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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. Ironica

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.
empath75 8mo ago
I think you have it exactly backwards, and that "owning the stack" is going to be important. Yes the harness is important, yes the model is important, but developing the harness and model together is going to pay huge dividends.
- CuriouslyC 8mo ago
  That was true more mid last year, but now we have a fairly standard flow and set of core tools, as well as better general tool calling support. The reality is that in most cases harnesses with fewer tools and smaller system prompts outperform. The advances in the Claude Code harness have been more around workflow automation rather than capability improvements, and truthfully workflows are very user-dependent, so an opinionated harness is only ever going to be "right" for a narrow segment of users, and it's going to annoy a lot of others. This is happening now, but the sub subsidy washes out a lot of the discontent.
- quikoa 8mo ago
  If Claude Code is so much better why not make users pay to use it instead of forcing it on subscribers?
  - cyanydeez 8mo ago
    If these LLMs and tools create real valuable products, where are they? Shouldnt there be dedicated youtubers showibg us thwir skillz?
- popcorncowboy 8mo ago
  You're right, because owning the stack means better options for making tons of money. Owning the stack is demonstrably not required for good agents, there are several excellent (frankly way better than ol' Claude Code) harnesses in the wild (which is in part why so many people are so annoyed by Anthropic about this move - being forced back onto their shitty cli tool).
- athrowaway3z 8mo ago
  https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/ https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/ This coding agent is minimal, and it completely changed how I used models and Claude's cli now feels like extremely slow bloat. I'd not be surprised if you're right in that this is companies / management will prefer to "pay for a complete package" approach for a long while, but power-users should not care for the model providers. I have like 100 lines of code to get me a tmux controls & semaphore_wait extension in the pi harness. That gave me a better orchestration scheme a month ago when I adopted it, than Claude has right now. As far as I can tell, the more you try to train your model on your harness, the worse they get. Bitter lesson #2932.
keeganpoppen 8mo ago
the fat and opinionated has always been true for them (especially compared to openai), and to all appearances remains a feature rather than a bug. i can’t say the approach makes my heart sing, personally, but it absolutely has augured tremendous success among thought workers / the intelligensia
mikestorrent 8mo ago
I think their branding is cementing in place for a lot of people, and the lived experience of people trying a lot of models often ends up with a simple preference for Claude, likely using a lot of the same mental heuristics as how we choose which coworkers we enjoy working with. If they can keep that position, they will have it made.
- tracker1 8mo ago
  I'm a very experienced developer with a lot of diverse knowledge and experience in both technical and domain knowledge. I've only tried a handful of AI coding agents/models... I found most of them ranging from somewhat annoying to really annoying. Claude+Opus (4.5 when I started) is the first one I've used where I found it more useful than annoying to use. I think Github Co-Pilot is most annoying from what I've tried... it's great for finishing off a task that's half done where the structure is laid out, as long as you put blinders keeping it focused on it. OpenAI and Google's options seem to get things mostly right, but do some really goofy wrong things from my own experiences. They all seem to have trouble using state of the art and current libraries by default, even when you explicitly request them.
  - mikestorrent 8mo ago
    Well, let's be thankful that there's still some work to do so we can keep our jobs for a few more years!
  - ThunderSizzle 8mo ago
    Github Copilot let's you pick the underlying model, including Claude models. Is the problem you observed true regardless of the model you picked?
    - tracker1 8mo ago
      I've only used the default selection, whatever it is in VS Code. Even paid for a year at one point as I was first using it with some SQL schema generation and it was pretty useful, kind of as a super auto-complete. If the default option isn't at least arguably the best option I can't really speak to that. I would suggest that maybe metrics on a given set of technologies be done and that based on the project in use, that it should choose the best option dynamically by default. Such as C#+MS-SQL vs Node+Postgres vs Python+Matlab+DuckDB.

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.

empath75 8mo ago

I think you have it exactly backwards, and that "owning the stack" is going to be important. Yes the harness is important, yes the model is important, but developing the harness and model together is going to pay huge dividends.

CuriouslyC 8mo ago
That was true more mid last year, but now we have a fairly standard flow and set of core tools, as well as better general tool calling support. The reality is that in most cases harnesses with fewer tools and smaller system prompts outperform. The advances in the Claude Code harness have been more around workflow automation rather than capability improvements, and truthfully workflows are very user-dependent, so an opinionated harness is only ever going to be "right" for a narrow segment of users, and it's going to annoy a lot of others. This is happening now, but the sub subsidy washes out a lot of the discontent.
quikoa 8mo ago
If Claude Code is so much better why not make users pay to use it instead of forcing it on subscribers?
- cyanydeez 8mo ago
  If these LLMs and tools create real valuable products, where are they? Shouldnt there be dedicated youtubers showibg us thwir skillz?
popcorncowboy 8mo ago
You're right, because owning the stack means better options for making tons of money. Owning the stack is demonstrably not required for good agents, there are several excellent (frankly way better than ol' Claude Code) harnesses in the wild (which is in part why so many people are so annoyed by Anthropic about this move - being forced back onto their shitty cli tool).
athrowaway3z 8mo ago
https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/ https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/ This coding agent is minimal, and it completely changed how I used models and Claude's cli now feels like extremely slow bloat. I'd not be surprised if you're right in that this is companies / management will prefer to "pay for a complete package" approach for a long while, but power-users should not care for the model providers. I have like 100 lines of code to get me a tmux controls & semaphore_wait extension in the pi harness. That gave me a better orchestration scheme a month ago when I adopted it, than Claude has right now. As far as I can tell, the more you try to train your model on your harness, the worse they get. Bitter lesson #2932.

keeganpoppen 8mo ago

the fat and opinionated has always been true for them (especially compared to openai), and to all appearances remains a feature rather than a bug. i can’t say the approach makes my heart sing, personally, but it absolutely has augured tremendous success among thought workers / the intelligensia

mikestorrent 8mo ago

I think their branding is cementing in place for a lot of people, and the lived experience of people trying a lot of models often ends up with a simple preference for Claude, likely using a lot of the same mental heuristics as how we choose which coworkers we enjoy working with. If they can keep that position, they will have it made.

tracker1 8mo ago
I'm a very experienced developer with a lot of diverse knowledge and experience in both technical and domain knowledge. I've only tried a handful of AI coding agents/models... I found most of them ranging from somewhat annoying to really annoying. Claude+Opus (4.5 when I started) is the first one I've used where I found it more useful than annoying to use. I think Github Co-Pilot is most annoying from what I've tried... it's great for finishing off a task that's half done where the structure is laid out, as long as you put blinders keeping it focused on it. OpenAI and Google's options seem to get things mostly right, but do some really goofy wrong things from my own experiences. They all seem to have trouble using state of the art and current libraries by default, even when you explicitly request them.
- mikestorrent 8mo ago
  Well, let's be thankful that there's still some work to do so we can keep our jobs for a few more years!
- ThunderSizzle 8mo ago
  Github Copilot let's you pick the underlying model, including Claude models. Is the problem you observed true regardless of the model you picked?
  - tracker1 8mo ago
    I've only used the default selection, whatever it is in VS Code. Even paid for a year at one point as I was first using it with some SQL schema generation and it was pretty useful, kind of as a super auto-complete. If the default option isn't at least arguably the best option I can't really speak to that. I would suggest that maybe metrics on a given set of technologies be done and that based on the project in use, that it should choose the best option dynamically by default. Such as C#+MS-SQL vs Node+Postgres vs Python+Matlab+DuckDB.