I don't see them as side quests but rather as a complement to what they offer.
A typical workflow is: connect via MCP to some data source. Do some stats, transformations, etc. Put the data in a format that Claude understands or will understand better later. Make a UI/story out of it. Keep track of your "things" through visualizations.
Been using this worlflow extensively now. This is their easy wall garden.
This explains the amount of spam emails I am receiving in the work email since I switched to Claude. I used to work with copilot which was fine. Now I am getting really a lot of spam emails almost on a daily basis. Absolutely crazy. And they are even personalised with my name and surname, not just "dear customer"...
Stupid me, I thought they somehow had hacked my company database or so... (considering all the cves, attacks happening on a daily basis...).
It almost certainly does not explain it, and is probably just a coincidence.
Claude Code is not sending your email address to websites as a default, or regularly. It is not some automatic header or anything.
Rather, if you are performing certain kinds of research on sites that involves downloading certain kinds of information, like on Wikipedia or the SEC, it supplies your e-mail address when the sites request it as part of their download policy. As part of anti-bot policy. Obviously Claude should have asked for approval first, but Claude isn't out there just spamming your e-mail address in every external request it makes or anything.
Wikipedia and the SEC are not selling your e-mail address to spammers. And these are the two main sites where it has come up.
Yep it’s mainly happened to me when I was playing around with the EVE Online API via Claude. The game developer asks everyone to put their emails into the request headers so they can contact users to fix their buggy scripts and stuff.
I burnt a few tokens to get some clarity on this (giving HN as source as well, so there is a reference to this thread):
> This doesn't appear to be Claude Code automatically attaching your email address to every outgoing request. The issue is that Claude has access to your account email in its context and can sometimes include it when generating HTTP requests (e.g. "curl" commands).
> Wikipedia and the SEC were mentioned because they explicitly ask automated clients to identify themselves through the "User-Agent" header, often with contact information. Claude may try to comply with those requirements by inserting your personal email address.
> That's why the leak is probably concentrated on sites with these policies, rather than happening on every website. But Wikipedia and the SEC aren't an exhaustive list (the EVE Online API was also mentioned), and there's no technical guarantee that Claude couldn't include the email in requests to other domains.
> The important distinction is that this appears to be model-generated behavior, not a networking layer automatically adding your email to all requests.
> So "most likely Wikipedia and SEC" is a reasonable hypothesis about where the leak is more likely to occur, not a confirmed limit on where your email could have been exposed.
I do see a lot of times curl being used (in Claude). I don't check all the websites being fetched (shame on me!), but your answer doesn't convince me.
My coincidence is clearly not proof. I am just a random online guy so why trust me. I just shared my recent experience. I used extensively copilot until roughly 3 weeks ago (I went all in on Claude, to try it out properly), and that's when I started to see a lot of spam on my work account. Coincidence? Yes. Correlation? Yes. Causation? No. And I personally don't care because I assume my work email account is somewhere to be harvested, but when I then see such a but report, it kind of rang a bell like WTF. I am as careful as possible about the requests I send, but I cannot remove the UA or know everything the harness is doing behind the scenes.
This type of bugs kind of kills the trust in the tooling. On the other hand, we're being told to use more and more such black boxes.
OP literally described a timescale for (not spam) to (spam) and you described a few possible options (basically a knee jerk reaction, with no evidence).
The medical world uses the terms indications and contraindications. I think we in IT could do with a similar process/procedure.
From somebody who helped fixing bugs by contacting customers directly: the first thing you need to throw out from their story is correlation. Most of the time, it's just a coincidence.
For example, my only used by Claude email address doesn't get any spam at all.
I'm sorry that I'm disputing their totally scientific "timescale". Btw did you mean timeline?
It can take a while for spammers to get your address on their list. Generally the amount of spam over time only goes up. Just because there's a correlation doesn't mean there is a causation. Anyone with an email address, including on a custom work domain, has experienced this and Claude wasn't responsible for all email spam lol
Why are you being intentionally rude? Timescale is completely the right word and it is very telling that you didn't even bother to look up the definition, and in fact suggested a word that is more incorrect! I have a custom domain that is registered with very few select services and receive practically no spam. Are you trying to say that Anthropic should not be concerned with making their users' experience worse/better? Or that is simply our fault for being concerned about spam in our email inboxes?
I could care less about that but bringing up completely irrelevant things to blame it for is a bit annoying. At least stick to factual things.
Sites aren't scraping their logs for email address in request headers and selling that to spammers. Getting emails to spam is already easy.
I have email addresses I literally don't use to sign up for anything and they still get spam because you can easily guess the address based on first name on LinkedIn plus the company domain. Spam has been a thing since email was invented.
Please tell that to the LLM zealots. Because denial of documented facts is called pushing a narrative, not "sticking to facts."
There are numerous confirmed instances of websites asking to put personal information in the user agent string. And people here are downplaying, downvoting, or even denying that this issue exists. I am sick and tired of the relentless grifting that's overtaking the software industry.
I agree that there are some websites that it will send the email address and that Anthropic never should have put the email address in the prompt in the first place. I mean I can understand why they did it but it still seems pretty stupid to me. It's kind of like hardcoding API keys in your codebase, it saves a few minutes of time but is obviously not a good practice.
> I am sick and tired of the relentless grifting that's overtaking the software industry.
It's only going to get worse especially depending on your definition of grifting in this context. I've been doing this for a long time but these days I don't even write code. I have AI write the code, monitoring the logs, and suggesting PRs. Our users are happy, I'm happy, and we get features out very quickly without any sort of uptick in bugs. Some people consider that grifting but others will just see it as the current state of development. By the way that's the way that things will become more and more over time. It's scary how good AI is at things these days. I was testing it on 3D modeling with Blender yesterday and was blown away.
See, this is the issue. Companies like Anthropic are relentlessly hyping and pressuring everyone to inject their tech everywhere, without any care for the consequences. This privacy violation isn't an isolated incident. This is the usual Silicon Valley playbook, and the reckless way and speed in which it's being pushed out now is already causing damage.
If that wasn't bad enough, they're stealing and depriving everyone of critical resources like RAM, electricity, natural resources [1], public land, and taxpayer money.
All this for what exactly? Most of this isn't based at all on current demand, but rather the idea that they can make much better use of resources in the future than the people that actually need them right now. Yet, cheerleaders at HN downplay or deny that anything bad is going on.
This is the grifting. They're selling hypothetical demand while robbing everyone else of the actual resources that we all rely on. These companies are acting like the scammers at Wall Street who caused the 2008 financial crisis, except that the scale and scope of the harm is so much worse.
Your argument is akin to the scammers cheering for themselves in the lead-up to the financial crisis. "See? We're making it possible for people to afford homes, but you ungrateful people are calling affordable housing grifting."
That's gross.
Even the Wall Street scammers didn't publicly display this level of arrogance. Because at least, the superficial benefit was affordable housing, not the joy of rich assholes being able to play with their shiny new toy.
Sorry, I don't understand what is the "hypothetical demand" you identified in my comment you replied to? There is real demand for AI. I use it daily for years and my usage has only been increasing as its become more competent and I've learned how to use it better. If you think that is BS and its all hypothetical, you quite simply just don't know what you are talking about.
> Your argument is akin to the Wall Street scammers cheering for themselves in the lead-up to the financial crisis. "See? We're making it possible for people to afford homes, but you ungrateful people are calling affordable housing grifting."
What argument are you referring to? Can you specifically quote what you are talking about that I said because I don't understand. Just seems like you wanted to find a way to bring this back to a previous bubble and call me a scammer simply for not being anti-AI.
You really proved my point about how you people regard anything that puts LLMs in a negative light as an attack on yourselves. As long as you get to play with your shiny new toy, you're fine, or even cheer for, the fact that a handful of tech billionaires are funneling billions into our political systems, seizing and hoarding finite resources all for themselves, and doing a pump and dump on the global economy in order to do so. And the rest of the world is supposed to be thanking you for that. It's a cult.
But I agree with you on one point. Voters demanded change, and it's not in favor of the enablers who think any of the above is okay. And childish behavior like trying to call people mentally ill without getting flagged will not buy you any sympathy.
I tried to have a real discussion with you but you wouldn't even attempt that in good faith. I asked you to clarify your points and you totally ignored me. It's like you are talking to somebody else. Now you are suddenly bringing politics into this like a literal bot.
This isn't something US politics can just put back in the bottle and you are naive for thinking this. If it gets heavily regulated in the US it won't be long before everyone is just using Chinese models. And then what? Will we ban Chinese models? That strategy and approach didn't work so well with semiconductors back in the day.
Also I didn't bring up mental illness first, hope you're doing fine.
> I tried to have a real discussion with you but you wouldn't even attempt that in good faith. I asked you to clarify your points and you totally ignored me.
Why is every accusation a confession with you people? I clarified multiple times what the issue is, and every single time you've either ignored, denied, or downplayed. You pretend that the people being robbed of resources are just "resisting change," and are now even calling us "literal bots." If that's how you view people, no wonder you think it's "bad faith" to oppose the multi-trillion dollar levels of exploitation that's going on.
> Also I didn't bring up mental illness first
What I said was that unempathetic people are driving others mad. Very disingenuous of you to frame that as me inviting you to call me mentally ill. You have nothing but your own free will to blame for making that insult, and a responsible adult owns their decisions.
All of this highlights the lack of empathy even further.
> hope you're doing fine.
And you did it again. Calling people ill in a sarcastic way is your idea of a "real discussion"? No, that's petty and childish.
I asked you very specific questions because I genuinely was trying to understand what points you were making and what argument you thought I was trying to make and you never addressed those very specific questions. If I ask you specific questions and then you completely ignore them that isn't really going to lead to a productive conversation. You are just letting emotion control you and you are justifying it by assuming that you are more empathetic than me which frankly isn't even relevant.
Another issue that makes having a discussion with you impossible is that you keep using the plural form of words like "you people" and "are now even calling us...". I am a singular person talking to you another singular person. Stop trying to put myself and yourself into buckets and extrapolate this conversation into things I never said just because people that you might think are similar to me have said in the past. I was calling you a literal bot for bringing up politics out of nowhere. I'm not talking about "you people" or anyone else, or any other situation, I'm only talking about you in that specific context. Stop extrapolating everything and putting words in my mouth. It's exhausting and even trying to have a conversation with you is simply not happening so I'm not going to reply further.
I already read your reply. You didn't just ask a question. You asked a rhetorical question. Very different things.
> Sorry, I don't understand what is the "hypothetical demand" you identified in my comment you replied to? ... If you think that is BS and its all hypothetical, you quite simply just don't know what you are talking about.
"You quite simply just don't know what you are talking about" is not a question. It's denial of a very real issue. It's no secret that Anthropic and co. are currently depriving others of resources based on speculative future demand. It's not current demand that's already being served. It's future demand. And they're threatening human extinction if they don't have their way. How much imaginary future demand justifies such deprivation? At that point, who is all of this even for?
Or by "question," are you referring to this:
> Just seems like you wanted to find a way to bring this back to a previous bubble and call me a scammer simply for not being anti-AI.
The exact same straw man rephrased, also not a question.
> You are just letting emotion control you
Says the person repeatedly calling people mental.
> I was calling you a literal bot for bringing up politics out of nowhere
The insane amount of resources being allocated to LLM datacenters was one of the deciding factors in the outcome of the election. People wanted change, the precise thing you accused me of being against. You invited that discussion.
Furthermore, you call me a "bot" for bringing up this point, saying it's "irrelevant." Calling that dismissal of human suffering for what it is isn't "extrapolation."
I clarified what the grift is in every single one of my replies, and you refuse to even acknowledge the issue of resource deprivation and instead made it about being pro-progress or anti-progress. Don't pretend like that's a good-faith discussion.
By questions I was referring to my sentences that ended with a question mark that you ignored several comments back. None of them were rhetorical. I like that you are selectively quoting statements I made and saying they aren't questions. No shit. My questions were questions. That is why there are question marks. Maybe you can ask Claude to identify them for you.
AI companies can barely meet current demand. I don't know why you think all the demand is hypothetical but that's on you. You'd have to have your head in the sand to think this. They are collectively processing hundreds of billions of tokens per minute if you bothered to research it. That's not future demand, that's current.
Since you clearly don’t know what a rhetorical question is, I’ll help you out. Putting a question mark at the end of a sentence doesn’t make it a sincere question. If you’ve answered a question all by yourself right after “asking,” it’s without doubt a rhetorical question. Turns out Claude didn’t help you be correct here, just like when you mocked another commenter for using a totally legit English word.
Also, you think you need Claude to do ctrl-f? No wonder you have such a visceral reaction to the idea of placing limits on LLM resource usage. And that, by the way, is a rhetorical question, even though I put a question mark on it.
You appear to suffer from a cognitive dissonance so severe that you’re no longer able to comprehend the concept of time or numbers. Or even the difference between all and some.
Much of the resources being seized by these companies aren’t being used to serve live requests yet. Your claim that it’s serving current demand is a logical impossibility. It’s future demand.
And you refuse to even contemplate this at all, but what on earth justifies depriving people of resources they need to live? People being denied access to everything from RAM, electricity, natural resources, land, and money has consequences. But the only thing you’ve shown care for is the interest of LLM providers. You lash out against any criticism of their actions by calling people mental over and over.
You need a good hard look at yourself in the mirror, because that behavior is what most people would consider abhorrent. Consider this before you post the same insult again.
You are just putting words in my mouth. I agree Anthropic should not be putting the email addressing in prompts. But I'm simply disagreeing with the causation implied about how it is suddenly causing a bunch of spam.
I am a heavy user and I checked my logs and never once did it include my email in any sort of web requests. The chance that it actually included that person's email and then that led to them getting spammed is just incredibly low.
You can have guardrails and still ask for approval. There is a difference between a guy who just has to approve a CVE fix and someone that has to take the time to understand what's going on, etc.
You will need a sub-second network speed, in some cases < X ms, if you want to offer an acceptable UX for "heavy user interaction" software, like the photo editor you mentioned.
Even the cloud won't save you, though: some SaaS companies are far too easy to replicate internally. It kind of sucks, because these used to be small companies with a couple of use cases in mind that nobody ever wanted to "reimplement internally" and they did give work to real people. But now, throw some agents at it, and a few 100s $ later you have replicated their product and can run it in your (internal) network.
It's because this is how AI has been sold to everyone - just ask, and it will do it.
The better pattern is to let it code the app and then you can use the app to target your data. So you only pay for it once, plus it's deterministic. But yeah, it requires setting up an environment, etc. It becomes "maintenance".
Coding became now way faster especially when I knew exactly what I wanted so I tasked it with helping me build CLI tools, automations, small apps, which now surely are free to use and tailored for my needs. Asking it always the same thing, and spending tokens for that (and with that power) seemed just not right.
You have to keep it secure, so it’s not “pay once” but has running costs, and need some kind of security scanning, citizen developer devops platform etc etc
This is only when you build a big web app serving also others. You can just build a desktop app, a cli, a local webpage etc and use it to "Organize my gallery" or whatever.
So now you kinda have that app, even when you cancel your AI subscription or they go bust, things simply still just work so you can focus on important stuff.
It's actually not just funneling money if the company gives jobs to people in the country as well, paid with the sales of the product sold worldwide. Everyone knows US is where business is done, but it's not like money stays there and never leaves the country. It would make no sense at all if that was the case.
And companies here (in eu) would immediately create a competitor. As long as we both "eat" we're friends.
I also wondered the same until I saw that Rheinmetall produced that type of defense system you describe (I think in 2024 or so). And I think that except for Rheinmetall, nobody gives them this type of weapon (seems other countries have something similar), but it's probably a handful of them deployed in maybe very few locations.
I don't think it's that simple to build it, otherwise they would have all done it.
The problem with that is that behind the Rheinmetall brand name it's actually made by Switzerland's former Oerlikon before the Rheinmetall acquisition, and Switzerland doesn't sell military gear to countries currently at war due to its neutrality status. So for Ukraine it might as well be vaporware as they aint getting it (officially).
I assume the Skyrangers delivered to Ukraine are gonna be laundered Swiss-made AA guns, imported into Germany, assembled in Germany and exported as a "German Made" weapon system, to get around Swiss export restrictions
Becoming and staying a leader in innovation sometimes requires shortcuts. You can also frame a law to make that exception specific for an industry, a field or a group so it doesn't become the norm (or time box it, if you want). You need innovation, there is no other way USA can lead in AI if you don't build these damn data centers.
Come to live in Europe and you will see how nice it is to stagnate because rule A depends on rule B, but there is an exception C that requires D....
A typical workflow is: connect via MCP to some data source. Do some stats, transformations, etc. Put the data in a format that Claude understands or will understand better later. Make a UI/story out of it. Keep track of your "things" through visualizations.
Been using this worlflow extensively now. This is their easy wall garden.
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