I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
259 comments
·August 6, 2025pentamassiv
ChrisMarshallNY
Do you feel like Claptrap did?[0].
In all seriousness, good work. Sorry about the rejection, but it reminds me of the story about the Homebrew guy getting rejected by Google[1].
riedel
Also Microsoft and AppGet:
JdeBP
As discussed at length on this page at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808807 .
ChrisMarshallNY
Cool. Thanks for the link, but I wasn't actually trying to steal anyone's thunder, and ... I did read the article. Just felt that it wouldn't hurt to link to it.
Also, that discussion gets pretty mean. Didn't feel like I wanted to send people there. I just wanted to give the guy a pat on the back, and bring some humor into it. Been there. Sucks.
gherkinnn
I have fond memories of playing Claptrap in Borderlands Presequel. None of my friends do though, his vaulthunter.EXE ability made few friends.
voxleone
You are an ethical person, and this is an important topic.
We rarely hear serious public debate about whether an intelligent creature should move, explore, or interact with the world physically, not just digitally. Creating a mind and denying it movement would be like creating a bird and clipping its wings before it ever flies.
Embodiment seems to be essential for AGI. Whether we’re ready to face that is a question we should be asking now, not after the fact.
fenomas
Hey, great work, and just wanted to lend my voice in support! It's kind of wild how many open source devs have a story along similar lines. (Mine is the time when Mojang used my voxel engine..)
131012
Since you're asking: I took a pause mid-reading and told myself: "Woah, I like their writing style."
trueismywork
Do you think that making your product AGPL would being you more money/recognition/jobs for your effort?
pentamassiv
I don't know. I have no comparison but it is common for crates to be released under MIT. I took over the maintainership from the original author so the license was already there. I rewrote pretty much everything so I guess I could try changing the license now but that's not something I wanna think about.
I do the work because I see it as payback for all the great open source software I use all the time.
riedel
I really like the copyleft idea, however, I think you did nothing wrong, IMHO, because if large corps like an idea, they will rather reimplement it rather than even bothering with ways to conform to AGPL or buy an alternative licence. Particular in the age of AI, all source available code has become pretty much public domain (value is still in maintenance, etc). License have mostly become a compliance/ideology game that alienates most people. However, changing the license on the main repo, with only a minor version bump, would be a nice asshole move to get their attention past HR (won't make a difference, but if you have nothing to lose).
anonnon
> but it is common for crates to be released under MIT
Something that isn't brought up enough in the "rewrite everything in Rust" discussions is that the API guidelines explicitly recommend MIT/Apache to "maximize compatibility" (i.e., corporate friendliness, or developer and user exploitation): https://rust-lang.github.io/api-guidelines/necessities.html#...
Your project has been around for a while, but it's crazy to me that anyone still open sources anything under MIT (or similar) in the era of LLMs. Are they that confident in their job security? Are they already independently wealthy? Frankly, even a proper copyleft license is likely to just be ignored, or the code laundered through an LLM-assisted rewrite, by these companies. I prefer to just keep anything I can't sell all to myself rather than release it, at this point.
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gwbas1c
I wonder if it's useful for you to put a few subtle "hire me"s on your repo, mailing list, ect?
xico
If we are at the point where a hiring manager for a position deeply related to an open source library is not at least checking if the authors would be interested, I'm not sure.
lagniappe
Thank you for your service
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captain_coffee
Unfortunately, this seems on par with recruitment practices in the summer of 2025.
I can almost guarantee that they didn't even read that application / cover letter and auto-magically rejected it.
"the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications"
Zero effort. They probably didn't even realize the relevance of that specific application for that role. Unbelievable, I swear!
TrackerFF
To be fair with Anthropic, they probably get unfathomably many applications for everything, on top of the cold calls/emails. They're one of the hottest companies in the world, so I'd expect tens of thousands of applicants. Media writing about $100m+ hiring deals in AI does not help, either.
vdupras
Aren't they an AI company? Couldn't they sort it out? If Anthropic, of all companies, can't sort out incoming job applications, what exactly are their tools for?
bootsmann
Tbf, I'd rather get a "we didn't review your CV" response than a template "we are continuing with other candidates :)" response. It softens the blow considerably and helps me as an applicant better keep track on which variation of the CV is working best because I can just remove this datapoint.
motorest
> Tbf, I'd rather get a "we didn't review your CV" response than a template "we are continuing with other candidates :)" response.
Idk it sounds plausible that OP might just have been late to the party, and applied when the recruitment process was at the final stages.
yard2010
Yes, euphemism is one of the worst diseases of our time. This is gaslighting with fewer steps. It's almost always easier to lie.
notahacker
Tbf the other summer recruitment practice in AI this summer is Zuck running round offering engineers with some sort of reputation $100m+ windfalls, so maybe all the OP needs to do is add "author of computer interaction library used by Anthropic" to his LinkedIn profile to acquire that garage full of Ferraris
mlinhares
Nah, if there was ever a time where making meaningful contributions to open source was important to land you a good paying job in a hot tech company, that died a long time ago. The people making these decisions don't care, unless you have someone inside to put your resume first it doesn't matter that you wrote all the code that makes their product even possible, the hiring manager won't care.
I might just be old but i really haven't felt like contributing to open source at all lately because i've bills to pay and kids to care for and taking time out of this just for the sake of enriching some billion dollar corp that will eat me and spit me out doesn't feel like a good investment for my time.
Sometimes i feel sad that it came to this but this is the place we're living in right now.
thisOtterBeGood
Poor poor... I always felt that too many people in hr decision making underestimate the role of talent. Many awesome software products stem from teams with extraordinary talent. Average people create average software.
woadwarrior01
There's an ongoing lawsuit[1] pertaining to AI-driven job applicant filtering.
[1]: https://www.cdflaborlaw.com/blog/federal-court-grants-prelim...
nikolayasdf123
they should have used their AI to scan through resume... they are AI company afterall. shame they missed this guy. it shows their resume-scannign AI is useless.
practice9
They should have used Claude Code for reviews
cnst
> Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo. I wrote a cover letter and sent out my application. An automatic reply informed me that they might take some time to respond and that they only notify applicants if they made it to the next round. After a few weeks without an answer, I had assumed they chose other applicants.
I've mostly stopped applying to the big companies long time ago (10+ years) precisely because I'd never hear back regardless of the match or the credentials.
The only exception has been JaneStreet — they've contacted me almost immediately after a cold application with a small cover letter about my interests.
Yet going the referral route, it's relatively easy to get an interview almost anywhere, even Google or Apple.
sigmoid10
>The only exception has been JaneStreet
Huh. I guess if you decide to make OCaml your company's primary programming language, you have to take what you can when it comes to devs.
cnst
Yes and no, I imagine the biggest qualification for Jane Street would still be humility and not OCaml interest or expertise, and the pay probably has something to do with people's desire to apply, too.
ArcHound
I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV?
Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.
mac-mc
Lets make a new license: If you wont hire me, use my library and make over $100m in revenue a year, you must pay a commercial license to use my software equivalent to the total cost (equity grants included) of an average principal engineer or director who manages 50+ people at your company in your highest COL metro, whichever is higher. For OSS work that isn't mostly one author, make it go to the foundation for the OSS project instead and apply the rule to principal maintainers. You could even scale it in multiples of revenue in principle engineer units of $1b per principle engineer of global revenue.
IMO I think foundational projects that every single bigtech uses like ffmpeg should get on this licence yesterday. They would start getting millions because it still would be way cheaper than making it themselves in their bloated cost structures.
ArcHound
I agree with the spirit of this comment, but I worry about the implementation.
See the comment of Manly read in this section. Once the threat of payment approaches, you can just switch to a free fork. A single person can't really win a trial against a big, well-funded company.
mettamage
They can fork it, but can they find the maintainers? If it's just their own internal employees, then they definitely have less expertise in that codebase.
Might as well hire the actual expert.
zamalek
If the license were copyleft forking would not be a solution.
Etheryte
I don't really see how this is an issue, depending on the license text it's trivial to make the license apply in the same manner. As for winning, I think that's more of a US-centric view, if you sue elsewhere in the world there's plenty of courts that are happy to slap big tech.
BobbyTables2
It’s a nice idea but couldn’t a big company simply move its engineering team to a subsidiary that doesn’t get sales revenue?
(I’m not an accountant!)
Would be hilarious to bury a clause like “Modified MIT license — head of HR must publicly announce any employment application rejections of the maintainers while wearing a chicken suit).”
antihero
Couldn't they just get Opus to rewrite the lib?
The model probably has the lib in it tbh.
jaccola
Because - They can decide more easily what he works on - They know he loves this work and is very capable of doing it - They can own his output, a competitive advantage - He will likely cost them ~nothing anyway
ArcHound
While that sounds rational, I worry that the same reasoning is not applied in the HR department.
But that might be just my frustration from experiences.
To continue the devil's advocate: why bother with all of this, if the company doesn't have to and the OSS version is enough anyway?
ManlyBread
This is an incredibly short-term thinking. The reason is simple: the author is not obliged to continue while this sort of thing can be demoralizing.
I don't know about the author's approach to this matter, but if I would find out that a company is making a killing using my software and then that company would refuse to even give me an interview I'd probably stop loving doing what I do. Sure, the software is under MIT license and it was the author's choice to do so, but what's the point of doing it under such a license when you can't even count of it mattering in a resume? What's the point of providing free labor to a company with revenue in billions? If you look at the author's blogpost, the only benefit the author mentions is making the number of downloads go up and that's just pathetic.
I am reminded of an another, similar case with a library called "FluentAssertions". This library used to be free to use by anyone until the author changed the license and started charging money for commercial use. The author did that because he spend several year maintaining the library on his own time and dime and megacorpos like Microsoft wouldn't even bother to donate despite using it extensively. What happened afterwards was that the author got shat on by everyone on the internet for daring to ask for money. In the company I work for his library has been replaced with an another free fork at a incredibly fast pace. All that free labor and the author got dropped as soon as they fell out of line.
The worst thing is that it wouldn't probably take much to make the author of the library happy. Even if they weren't interested in hiring him they could still acknowledge him, talk to him a bit to maintain good relations, throw him a nice donation as a thank you and now it would be a nice, good PR story instead of an another reminder that corporations are just looking to squeeze out value out of all of us.
trueismywork
They probably already have someone working on top of it but it's just closed source because of the license.
dmurray
But they are hiring someone else to work on it.
> I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo
pentamassiv
Right now it is just a hobby and there are still a number of bugs remaining. Since I don't have an income from it, I can't dedicate more time to it. Hiring me would allow me to work on fixing them full time and make the progress much faster
ArcHound
Hey, props to your attitude, and I wish you the best of luck.
Obviously, you've provided value to a company in a really in-demand area. It doesn't feel right to treat the contributors like this. Sadly, it seems that the companies have the power and the intent to just abuse and exploit
I don't have a solution. I am just expressing my frustration from the perceived injustice.
trueismywork
Do you think they already have hired someone to work on it but are just not releasing the source code?
pentamassiv
I don't think so. They use an outdated version straight from crates.io (at least in the publicly available version of Claude Desktop).
RMPR
Implementing the features they would want to prioritize. Just like most companies hiring OSS maintainers.
ArcHound
That is also a good point, but I worry that the power has shifted. I worry that companies might get away with no compensation for such efforts.
bravesoul2
Only through trickery. E.g. "you might get a job if you work for free for us". In other news see many tech job ads these days :)
dirkc
I can't say for Anthropic, but I've seen Google hire people working on open source projects that were aligned with the skills they were looking for. Desktop search and collaborative editing comes to mind, although I might be mis-remembering?
bravesoul2
That's like having someone say gives you free tractor blueprint but you can hire its inventor to come and put it together, or some other engineer.
An FOSS project is rarely production ready that is really free as in beer considering TCO. Especially for a tech company.
that_guy_iain
But he's not doing the work for free. He's doing something else for free which they use. He has domain knowledge with the library that noone else has, their can either pay someone to learn it or they can hire someone with it.
ArcHound
And that's exactly what these companies can abuse.
If this wasn't available for free, they would gladly pay for a programmer to create it. But if it's already free, they can use it as a starting point. Maybe they'd need to internalize/extend it. But the option of paying for the work already done is gone.
Do this for each npm dependency and you're looking at huge savings.
imtringued
This is still illogical. You can hire the original maintainer and pay an incremental cost, or you can hire a random developer and pay the initial learning cost + higher incremental cost.
If every company using a library chose the former, then every hour of development would be paid for (from the perspective of the maintainer) and the cost would be spread out across all its users.
stopthe
Unfortunately, the choice of license likely won't matter in the nearest future (if not already so). If a tech giant wants you open-source library, they will just point their agent to it and ask "to rewrite in the style of War and Peace". And more unscrupulous players won't even bother with a rewrite, as we've seen recently in the case of Cheatingdaddy/Pickle.
roenxi
The flip side is that if they can technically pull that off then the cost of writing the library has dropped so low that an OSS maintainer probably wouldn't have to work too hard to write it anyway.
pimterry
Being able to rewrite existing working code sufficient to copyright-launder it isn't the same as being able to write it from scratch, unfortunately, especially since LLMs seem to be allowed to ignore quite a bit of copyright law with complete impunity.
Imo it's totally plausible that something will be expensive & time consuming to create, even with LLMs, but still easy to fork outside current licensing restrictions with LLMs.
layer8
Rewriting it with a guarantee of not introducing any errors is still beyond current LLM capabilities, and there might be a certain correlation between that capability and the capability of writing it from scratch.
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senko
The author should have just asked the friend of a friend for a warm intro instead of trying to go through the main gate.
Sucks, but that's the reality of hiring (and getting hired) in tech in general.
Onewildgamer
Was wondering something similar, if OP had blogged it earlier when he found claude was using it and re-posted it in HN/reddit it in a sensational way to capture eyes. Maybe through one of the forums he could have got an introduction and a job doing what he loves.
OP still has a chance now, maybe not anthropic, even other competitors can come knocking.
tartoran
Come Anthropic, give this guy a fair shot. At least interview him in person or something.
lesser-shadow
Also I low how the IT hiring has a become a paradox: Companies won't hire you if you don't have enough projects in your portfolio, but by the time you will have enough stars on your github projects they have already used you to their own goals and are "not interested".
motorest
I think you are making up scenarios in your head to try to rationalize away why you have a bad time at job interviews.
OldfieldFund
exactly. there is a reason companies are paying through their noses for some people
charcircuit
I don't think is true. I had more success removing my portfolio and letting my work history speak for itself.
davidgomes
I wonder if it was geolocation? Anthropic is based in SF, the author seems to be based in Munich, and maybe they're not open to hiring people who aren't based in the US right now? Given the state of US visas right now, this wouldn't shock me.
zamalek
My company, which is significantly smaller, hires people in multiple countries across the world. You don't need an office to hire (I am sure there so exist countries where you do, but I expect they are the minority).
brudgers
Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position
"Coffee" with the friend of a friend would he better strategy than a cover letter in that case...more work, but better strategy.
Because logically, getting hired requires demonstrating you are "the kind of person we want to work with." Being qualified on paper is not necessarily required.
stog
Ah, it seems their AI powered cover letter review system isn't up to scratch.
henriquegodoy
I think this blog post was the best way to get into Anthropic, and it was well-deserved. That's the reality of hiring in tech: there are many non-technical people judging whether technical people are competent or not. Escaping that matrix through things like blog posts, cold emails, and Twitter threads can be great ways to break in and get noticed by these companies.
calvinmorrison
HR _hates_ hiring anyone, they just want H1-Bs.
Hey, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for submitting this. If you have any questions feel free to ask and please let me know how the writing was. It's one of my first posts so I'd like to improve