe what's most likely churn? 1000 "PRs" a day on a TUI to wrap a while loop?

From the article, the 30,000 changes a month are in the monorepo, and Claude Code is in a separate repo. So it’s not the TUI that has 1,000 PRs a day.

I could easily see 1,000 PRs a day on the backend. Big tech was doing more than that pre-AI.

We spend a few thousand dollars a month in AI code review costs.

Compare that to the cost of human code review which can take up a third of an engineer’s time. You’re looking at $50-100K a year per engineer fully loaded in code review costs.

If AI assists in code review (not even replaces – we still do human review ourselves), you could spend thousands a month per engineer and still come out ahead.

Ironic that this comment talks about cost without weighing the numbers.

People will just use the best tool for the job, putting aside some time it takes for practices to propagate.

Native date pickers suck, are ugly, and have no customizability, and look inconsistent between user agents. They don’t even really conform to the OS either (other than iOS). Everyone uses JS. Chrome’s native date picker shipped with a monospaced input font, for crying out loud.

Position sticky is amazing and the behavior is better than what JS can give you. A lot of people use it. Not much UI to make consistent between user agents.

Make the platform actually good and consistent and people will use it. Native APIs are always the better choice if they accomplish your need.

This is great. People always talk about how important the harness is and yet we have so few harness benchmarks. Agree with sibling commenter that ‘harness x model’ is needed.

People always talk about how Cursor harness has some secret sauce; would like to see how that one stacks up.

Thanks for making this and filling a real gap!

I’m not sure if the underlying data is counting subscription use for Fable, which is where a lot of people are using it because token pricing is very expensive. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was counting enterprise token usage only. As rich as enterprise customers are, they’re not exactly willing to double the cost of SWE salaries on tokens.

Either way, a model used to solve the top 10% of problems that people use AI to solve for, being used 10% of the time … seems like it’s in a decent place.

I find Fable indispensable, and measurably better than alternative models, for complex feature development in an existing codebase. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to nearly one-shotting features. Even still, I only use it for the hardest features and Opus 5 does a good enough job on the rest.

I’ve never had an agent fail to write the actual implementation. Has it done so badly, yes, but not nothing but tests. This sounds to me like a rare case that doesn’t generalize.

If the general idea is that these agents write too many tests, sure I guess? ‘Too many tests’ doesn’t sound like a failure case of engineering to me; typically software has had too few tests. Also, a lot of the power of these agents is their ability to self-verify and correct, which the test loop is a part of.

Nobody is making you pay this supposed tax. Just tell it not to write tests.

Y'all need to try PR review tools that split PRs into chapters. Stage was the best product in this space, but Linear Review has it, Graphite has it, and some other tools too. You get the full contexts while each piece is still reviewable individually.

For me absolutely not. Fable 5 has been a step function change in the ability to hand off stuff to Claude. Opus 4.5 was itself a step function but I was still steering that significantly. Fable is one-shotting stuff that took multiple redirections in 4.5.

This is phenomenal. I know everyone is asking for their pet feature in this thread, but I would really like to see this in split keyboard format. They are much more comfortable to use since they put your wrist in a more natural position. And there are hardly any good split mechanical wireless keyboards – and certainly none this thin.

Great work on this and congratulations on the launch!

And to be specific, the METR study was using the Cursor harness with Claude Sonnet 3.5/3.7, along with other models of that era of the participant’s choosing.

Which is ancient at this point, and half a year older than the November 2025 inflection point when agentic coding got really good.

The original article is from August 2025, and the overall message to not trust ‘how it feels’ and rather measure outcomes seems right to me despite the outdated figures. On my team at least, we are seeing a noticeable inflection in work shipped with AI according to Weave.

And the comment you’re replying to, which is entirely a reasonable opinion, was flagged, proving their point. I’ve been here for 18 years and similarly alienated by the cynicism here.

I don’t think this is entirely wrong, in that there is a ‘class thing’ about riding the bus, but it’s more practicality than a class marker for a lot of people.

- In SF you can either walk 1-10 minutes to the bus, wait 0-15 minutes for the bus, tap on (while watching most other passengers evade the fare), get dropped off, and then walk 1-10 minutes to your destination… or spend an additional $5-10 to get Ubered door to door at a third of the time. First and last mile are real costs.

- In SF I Uber, unless Muni/BART is a straight shot. In NYC I take the subway. It’s not really a class thing. In NYC it takes longer to Uber much of the time and it costs several more times than the subway. You still have a 1-5 minute first and last mile problem, but headways on trains is decent and above ground taxis are incredibly inconsistent with traffic.

That about matches up with the experience with social groups in similar classes in these areas too. Most of my SF friends Uber. Most of my NYC friends take the subway.

I’m all for standardization but you could just use this argument to keep any suboptimal status quo in place. XML is good enough and a standard. SOAP is good enough and a standard. etc.

The claim is that Conventional Commits are good enough and standardized enough that having another structure isn’t really worth it. But “worth it” is subjective. I’d say that if you are making commits and reading PRs every work day, and the conventional commits format causes a little bit of friction, that friction can add up. Having another option other than seeing conventional commits as a law of nature gives options for teams who prefer it. (Most teams aren’t generating changelogs anyway.)