Fun fact, I named it "Stainless" after Stainless Steel pipes, likening ourselves to a high-end plumbing supply shop. If you look at the earliest versions of stainlessapi.com on archive.org, you'll see our original motto was "Quality fittings for your REST API".
All that is to say, the incredibly "boring" infrastructural work of making "boring" APIs like Hubspot's more usefully accessible is absolutely the kind of thing I'm excited to do at Anthropic :)
(It also happens to be what got us all excited to work at stainless in the first place, but of course, we understand it's not for everyone!)
We might have our opinions on AI and slop, but in the end of the day this was a business play and it worked out for the players. Separate that from the actual product and u can respect they did really well for themselves.
See https://www.stainless.com/customers/ for an overview
Alex vision has always been to generate code other engineers would love reading. It’s something I know the team is very proud of and what attracted most of us. We all joined because we wanted to raise the quality of developer experience across the board and I believe that we did it successfully
edit: they sure do
I don’t understand your point, things look fairly clear to me, assuming you’re familiar with that part of the industry. We didn’t hide behind buzzwords and show you the end product right away
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Best-in-class interfaces for developers and agents
Great agent experience is built on great developer experience. Stainless helps you deliver both, with robust and idiomatic SDKs, documentation that keeps up with your API, and state-of-the-art MCP servers, all derived from your OpenAPI spec.
--- end quote ---
There would be no questions asked if you had the SDK's copy on your front page. Or whatever you wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48191376
They might be a big part of the reason why claude code can edit notion docs for you pretty easily
Going further into it: the expected user experience for your team is that you create a PR in your own API repo, a GitHub action triggers builds for everything and gives you a summary via PR comments where you can directly see diagnostic feedback, see the exact diff for each SDKs, provide the commit message for your end users. Once your PR is merged we push changes to all your SDK/docs repos and prepare a release PR ready for your team to review and merge. You merge it, everything gets released to your end users.
Now what we build goes way further than that: we have a web platform where you can live edit your Stainless config file and preview your SDKs, a fairly complex diagnostic system, a really cool system that allows you to add your own custom code on top of any generated SDK directly via git — the whole repo is something you can modify to your wishes, we keep track of your custom changes and always reapply on top of the latest codegen output. And a lot of other features (I’m biased because I designed and implemented the public version but I personally really like our spec transforms, they let you apply changes to your spec file downstream, just by modifying your stainless config file).
Does that make sense?
Why aren’t they dogfooding their own products to replace such roles?
And seeing how people use it: good programmers review output and iterate to get better output. But bad programmers simply trust the output is good: they have no ability to review it themselves and often don't try.
With about 5-10h over the weekend using free tier Claude and ChatGPT I managed to put together a scraper for a particular thing on a website I’m interested, grab the item images, do an initial pass with local OCR, if it hit some keywords, run openCV to crop for better OCR and dump the hits for further investigation.
Nothing particularly advanced but it would have taken me a horrendous amount of time without it to be half as good, like it did when I built a similar scraper 10 years ago.
Neither were very good code quality i’m sure.
An expert can either use the tool more effectively, or see all the issues in a less experienced person's output.
Both of these are good things, the mistake a ton of people are making is experiencing industrial scale Dunning-Kruger and thinking "Only my expertise is still valuable, every other white collar role is done!"
The second-order mistake is thinking that raising the floor like that devalues expertise instead of increasing demand for it. The net-effect of me starting to play with CAD because it's a little easier now isn't that I don't hire my friends who are experts to make a tiny spacer I'm going to 3d print, I never would have hired them for that, it's that maybe I start learning the skills and decide to take on a more ambitious project where I do need to hire one of them for some help, or start ordering custom CNC'd parts -- scale that to the entire economy.
I guess this means that you have some good instincts or habits that would be good for a programmer, even if you didn't choose that path.
Programming is more than just knowing the syntax of the programming language and the APIs you want to use. It also requires clear communication and clear thinking, checking things, etc.
There is no reason why a non-programmer couldn't also think clearly or carefully. It's just a fact about humanity that most people don't; and many people have jobs that do not require this, so they never develop the skills. Some people develop them for job-unrelated reasons.
Now we are at the moment when the LLMs can do the syntax and APIs for you, but they still fail at clear thinking and proper caution. That elevates a good potential programmer to a good vibecoder.
On average, the output is still better than what a bad programmer would produce.
For example, a recent story about the openclaw creator using $1.3M of tokens/month. And let's assume he's getting laid $5M/yr which is probably a vast under estimate.
Is he providing value that a traditional software development org with normal developers couldn't provide for $20M/yr?
Finally in some ways agentic workflows magnify the power of the individual who is adept at harnessing them, they don’t have to argue (much) with the agents to effect their ideas. I’ve found a lot of very bright engineers spend their days fighting to be heard by managers and peers who can’t / won’t understand them. By unshackling them from trying to debate down idiots, they deliver way way more, and of the right things, than they otherwise could have.
Leibniz, literally parallel.
Was Newton just a smart guy at the right place and the right time. These smart folks require other smart folks to understand and verify what they did. There are many who have amazing pedigrees in history.
Yes, $1.3M in token cost in less than 30 days and some days were even off-peak, if you can call it that with that insane scale that likely hides quite a lot of tokens in the lower bars.
I don't think existing companies will bite that bullet, but I think you'll see AI native companies in five years with like, a baffling small number of people.
Getting bought by the bigger companies as it is currently the goal of most start-up since no one cares about monopolies and anti competitive behavior nowadays.
Who claimed that?
Their customers will be happy if their product replaces all the junior positions and midwit developers off the payroll. then that's already a huge saving to any company's bottom line.
Even if it doesn't directly replace workers, reducing the bargaining power of those spoiled SW devs and not having to give them huge raises all the time or they leave, is still enough. That's the whole point of layoffs and offshoring anyway.
Possibly not if they are paying the full cost of inference
Dario Amodei
If I find a task to be annoying and repetetive, I use an LLM to do it, then validate it. The quality of my work only improves, and so does the speed, and I don't lose my skill over time.
Once I got the manpages ready and the way I wanted, I just stored those in an empty project folder and told the agent to implement as specified in a language of my choosing.
Maybe for other development scenarios like GUI there is some "native" way to spec the project in a common format like this.
Oh, they do. That's why they buy actual engineers to fix the vibe-coded slop they produce en masse: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987
Unfortunately those engineers slowly succumb to the same slopcoding vibes, so they go and buy a bunch of new engineers.
This tests for very different skills than being an exceptional programmer.
The reason why I avoided this term is that in Germany, there exists a quite strict of whatx an engineer (Ingenieur) is, which is defined in the laws of many federal states (Ingenieurgesetz [engineering law]). "Ingenieur" (engineer) is a protected professional title:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ingenieur&oldid=2... (*)
Falsely claiming that you are an Ingenieur when you aren't (by the definition in the Ingenieurgesetz) is a punishable crime in Germany:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Missbrauch_von_Ti...
There exist some boundary cases under which as a software developer you can call yourself an "Ingenieur", but you have to be insanely careful about whether you actually satisfy the legal criteria (see (*)) - in most cases you don't and you are thus a criminal if you do.
If so, is this ever enforced?
Using the German translation "Softwareingenieur" of "software engineer" on your LinkedIn page might easily get you into trouble.
Typically, as far as I know, law enforcement agencies only get active in the punishable act "Missbrauch von Titeln, Berufsbezeichnungen und Abzeichen" [abuse of titles, occupational titles and emblems] if the culprit gets denounced by someone or if there is a public interest, but everybody knows how easy it is to make enemies in your job or on the internet.
That being said, in Germany there is no official degree named Diplom-Ingenieur Softwareentwicklung, it is always Diplom-Informatiker. Also, the Expression “Softwareingenieur” is not used, the straightforward translation of software engineer would be either Informatiker (emphasizing the degree) or Softwareentwickler (emphasizing the skill).
This is no legal advice: As far as I know, the regulation is strictly about German titles, so putting “software engineer” in your LinkedIn CV is out of scope of this law.
I think you're overestimating the rationality of this game.
What's the difference between a software developer and a software engineer?
The honest answer is that in most day-to-day contexts, the distinction is more about company culture and title preference than actual job duties. A "software developer" at one company might do more rigorous engineering work than a "software engineer" at another.
It's just not the distinction some people believe it to be.
I said difference between a _programmer_ and a _software engineer_ (or _software developer_, it is irrelevant in this context).
Having a successful business requires a lot of factors that don't really have anything to do with software engineering. Things like luck, connections, access to funding, good marketing, etc. And while have good engineers on the payroll undoubtedly helps, the good engineers aren't necessarily the ones getting a big fallout from the acquisition and may not stick around for long after the acquisition, especially if they get put on a project they don't care about.
There are plenty of other reasons to acqui-hire, but it is not the only or even the most effective way to hire the strongest engineers
Successful founder is deeply filtering for very uncommon skills. Effectiveness, grit, decision making, independence, technical plus sales ability.
University is a shit filter in comparison.
The current word is "taste" but even that is way too narrow. Intelligence is close, although usually too academic (hence the VC uni dropout theme).
The other big problem with a independent capable people is that they rarely apply for jobs.
It also only self selects for those who want to work in stressful/long working day environments, rather than those who value stability.
All that's moot though if your fundamental premise is wrong. Why does Anthropic need "the world's best software engineers" to build on top of the models? Compentent developers can build APIs - sorry - MCP servers and other integration plumbing.
If Anthropic can rummage through your data and workflows to deem you worthy of their grace, then that is seriously wrong.
Normally I would say those Engineers would leave eventually, because there are not enough technical challenges and/or the pace is slower. But I guess when you pay much above market rate that doesn't really matter.
I see a lot of AI openings though.
For what, to write regex to check for number of "fucks" given in prompts, or to write 20k LoC files with 20 levels of nesting ? As we saw in that Claude code leak recently.
What you should be paying attention to: Stainless is shutting down, and their team is joining Anthropic to build, who knows, some dumb integration to make Hubspot data available in Claude, or something equally as boring. But, Stainless was successful. Be the next Stainless. The idea is already validated, these AI companies have already done this to a handful of companies and they're going to keep doing it.