5 ms·

Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious? Claude Code is a lock in, where Anthropic takes all the value. If the frontend and API are decoupled, th

Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious? Claude Code is a lock in, where Anthropic takes all the value. If the frontend and API are decoupled, they are one benchmark away from losing half their users. Some other motivations: they want to capture the value. Even if it's unprofitable they can expect it to become vastly profitable as inference cost drops, efficiency improves, competitors die out etc. Or worst case build the dominant brand then reduce the quotas. Then there's brand - when people talk about OpenCode they will occasionally specify "OpenCode (with Claude)" but frequently won't. Then platform - at any point they can push any other service. Look at the Apple comparison. Yes, the hardware and software are tuned and tested together. The analogy here is training the specific harness,caching the system prompt, switching models, etc. But Apple also gets to charge Google $billions for being the default search engine. They get to sell apps. They get to sell cloud storage, and even somehow a TV. That's all super profitable. At some point Claude Code will become an ecosystem with preferred cloud and database vendors, observability, code review agents, etc.

marscopter 8mo ago
> Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious? AI companies: "You think you own that code?"
thenaturalist 8mo ago
??? Use an API Key and there's no problem. They literally put that in plain words in the ToS.
- 9cb14c1ec0 8mo ago
  Using an API key is orders of magnitude more expensive. That's the difference here. The Claude Code subscriptions are being heavily subsidized by Anthropic, which is why people want to use their subscriptions in everything else.
  - naveen99 8mo ago
    They are subsidized by people who underuse their subscriptions. There must be a lot of them.
    - noosphr 8mo ago
      There is a lot more vc cash.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - tom_m 8mo ago
      There are. It's like healthcare, the healthy don't use it as much and pay for the sick.
    - bloppe 8mo ago
      I think the people who use more than they pay for vastly outnumber those who pay for more than they use. It takes intention to sign up (not the default, like health care) and once you do, you quickly get in the habit of using it.
      - naveen99 8mo ago
        Of course, like gym memberships. VC’s subsidizing powerlifters…
    - canibal 8mo ago
      This move feels poorly timed. Their latest ad campaigns about not having ads, and the goodwill they'd earned lately in my book was just decimated by this. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's still just dipping their toes into the AI pool. And am very much a user that under utilizes what I pay for because of that. I have several clients who are scrambling to get on board with cowork. Eliminating API usage for subscription members right before a potentially large wave of turnover not only chills that motivation it signals a lack of faith in their marketing, which from my POV, put out the only AI super bowl campaign to escape virtually unscathed.
- anonym29 8mo ago
  The people mad about this feel they are entitled to the heavily subsidized usage in any context they want, not in the context explicitly allowed by the subsidizer. It's kind of like a new restaurant started handing out coupons for "90% off", wanting to attract diners to the restaurant, customers started coming in and ordering bulk meals then immediately packaging them in tupperware containers and taking it home (violating the spirit of the arrangement, even if not the letter of the arrangement), so the restaurant changed the terms on the discount to say "limited to in-store consumption only, not eligible for take-home meals", and instead of still being grateful that they're getting food for 90% off, the cheapskate customers are getting angry that they're no longer allowed to exploit the massive subsidy however they want.
CuriouslyC 8mo ago
Anthropic is going to be on the losing side with this. Models are too fungible, it's really about vibes, and Claude Code is far too fat and opinionated. Ironically, they're holding back innovation, and it's burning the loyalty the model team is earning.
- eshaham78 8mo ago
  The competition angle is interesting - we're already seeing models like Step-3.5-Flash advertise compatibility with Claude Code's harness as a feature. If Anthropic's restrictions push developers toward more open alternatives, they might inadvertently accelerate competitor adoption. The real question is whether the subscription model economics can sustain the development costs long-term while competitors offer more flexible terms.
- tom_m 8mo ago
  I thought Anthropic would fall after OpenAI, but they just might be racing to the bottom faster here.
  - burnte 8mo ago
    Maybe for coding but the number of normie users flooding to Claude over OAI is huge.
  - wolvoleo 8mo ago
    I think they're doing a great job on the coding front though
    - ruszki 8mo ago
      I think there is a huge gap between people who has a good CLAUDE.md (or similar), or those who doesn’t. When I first tried, the created code was garbage. Now that I slowly built my memory, several thousands of manually written examples and guidance, it can generate quite reliably, when it doesn’t need literally anything outside of those… That being said, most of the vibe coded codebases (in reality every single one which I saw) use garbage memory, and consequently have garbage output. So the same thing is terrible and great at the same time. People who give time, and people who is fine producing garbage (huge majority) says it’s great. People who just tried it out, and don’t have the luxury to potentially waste days and weeks, say that it’s bad. All of these are true at once.
rurp 8mo ago
I don't think many are confused about why Anthropic wants to do this. The crux is that they appear to be making these changes solely for their own benefit at the expense of their users and people are upset. There are parallels to the silly Metaverse hype wave from a few years ago. At the time I saw a surprising number of people defending the investment saying it was important for Facebook to control their own platform. Well sure it's beneficial for Facebook to control a platform, but that benefit is purely for the company and if anything it would harm current and future users. Unsurprisingly, the pitch to please think of this giant corporation's needs wasn't a compelling pitch in the end.
mccoyb 8mo ago
"Training the specific harness" is marginal -- it's obvious if you've used anything else. pi with Claude is as good as (even better! given the obvious care to context management in pi) as Claude Code with Claude. This whole game is a bizarre battle. In the future, many companies will have slightly different secret RL sauces. I'd want to use Gemini for documentation, Claude for design, Codex for planning, yada yada ... there will be no generalist take-all model, I just don't believe RL scaling works like that. I'm not convinced that a single company can own the best performing model in all categories, I'm not even sure the economics make it feasible. Good for us, of course.
- thepasch 8mo ago
  > pi with Claude is as good as (even better! given the obvious care to context management in pi) as Claude Code with Claude And that’s out of the box. With how comically extensible pi is and how much control it gives you over every aspect of the pipeline, as soon as you start building extensions for your own, personal workflow, Claude Code legimitely feels like a trash app in comparison. I don’t care what Anthropic does - I’ll keep using pi. If they think they need to ban me for that, then, oh well. I’ll just continue to keep using pi. Just no longer with Claude models.
  - throwaw12 8mo ago
    As a Claude Code user looking for alternatives, I am very intrigued by this statement. Can you please share good resources I can learn from to extend pi?
    - theshrike79 8mo ago
      Pi has specific instructions to extend itself. You can just tell it to create an extension to connect to any AI API provider and it'll most likely one or two-shot it for you. IMO it's the most self-aware of all of the current harnesses.
ksec 8mo ago
>Claude Code is a lock in, where Anthropic takes all the value. I wouldn't all the value, but how else are you going to run the business? Allow other to take all the value you provide?
chasd00 8mo ago
> At some point Claude Code will become an ecosystem with preferred cloud and database vendors, observability, code review agents, etc. i've been wondering how anthropic is going to survive long term. If they could build out an infrastructure and services to complete with the hyperscalers but surfaced as a tool for claude to use then maybe. You pay Anthropic $20/user/month for ClaudeCode but also $100k/month to run your applications.
m11a 8mo ago
Don't think that's a valid comparison. Apple can do those things because they control the hardware device, which has physical distribution, and they lock down the ecosystem. There is no third party app store, and you can't get the Photos app to save to Google Drive. With Claude Code, just export an env variable or use a MITM proxy + some middleware to forward requests to OpenAI instead. It's impossible to have lock in. Also, coding agent CLIs are a commodity.

marscopter 8mo ago

> Reading these comments aren't we missing the obvious? AI companies: "You think you own that code?"

thenaturalist 8mo ago

??? Use an API Key and there's no problem. They literally put that in plain words in the ToS.

9cb14c1ec0 8mo ago
Using an API key is orders of magnitude more expensive. That's the difference here. The Claude Code subscriptions are being heavily subsidized by Anthropic, which is why people want to use their subscriptions in everything else.
- naveen99 8mo ago
  They are subsidized by people who underuse their subscriptions. There must be a lot of them.
  - noosphr 8mo ago
    There is a lot more vc cash.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - tom_m 8mo ago
    There are. It's like healthcare, the healthy don't use it as much and pay for the sick.
  - bloppe 8mo ago
    I think the people who use more than they pay for vastly outnumber those who pay for more than they use. It takes intention to sign up (not the default, like health care) and once you do, you quickly get in the habit of using it.
    - naveen99 8mo ago
      Of course, like gym memberships. VC’s subsidizing powerlifters…
  - canibal 8mo ago
    This move feels poorly timed. Their latest ad campaigns about not having ads, and the goodwill they'd earned lately in my book was just decimated by this. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's still just dipping their toes into the AI pool. And am very much a user that under utilizes what I pay for because of that. I have several clients who are scrambling to get on board with cowork. Eliminating API usage for subscription members right before a potentially large wave of turnover not only chills that motivation it signals a lack of faith in their marketing, which from my POV, put out the only AI super bowl campaign to escape virtually unscathed.
anonym29 8mo ago
The people mad about this feel they are entitled to the heavily subsidized usage in any context they want, not in the context explicitly allowed by the subsidizer. It's kind of like a new restaurant started handing out coupons for "90% off", wanting to attract diners to the restaurant, customers started coming in and ordering bulk meals then immediately packaging them in tupperware containers and taking it home (violating the spirit of the arrangement, even if not the letter of the arrangement), so the restaurant changed the terms on the discount to say "limited to in-store consumption only, not eligible for take-home meals", and instead of still being grateful that they're getting food for 90% off, the cheapskate customers are getting angry that they're no longer allowed to exploit the massive subsidy however they want.

CuriouslyC 8mo ago

Anthropic is going to be on the losing side with this. Models are too fungible, it's really about vibes, and Claude Code is far too fat and opinionated. Ironically, they're holding back innovation, and it's burning the loyalty the model team is earning.

eshaham78 8mo ago
The competition angle is interesting - we're already seeing models like Step-3.5-Flash advertise compatibility with Claude Code's harness as a feature. If Anthropic's restrictions push developers toward more open alternatives, they might inadvertently accelerate competitor adoption. The real question is whether the subscription model economics can sustain the development costs long-term while competitors offer more flexible terms.
tom_m 8mo ago
I thought Anthropic would fall after OpenAI, but they just might be racing to the bottom faster here.
- burnte 8mo ago
  Maybe for coding but the number of normie users flooding to Claude over OAI is huge.
- wolvoleo 8mo ago
  I think they're doing a great job on the coding front though
  - ruszki 8mo ago
    I think there is a huge gap between people who has a good CLAUDE.md (or similar), or those who doesn’t. When I first tried, the created code was garbage. Now that I slowly built my memory, several thousands of manually written examples and guidance, it can generate quite reliably, when it doesn’t need literally anything outside of those… That being said, most of the vibe coded codebases (in reality every single one which I saw) use garbage memory, and consequently have garbage output. So the same thing is terrible and great at the same time. People who give time, and people who is fine producing garbage (huge majority) says it’s great. People who just tried it out, and don’t have the luxury to potentially waste days and weeks, say that it’s bad. All of these are true at once.

rurp 8mo ago

I don't think many are confused about why Anthropic wants to do this. The crux is that they appear to be making these changes solely for their own benefit at the expense of their users and people are upset. There are parallels to the silly Metaverse hype wave from a few years ago. At the time I saw a surprising number of people defending the investment saying it was important for Facebook to control their own platform. Well sure it's beneficial for Facebook to control a platform, but that benefit is purely for the company and if anything it would harm current and future users. Unsurprisingly, the pitch to please think of this giant corporation's needs wasn't a compelling pitch in the end.

mccoyb 8mo ago

"Training the specific harness" is marginal -- it's obvious if you've used anything else. pi with Claude is as good as (even better! given the obvious care to context management in pi) as Claude Code with Claude. This whole game is a bizarre battle. In the future, many companies will have slightly different secret RL sauces. I'd want to use Gemini for documentation, Claude for design, Codex for planning, yada yada ... there will be no generalist take-all model, I just don't believe RL scaling works like that. I'm not convinced that a single company can own the best performing model in all categories, I'm not even sure the economics make it feasible. Good for us, of course.

thepasch 8mo ago
> pi with Claude is as good as (even better! given the obvious care to context management in pi) as Claude Code with Claude And that’s out of the box. With how comically extensible pi is and how much control it gives you over every aspect of the pipeline, as soon as you start building extensions for your own, personal workflow, Claude Code legimitely feels like a trash app in comparison. I don’t care what Anthropic does - I’ll keep using pi. If they think they need to ban me for that, then, oh well. I’ll just continue to keep using pi. Just no longer with Claude models.
- throwaw12 8mo ago
  As a Claude Code user looking for alternatives, I am very intrigued by this statement. Can you please share good resources I can learn from to extend pi?
  - theshrike79 8mo ago
    Pi has specific instructions to extend itself. You can just tell it to create an extension to connect to any AI API provider and it'll most likely one or two-shot it for you. IMO it's the most self-aware of all of the current harnesses.

ksec 8mo ago

>Claude Code is a lock in, where Anthropic takes all the value. I wouldn't all the value, but how else are you going to run the business? Allow other to take all the value you provide?

chasd00 8mo ago

> At some point Claude Code will become an ecosystem with preferred cloud and database vendors, observability, code review agents, etc. i've been wondering how anthropic is going to survive long term. If they could build out an infrastructure and services to complete with the hyperscalers but surfaced as a tool for claude to use then maybe. You pay Anthropic $20/user/month for ClaudeCode but also $100k/month to run your applications.

m11a 8mo ago

Don't think that's a valid comparison. Apple can do those things because they control the hardware device, which has physical distribution, and they lock down the ecosystem. There is no third party app store, and you can't get the Photos app to save to Google Drive. With Claude Code, just export an env variable or use a MITM proxy + some middleware to forward requests to OpenAI instead. It's impossible to have lock in. Also, coding agent CLIs are a commodity.