My wife's startup made the mistake of building her internal operations around Claude Team.

Then she hired a VA in the Philippines. Anthropic promptly banned her account without warning once the VA connected to the account. It took her weeks to get her account reinstated, at which point she had already moved on to OpenAI.

How many big tech companies let you talk to a human to get support. Automation is wonderful to cut cost for them but for the users being unable to get support is a horrible experience. But you cannot go elsewhere because they are the only player in town.

How can small companies with 1000x less money able to provide live support, but if you pay 20, 100, 200 dollars for a subscription you dont have a phone number to call ?

I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers.

You message support, some real person reads and gets back to you within a day.

> I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers.

What your your company do? Is it low ticket business or a high ticket business?

I work with music streaming, I don't really know how to judge what is low-ticket vs high-ticket. However it is a medium-to-high margin business.

Our free tier is time-limited but we still look at all tickets even from non-paying customers (in the hopes of converting them). A 1-hour intervention from a customer rep can result in a multi-year paying customer.

Vanguard does get some support right as they tier their support based on how much you're worth. Businesses need to focus on Lifetime Value of their customers and realize that some of their marketing budget would be better spent in support.

>Automation is wonderful to cut cost for them but for the users being unable to get support is a horrible experience. But you cannot go elsewhere because they are the only player in town.

I can't tell you how many times I've experienced this with comcast. The last time I had to deal with it, was when I bought a new cable modem. I call in to provision it, the automated system assumes I have one of their modems and fails. For some reason I can't get technical support on the line and finally I resort to yelling 'cancel my account' over and over again until I finally get someone on the phone.

The guy was able to solve the issue in 5 minutes flat. The problem with automation is it's only ever going to be able to handle the 'happy path'

It feels so degrading talking to the bot. Last time I did it I was trying to upgrade my service to take advantage of a 2.5GbE modem I bought and I almost said screw it because it was so frustrating with the long pauses after everything I said!

The company solves the happy path every time. Your problem is they are solving their happy path which is profit optimization. The system is not poorly designed, it is working as intended.

The solution here is removing corporate monopolies and political power.

> How can small companies with 1000x less money able to provide live support, but if you pay 20, 100, 200 dollars for a subscription you dont have a phone number to call ?

They spend the money which can drastically cut into their profits.

If you scale up customers, you scale up support. If you don't want to serve new customers, tell them to take their business elsewhere. But if you want to be a big boy, you need to play like you are one.

> you scale up support

you'd end up with a call center larger than most cities. It's not feasible.

If your maximum addressable market is “the whole economy,” as seen in SpaceX filings, then a city-sized call centre (distributed, of course) really is ‘t that much of an ask.

If you think you hit a limit where you can't support any new customer anymore, you just tell them you have no capacity at the moment. Like any normal practice does.

What's the support staff required for a few billion people?

Their problem, not ours.

And yet, building city-sized datacenters is somehow totally doable.

But how else can they get an edge over any possible competition so that they can grow faster? Quarterly reports are coming faster and faster!

That's not scale, Its profit margins.

If firms had a base degree of customer support they were expected to provide, they would still exist. They would just not be as profitable, but customers would be better off.

I seem to remember there was a time when S/W was also designed with the aim to be easy to use, so that the need for support was reduced. It feels like the lesson learned was to keep costs low, not to ensure users were ok.

So you overextend, such that the quality of your support suffers? You can just call it what it is: greed. Have you considered that maybe a company shouldn’t have millions or billions of users? That’s a lot of eggs to put in one basket.

You mean like Microsoft, Google (GMail, YouTube, Android), Apple, Facebook, and others?

Sorry, you can't buy an iPhone because Apple has got too many customers.

Sorry, you can't have a GMail account because Google has too many customers.

None of those things sound terrible. I’d argue the world would be better off. The only real losers are those companies you mentioned :shrug:

All of it is greed. 100%.

If you could be profitable with 50 customers providing excellent support, you can be MORE profitable spreading that excellent support across a larger customer base.

Just because none of the big corpos choose to do this does not mean it isn't possible. It's JUST greed.

It depends more on revenues per customer.

A lot of companies seem to want to lock in to one solution or the other - like picking Oracle or SQL Server. The landscape is far too unsettled for that imo.

This is why I re-did the AI operating system I originally placed in Claude. For my 2.0 version I pulled it into OpenClaw (then eventually migrated to Hermes). All our work can be preserved after we change the model, even at a moment's notice or temporarily.

Right now we're using OpenAI's models by default since (unlike Anthropic) will allow us to use our pro subscription rather than token metering, but I've already had the joy of being able to change it to Kimi K3 (via OpenRouter) for an hour to try it out, and there were zero hiccups.

Hermes is the way to go. Accounts provided by the frontier labs are just too volatile.

we have 7 coworkers we have been trying to re-instate for nearly 4 months now. All using the same google workspace sso, so there really was no special reason to ban them...

Misread as "infernal operations" which made it fun.

It was flagged for account-sharing, or detecting a compromised account

I had my GMail account locked for 1-2 years because I accessed it from my parents house (in the same country but in a different county) while on holiday. That was because they detected the account being used from a different IP address.

Using VPNs can also trip this.

Interesting, I only use VPNs and have never had an issue other than constant "prove that it is you" secondary authentication.

How do you know there wasn't account sharing though?

I've seen some amazingly dodgy stuff when hiring people from south east Asia, sharing a paid account with friends worth a months rent there seems milquetoast in comparison.

>How do you know there wasn't account sharing though?

Even if it was, it should be able to be sorted, maybe pay some overcharge or explain, and have your fucking business access re-instated.

This is such a tough problem. Anthropic would need access to some kind of technology that could, like, intelligently handle unforeseen circumstances and nuances. Yeah, that’s definitely not something we should expect of them.

It’s interesting how much Anthropic itself is a demonstration that its own hype is false.

Just use any product going all in on AI hype. In 5 minutes you will see annoying bugs, server is down, non-sensical press releases, confusing UI. This is GitHub, this is Cursor, this is Anthropic, this is Google, this is all of them.

Including most of vide coded apps one sees, even from people who they'd trust before.

Anecdotal example, I downloaded a new alerting app recently from an indie dev who had a small following back in the day in iOS space. It asked for a subscription, like $20/year.

I thought, let me try this the (final version, from Mac App Store) app first. Well, it's a barely-there vibecoded shit. There's a bare-bones list, everything looks like my nephew designed it, the macOS "app" is a iPhone-size view of the iOS one, it has a bug that if you click on it it opens multiple duplicates of the same list view for no reason that you have to manually close, and in general it barely works.

Yay for vibe coding.

Not to mention if their tools were so clearly useful they wouldn’t spend so much time making UI updates designed to force, trick, or confuse me into using their tool when it wasn’t my intention. SaaS companies with assistant integrations are the worst about this (looking at you, HubSpot)

Agreed. I think LLMs are best used as pair programmers or typists for users who already know what they’re doing. Or as tutors for users who want to learn.

Vibe coding is mostly garbage. But it can be useful for creating instant, disposable prototypes to investigate an idea or design direction.

There clearly was account sharing, someone logged into the wife's account from the Phillipines.

The core complaint was that it took weeks for Anthropic support to restore access. For a startup that might as well be years.

You aren't supposed to add other users to your Team plan?

Well a VA would need access to her account, just like how they would need email access etc. But Anthropic has clearly picked the enterprise side of things, small teams and startups without millions of dollars in token budgets are irrelevant to them. I’m surprised they even got their account back to be honest.

And yet enterprises will be the first to move to on-prem LLMs as soon as they become feasible. The next generation of TPU chips already promises 5x efficiency and enough RAM to run a 1TB+ model, and Kimi K3 is about as good as Fable for a lot of tasks, so we'll be there much sooner than anyone anticipated.

One can only hope, it would be great for everyone, myself included (the company I work for rather)

The VA had her own account on the Team plan.

why does that matter ? Why does that block entire corporate account not a given user ? Use your brain

As soon as I started using Fable I was like, okay, this is probably as good a model as I will need for software engineering going forward. I still feel that way. I don’t need a better model, I need a faster Fable.

The thing I miss most about programming is flow, and the constant bouncing between terminal tabs sucks. I’d love to do one thing at a time, with Fable, quickly.

remember 4 year ago we use to : have stack overflow open, documentation, obscure forums plus other tabs.

An ide open with 20 tabs open each file a component, a class or an interface We also use to hold entire codebases in our brain.

Yeah StackOverflow which was either telling you to use google or it was so specific, that no one wanted/could respond.

Even a year ago when i was trying to do a hugo template manually with the help of the documentatin /tutorial, it was shit. The LLM at that time, was better helping me than the documentation.

But it worked and it was so useful that LLM companies siphoned their data. It was how i learned programming

I personally do not remember this time of Stack Overflow.

I had some helpful people helping me on IRC / Quakenet.

But the hugo example i found very interesting because it was the latest hugo ducumentation and I don't think I was able to find a tutorial. I tried it without an LLM first.

And now I'm getting 10-20x as much done. I'd say the trade off is worth it.

I'm struggling to scale myself even further. This tech is unreal and I have so many things I can do.

For the first time, tech feels like the 90's-00's again. Everything is greenfield and exciting and big tech is struggling to figure out what to do about it.

People are just hacking all kinds of stuff, and it's awesome. Feels like techno utopia.

> For the first time, tech feels like the 90's-00's again.

It feels like the opposite of 90s - 00s: they were filled with periods where a person could self-study technology and get a job using those skills that few others had.

Where we are going (according to the AI-proponents) is children being able to replace you.

In brief; the 90s - 00s were a skill-valuation time, now we are looking at a skill devaluation time.

Unless you meant to say "Just like how any kid who could write broken HTML t put up a webpage could pretend to be a skilled professional, that's where we are now"...

We used to get paid to code now we think we need to pay a subscription fee just to write software. They push marketing campaigns saying Manual coding no more, just vibe code, gain 10x speed for $100.

Then they hit you with hourly and weekly limits, you are wondering when you are going to get cut off. Since LLM at probabilistic it often feels like pulling the lever of a slot machine, hoping our prompt is the jackpot. To make sure we win, we come up with systems, convoluted agents, context pipelines, rags to load . It feels like it's working, then bam you reach weekly limits.

(Just pay more if you want to keep winning).

I think developers need to wake up.

I myself started to use AI like a fancy debugger ,explainer. I make it walk me though every single line of code it writes.

I notice that i run into limits less, if i get cutoff, i can still make changes

As we've clearly seen, technology is static and the price to performance will never go down. And never be infiltrated by open source.

I'm not trust I was meant to be sarcastic or if you're serious I cant tell Is it true?

Look at what open source is doing to the market.

The sand magic will be free and abundant for all.

The only thing you have to worry about is regulatory capture - if Dario and Sam can convince the US government to regulate and outlaw open source AI, then we're in for a world of hurt.

I have mixed feelings.

The barrier and time between idea and usable implementation is almost zero now. I don't have to imagine. I can just write something and see it work before making larger decisions. I really like this. Many of my ideas were abandoned because I needed to study some obscure library. Now, I can learn the parts that I find interesting and just have the AI chew through the grunt parts easily. That's the good.

I started coding with a line editor on a small Casio handheld "computer" and used to keep programs in my head. I more or less knew what happened on each line without seeing the line. With larger programs, I had a mental model of what was going on where and a big part of the input to that was the effort of writing everything by hand. That's gone. It's not really important as far as the output of usable programs is concerned but there's a certain feeling of satisfaction that came with digesting a larger codebase and having it surrender it's secrets to you that's missing.

I've seen this exact comment what feels like twice a day for the last 2 years, and not once have I seen the person making it back it up and show something even remotely impressive.

I dislike these comments just as much. What do you want people to show you? Most of us work on projects for other people where tasks that used to take a week take a day or less. It’s also a no true Scotsman as nothing we could show would be “good enough” because it’s just the same software engineering as before but faster.

But for instance I used to work in 1-2 client projects at a time and they take months now I can do 4-5 at once and they take a month. That’s a huge improvement

Piling on to the other responses, I don't really want to see anything at all from you. What I want to see to believe that any meaningful number of people out there are generating 10x the value they used to is a visibly more valuable world.

My skepticism is we're not getting that because the world mostly doesn't need more software and it doesn't need all software to be ultra-personalized to each user, either. There are plenty of valuable problems that may be solved via computation, but thus far, it seems we're getting the software equivalent of movie theaters disappearing and being replaced with people watching TikTok from bed. It re-routes the monetary value extraction from consumers of audio-visual entertainment, and TikTok probably has at bare minimum 1000x the content-length of the Criterion Collection, but it isn't making the world 10x better for anyone but the owners of TikTok.

It reminds me of my best friend from college, who was bipolar. His goal in life was to become a writer and he eventually did become an Emmy winner, but back in school, he's go into manic episodes in which he'd stay up all night five nights in a rows and churn out thousands upon thousands of pages of free-form text that incorporate prose, poetry, play scripts. It was definitely more than 10x the output of a non-manic period, and there were nuggets here and there of intensely evocative single phrases, snippets of dialogue that looked like they could come from a more compelling story, but they were ultimately sketches and drafts, not anything publishable that another person would want to read.

Would we call him 10x as productive when he was writing more total output as measured by number of words or when we was writing much less but in a form that millions of other people enjoyed and remembered?

If we purely mean economic productivity, that is pretty straightforward in a case like yours. If you were previously completing 4 projects every 3 months and now you're completing 42 every 3 months, are you earning 14x as much money as you used to?

I wonder if the project you build are more one off Disposable(sorry for my choice of words) software.

Do you have project that needs to be maintained. I am also interested in your workflow. Do you Vibe code , never look at the code or do you hold the LLM agent's hand.

I feel like it's a spectrum

I work on real projects with paying customers with the occasional mvp here, but I tend to select for people who have distribution so mvps become apps that need maintenance almost every time.

If anything maintenance is where it gets easier the mvp stage is where more focus is required

The issue is that the amount of useful software written—or more broadly, the value, or even profits, businesses are making—hasn't increased in any measurable way.

I don't dispute that your tasks are taking less time, but I suspect that to be temporary. This is a forum of AI frontrunners and early adopters, so I expect it's a matter until people catch on, and recalibrate their expectations for amount of output a programmer can produce in a given timeframe.

What I dispute is that this increased output amounts to actual value. There may very well be a HN-wide 10x productivity boost, if HN measures productivity in Jira tickets per day. But if that's the only measurable result, we should expect the only long term change to be a 10x increase in Jira tickets once orgs catch on.

> not once have I seen the person making it back it up and show something even remotely impressive.

heh this is funny because this reaction was all the rage in the 90s early 00s too. You'd put together something you thought was cool and then post a link on a forum only to be told how it wasn't even "remotely impressive". I'm glad people didn't give up back then and i hope no one gives up now.

BINGO!

Software is pretty shit these days, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. Definitely doesn't feel like a utopia to me.

i still do :)

Right, instead of having 20+ tmux panes with docs, specs and whatever, I just have 20+ tmux panes with various Codex sessions for various purposes instead, some of them been idling for days now, waiting for me to come back.

Things just moved up on the abstraction-ladder, but it's still there, hidden beneath all the TUI sessions instead.

There is GPT 5.6 Sol on Cerebras if you want to try that experience for an ungodly sum of money (not getting into GPT 5.6 Sol vs Fable, but only one is available on Cerebras) for an 11x speedup.

OpenAI also have 5.6 fast mode for a 2.5x speedup for 2x cost and is available on standard plans.

I have lower standards than you: I pay for deepseek-v4-flash-0731 tokens from a fast and reliable US vendor and I feel like working on one task at a time is fast and gets almost everything done I need.

I _still_ haven't actually been able to _use_ Fable at all. Those safeguards just refuse biology in general.

It changed for the better a few weeks ago. Obviously it depends on what one is doing but I haven’t had an issue with my biology related material since that update

You may or may not like agents mode. I also hate flipping tabs, but I enjoy using agent mode with well named sessions. I still stick with a single session until I must move to another, then I leave them around for a few days until I’m sure I won’t need to pick up where I left off again.

Command: claude agents

I don’t think they were complaining about literally flipping tabs but rather just needing to context switch so often. This doesn’t sound like it helps with that.

I felt the same about GPT-5.2 on High. It did all I asked and it did it good and cheap. Too bad it’s no longer an option at all.

A faster Fable -- So you mean a model that's smaller, yet delivers the same quality of responses, ergo a better model?

I used Fable a bit when it was available. I didn't get the senae is was dramatically better than OpenAI. Now I am considering canceling my Claude sub since I can no longer experiment with their best models.

> OpenAI is on much better terms with the administration and the administration seems corrupt enough to...

Which tells you everything you need to know about OpenAI.