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points by solidasparagus 20 hours ago | 0 comments

I don't think it's profit, I think it is genuine functionality. I think that they build features for their internal users while having no token concerns. And this mindset of using LLMs to solve product problems leads to useful features (e.g. agentic auto-approval). Then there is a bit of an issue when they try to ship a genuinely useful feature but now token cost matters.

[–] shevy-java 18 hours ago

Of course it is for profit. Tokens cost money. Just the energy cost alone.

I don't understand this "analysis". Why would it not be about profit?

"Features for internal users" makes no sense here, as it does not apply to the case. "Useful features" is also debatable - LLMs providing user data upstream to Anthropic is a use case for Anthropic, but less so for downstream users and token burners.

[–] Syntaf 17 hours ago

I don’t feel like reality is so interesting that CC devs are sitting in a room theorizing how to extract the most profit from their users.

I’m much more inclined to believe they just don’t _care_ about cost, and profit is an ancillary benefit to their functionality above all else.

Just recently they released auto idle-compaction for large sessions about to miss the cache window. If they were so profit driven I can’t imagine they’d have built this to begin with, that’s free tokens from your perspective.

[–] plagiarist 15 hours ago

A smart company would A/B test changes and choose based on lifetime value vs. average session value. The compaction is going to happen anyway, does idle compaction increase the length of a session or the amount of sessions per user?

[–] pessimizer 14 hours ago

> I don’t feel like reality is so interesting that CC devs are sitting in a room theorizing how to extract the most profit from their users.

Do you really think this is so interesting, or something that people who work jobs have a responsibility to do?

[–] Syntaf 14 hours ago

You’re making a straw man argument out of the nature of what jobs are for, of course they are to help a company make a profit.

I don’t think the CC’s teams have hidden motives to optimize for token inefficiency as the OP I replied to implies.

A reality where a secret cabal of CC engineers are trying to find the most token inefficient ways to build the best harness on the market sounds quite interesting to me, but not realistic.

[–] junofan 14 hours ago

Somebody in the chain is likely getting profit sharing and, if so, definitely thinks about it (because that’s the whole point of such arrangements).

[–] pantsforbirds 14 hours ago

I highly doubt it's the case that it was purely driven by profit motives. I think it's much more likely that Anthropic engineers treat tokens in a similar manner to how we treat memory and compute.

Older programs were MUCH more memory and compute conscious because memory and compute were actively limiting factors. Anthropic engineers probably don't feel the token efficiency requirements nearly as much as we do because they are working with the equivalent of a super beefy dev machine.

[–] sirtaj 17 hours ago

Not about profit in the sense that nobody sat down to say "let's add a feature that looks useful and burns more tokens so we make more money". For status update thing I can believe that.

[–] gwd 15 hours ago

> Of course it is for profit. Tokens cost money. Just the energy cost alone.

That only counts if people wouldn't find some other way to spend tokens anyway. I regularly have to pace my usage to avoid hitting the weekly limit on the 20x plan; I have plenty of things I could automate.

Jeavon's Paradox means that until all possible uses are saturated, the cheaper frontier AI becomes, the more of it they can sell.

[–] shafyy 19 hours ago

> I don't think it's profit

Hahaha good one. Profit is the whole reason of existence for for-profit companies. Sure, companies might start with some ideologic grain of thought. But as soon as you reach a certain size, all that goes flying out of the window.

[–] newAccount2025 18 hours ago

I agree at the top, and it certainly trickles down to some degree. Still, a lot of the everyday engineers who actually make the stuff at every place I’ve ever been just care about making things that are good.

[–] fhd2 18 hours ago

Well, it's either about "profit now" or "profit later". The latter one can feel a lot like it's not about profit.

[–] shevy-java 18 hours ago

That is true, but it is definitely about profit. The prior comment made that question via "I don't think it is for profit". Very clearly it is.

[–] retsibsi 17 hours ago

You're taking that phrase out of context. If you look at the parent and grandparent comments of the one you originally replied to, it's pretty clear that "the answer is profit" was pointing to the insinuation that Anthropic is deliberately causing Claude Code to waste lots of tokens for no reason other than short-term financial gain, and that's what solidasparagus was disagreeing with.

[–] kirth_gersen 15 hours ago

even if their motive is "make our product better", that is still just the profit motive with extra steps. the reason to make your product better is to make it more competitive so that... it makes more profit long term.

[–] fhd2 17 hours ago

But would you argue that it is neither about short term nor long term financial gain? Cause that was my point. It really always is about profit one way or another, in my experience, with barely any exception I can think of.