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Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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