Yes, but as Patrick Boyle points out, the banks underwriting this IPO are incentivized to make this deal look as big and sexy as possible. What goes up will eventually come down, though.
906 karma · joined July 8, 2025
> OpenAI has told investors and employees this approach inflates Anthropic's reported revenue by billions of dollars, Reuters reported in June. Anthropic told Reuters then that it follows established accounting practices, recognizing gross revenue because it is the “principal” in the transaction.
Obviously, OpenAI has a very large financial incentive to criticize their competitor, but it is kind of interesting that they're choosing specifically to attack them on accounting practices because their own IPO prospectus will surely receive the same scrutiny. One might assume that they'd want to avoid the accounting conversation altogether.
Maybe, but I'm skeptical so far. DHH's core businesses are some of the most at-risk applications in the market IMO. They're really not much more than fairly standard Rails apps, there's very little deep problem-solving in them. And that's what I find so fascinating about his position: he's happy to talk about how at-risk Adobe is, but AI is going to one-shot Basecamp loooooong before it can one-shot Adobe.
Adobe's applications have years of deep expertise in all kinds of technical problems that nothing in Basecamp's arsenal comes close to touching. Just look at the quality of SVGs that LLMs generate today. It's impressive compared to a couple of years ago, but they're nowhere polished enough for something like you'd see a professional generate. And sure, it'll get there one day, but it's still not close today.
Maybe there will be one day, but what are the odds that it will meaningfully move the needle for existing platforms such that manual code review is unnecessary? "Blindly trust the output" is not a feasible security posture today.
I'm on board with the idea that agents are going to write most of the code, but not checking it is just insane to me, based on some of the things I've seen committed in commercial codebases recently.
I was really on the fence about replacing my Ultra 1 watch, even though it's no longer supported in WatchOS 27. The updates to the Ultra line have been so incremental ever since it released, but watching this has solidly shut the door for me.
It's not that hard: treat people with dignity and take their contributions seriously, not as a disposable meat mass. In fact, not only will this improve code quality, it's likely to improve employee retention too.
This is very intentional because in my experience, Apple's attempt at actually managing screen time and device access is mostly theater, and it absolutely tracks that they'd bury this config within Screen Time.
Does a horrific war crime like My Lai[0] get scrutinized and investigated in 2026 or do people just say "eh maybe AI gave them bad intel" and ignore it?
Amazon's incubation of AWS was methodical and transparent. OpenAI is saying that they don't expect to be profitable until at least 2030, with over a trillion dollars in committed spend before that point. It's the largest "trust me bro" play in human history.
I still believe Ruby and Rails are great tools for small to medium sized teams in 2026, and the shift back to SSR and framework conventions (looking at you "Rules of React") very much validates what Rails has been doing all along. But it's not sexy, and sex sells in this industry just like any other.
In those early days post storm, I had neighbors regularly knocking on my door to make sure I was OK and I had enough food and water to get through the day. Since we had no internet, everyone was outside talking to each other, walking around and checking in. And we had huge cookouts at the houses with gas stoves so we could cook the perishable stuff before it went bad. Curfew was strict and law enforcement was everywhere, armed National Guard protected the grocery stores from looting.
It was a traumatic experience in some ways. I knew people that lost everything, had friends pulling bodies out of the river, sharing stories I never thought I'd hear in my life. But the community came together, and never once did I think "man I really wish I got into prepper culture".
I personally think it's insane to believe that someone could survive a major event like that completely independent of the community. Humanity got to where it is today because of community, not in spite of it. And prepper culture ignores all of that through it's "can't depend on anyone" ethos. I personally find it really sad.
A) the uptime matrix between Github, OpenAI, and Anthropic means that we've faced multiple entire days of not being able to ship org-wide due to our reliance on automated code review and other tooling. Every cloud service baked into our CI pipeline becomes a point of failure. We can't live without AI anymore, but it too often either directly or indirectly gets interferes with our ability to ship, and I don't see this improving any time soon.
B) Locally hosted AI has serious advantages with regard to PII/sensitive data management, and there's not much the frontier models can do to overcome this. There are so many things I want to build and let loose in a sensitive data environment but can't due to data governance around frontier models.
C) Anthropic and OpenAI cannot keep prices low forever. They're still burning insane amounts of cash and at some point, they're going to have to transition from growth mode to profit mode. They're already juicing their sales pipelines to the max with introductory pricing and other things to get people in the door. But those are all short-term online marketing plays.
It's the same as how communities respond to egregious law enforcement abuses. Accusations get nowhere as opposed to undeniable video of things like George Floyd.
There's an inherent conflict of interest around productized AI that doesn't get discussed enough when you can't fully control the configuration of the AI stack, which models are being used, what the prompts look like, etc. And that causes major pain for a mission critical process like code review.
And this announcement doesn't really make clear how much of this money is going directly to maintainers vs. being offered as free compute to use their product. My guess is that 95+% is going to be given out as credit towards reviews, which is not the same as actually committing money to open source projects through actual donations.
Not only is the blast radius smaller, but small businesses are less incentivized to cut corners since serious violations pose a greater risk to their business than large businesses. Corruption is essentially legalized in America via lobbying, but only big companies can really afford to lobby and make huge campaign contributions to sway the government in their favor.
Government is meant to be a check on businesses, but that completely falls down once business is big enough to buy the government. It wouldn't surprise me if quality control at large companies is worse for the simple fact that they know who to pay off if they get caught, as Taylor Farms has here.