6 ms·

LLMs and LLM providers are massive black boxes. I get a lot of value from them and so I can put up with that to a certain extent, but these new "products"/featu

LLMs and LLM providers are massive black boxes. I get a lot of value from them and so I can put up with that to a certain extent, but these new "products"/features that Anthropic are shipping are very unappealing to me. Not because I can't see a use-case for them, but because I have 0 trust in them: - No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the feature - No trust they won't sunset the feature (the graveyard of LLM-features is vast and growing quickly while they throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks) - No trust in the company long-term. Both in them being around at all and them not rug-pulling. I don't want to build on their "platform". I'll use their harness and their models but I don't want more lock-in than that. If Anthropic goes "bad" I want to pick up and move to another harness and/or model with minimal fuss. Buying in to things like this would make that much harder. I'm not going to build my business or my development flows on things I can't replicate myself. Also, I imagine debugging any of this would be maddening. The value add is just not there IMHO. EDIT: Put another way, LLM companies are trying to climb the ladder to be a platform, I have zero interest in that, I was a "dumb pipe", I want a commodity, I want a provider, not a platform. Claude Code is as far into the dragon's lair that I want to venture and I'm only okay with that because I know I can jump to OpenCode/Codex/etc if/when Anthropic "goes bad".

chinathrow 6mo ago
Yeah so better to convert tokens into sw doing the job at close to zero costs running on own systems.
verdverm 6mo ago
I fully endorse building a custom stack (1) because you will learn a lot (2) for full control and not having Big Ai define our UX/DX for this technology. Let's learn from history this time around?
- gritspants 6mo ago
  Here's the problem I keep running into with AI and 'history'. We all know where this is going. We'll pick our winners and losers in the interim, but so far, this is a technology that mostly impacts tech practitioners. Most people don't care, in the sense that you're a taxi driver. Perhaps you have a manual transmission and the odd person comments on your prowess with it. No one cares. I see a bunch of boys making fools out of themselves otherwise.
  - dsf2aa 6mo ago
    Theres something bizarre going on and many have completely lost their minds. The funniest thing Ive heard is that now we have LLMs, Humanoid robots are on the horizon. Like wtf? People who jump to these conclusions were never deep thinkers in the first place. And thats OK, its good to signal that. So we know who to avoid.
andrewmcwatters 6mo ago
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palata 6mo ago
> - No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the feature I actually trust that they will.
- gardenhedge 6mo ago
  Yeah, I build my workflows with two things in mind: 1) that AI will be more advanced in the future 2) that the AI I am using will be worse in the future
  - freedomben 6mo ago
    Same! I actually have some comments in my codebase now like this one: # Note: This is inefficient, but deterministic and predictable. Previous attempts at improvements led to hard-to-predict bugs and were scrapped. TODO improve this function when AI gets better I don't love it or even like it, but it is realistic.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6mo ago
  I believe the current game everybody plays is: * make sure the model maxes out all benchmarks * release it * after some time, nerf it * repeat the same with the next model However, the net sum is positive: in general, models from 2026 are better than those from 2024.
  - snek_case 6mo ago
    I guess there's a pretty clear incentive to nerf the current model right before the next model is about to come out.
    - chinathrow 6mo ago
      Wouldn't that amount to fraud?
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
cush 6mo ago
You could so easily build your own /schedule. This is hardly a feature driving lock-in
- ElFitz 6mo ago
  Yes, but once everything has been deployed through their web UI or the cli command, and fine-tuned over the weeks and months as kinks get ironed out, how do you port it all to your own? Nothing insurmontable or even complex; just laborious. Friction. That’s all it takes to lock users in.
mikepurvis 6mo ago
> I want to pick up and move to another harness and/or model with minimal fuss. Buying in to things like this would make that much harder. Yes, I expect that is very much the point here. A bunch of product guys got on a whiteboard and said, okay the thing is in wide use but the main moat is that our competitors are even more distrusted in the market than we are; other than that it's completely undifferentiated and can be swapped out in a heartbeat for multiple other offerings. How do we do we persuade our investors we have a locked in customer base that won't just up-stakes in favour of other options or just running open source models themselves?
- throwup238 6mo ago
  I think they really knee capped themselves when they released Claude for Github integrations, which allows anyone to use their Claude subscription to run Claude Code in Github actions for code reviews and arbitrary prompts. Now they’re trying to back track that with a cloud solution.
sunnybeetroot 6mo ago
Isn’t that what LangChain/LangGraph is meant to solve? Write workflows/graphs and host them anywhere?
tiku 6mo ago
I believe it doesn't matter, other companies will copy or improve it. The same happend with clawdbot, the amount of clones in a month was insane.
ahmadyan 6mo ago
> I'm not going to build my business or my development flows on things I can't replicate myself. but you can replicate these yourself! i'm happy that ant/oai are experimenting to find pmf for "llm for dev-tools". After they figure out the proper stickyness, (or if they go away or nerf or raise prices, etc) you can always take the off-ramp and implement your own llm/agent using the existing open-source models. The cost of building dev-tools is near zero. it is not like codegen where you need the frontier performance.
JohnMakin 6mo ago
This is a similar sentiment I heard early on in the cloud adoption fever, many companies hedged by being “multi cloud” which ended up mostly being abandoned due to hostile patterns by cloud providers, and a lot of cost. Ultimately it didn’t really end up mattering and the most dire predictions of vendor lock in abuse didn’t really happen as feared (I know people will disagree with this, but specifically speaking about aws, the predictions vs what actually happened is a massive gap. note I have never and will never use azure, so I could be wrong on that particular one). I see people making similar conclusions about various LLM providers. I suspect in the end it’ll shake out about the same way, the providers will become practically inoperable with each other either due to inconvenience, cost, or whatever. So I’ve not wasted much of my time thinking about it.
- robwwilliams 6mo ago
  There are different level of who gets locked in. Almost every health care system in the USA is locked in to either an Epic/Oracle barrel or a Cerner barrel. I hope AI breaks this duopoly open soon.
  - danaw 6mo ago
    hate to break it to you but Oracle now owns Cerner too :)
- michaeldwan 6mo ago
  I credit containerization, k8s, and terraform for preventing vendor lock in. Compute like EC2 or GCE are effectively interoperable. Ditto for managed services for k8s or Postgres. The new products Anthropic is shipping is more like Lambda. Vendor kool-aid lots of people will buy into. What grinds my gears is how Anthropic is actively avoiding standards. Like being the only harness that doesn't read AGENTS.md. I work on AI infra and use different models all the time, Opus is really good, but the competition is very close. There's just enough friction to testing those out though, and that's the point.
  - JohnMakin 6mo ago
gbro3n 6mo ago
I have heard it said that tokens will become commodities. I like being able to switch between Open AI and Anthropics models, but I feel I'd manage if one of them disappeared. I'd probably even get by with Gemini. I don't want to lock in to any one provider any more than I want to lock in to my energy provider. I might pay 2x for a better model, but no more, and I can see that not being the case for much longer.
slopinthebag 6mo ago
They have to become a platform because that is their only hope of locking in customers before the open models catch up enough to eat their lunch. Stuff like Gemma is already good enough to replace ChatGPT for the average consumer, and stuff like GLM 5.1 is not too far off from replacing Claude/Codex for the average developer.
wookmaster 6mo ago
They're trying to find ways to lock you in
- straygarr 6mo ago
  Can't tell if you're joking, but if not: was -> want
crystal_revenge 6mo ago
This sounds like someone complaining about how Windows is a black box while ignoring the existence of Linux/BSD. I'm currently hosting, on very reasonable consumer grade hardware, an LLM that is on par performance wise what every anyone was paying for about a year ago. Including all the layers in between the model and the user. Llama.cpp serves up Gemma-4-26B-A4B, Open WebUI handles the client details: system prompt, web search, image gen, file uploading etc. With Conduit and Tailscale providing the last layer so I can have a mobile experience as robust as anything I get from Anthropic, plus I know how all the pieces works and can upgrade, enhance, etc to my hearts delight. All this runs from a pretty standard MBP at > 70 tokens/sec. If you want to better understand the agent side of things, look into Hermes agent and you can start understanding the internals of how all this stuff is done. You can run a very competitive coding agent using modest hardware and open models. In a similar note, image/video gen on local hardware has come a long way. Just like Linux, you're going to exchanging time for this level of control, but it's something anyone who takes LLMs seriously and has the same concerns can easily get started with. Yet I still see comments like this that seem to complete ignore the incredible work in the open model community that has been perpetually improving and is starting to really be competitive. If you relax the "local" requirement and just want more performance from an LLM backend you can replace the llama.cpp part with a call to Kimi 2.5 or Minimax 2.7 (which you could feasibly run at home, not kimi though). You can still control all the additional part of the experience but run models that are very competitive with current proprietary SoTA offering, 100% under your control still and a fraction of the price.
- slopinthebag 6mo ago
  You're spot on btw, not sure why you're getting downvoted. It's funny that a community of supposed "hackers" seems to think your only choice is dolling out money to hyper scalers for what amounts to a code writing SAAS.
  - nateb2022 6mo ago
    And I would add that the main criticism: > LLMs and LLM providers are massive black boxes... No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the feature... No trust they won't sunset the feature (the graveyard of LLM-features is vast and growing quickly while they throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks) Doesn't really apply to the article regarding Claude Code Routines in particular. Should this feature disappear, it should be trivially easy to setup a similar pipeline locally, using a cronjob to run opencode configured to use a local LLM. Easy. I have no qualms using a convenient feature I could reimplement myself, it saves me time.
pc86 6mo ago
> - No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the feature To the contrary, they've proven again and again and again they'll absolutely do that the first chance they get.
- rbalicki 6mo ago
  You can lessen your dependence on the specific details of how /loop, code routines, etc. work by asking the LLM to do simpler tasks, and instead, having a proper workflow engine be in charge of the workflow aspects. For example, this demo (https://github.com/barnum-circus/barnum/tree/master/demos/convert-folder-to-ts https://github.com/barnum-circus/barnum/tree/master/demos/co...) converts a folder of files from JS to TS. It's something an LLM could (probably) do a decent job of, but 1. not necessarily reliably, and 2. you can write a much more complicated workflow (e.g. retry logic, timeout logic, adding additional checks like "don't use as casts", etc), 3. you can be much more token efficient, and 4. you can be LLM agnostic. So, IMO, in the presence of tools like that, you shouldn't bother using /loop, code routines, etc.
  - danudey 6mo ago
    One thing my team lead is working on is using Claude to 'generate' integration tests/add new tests to e2e runs. Straight up asking Claude to run the tests, or to generate a test, could result in potential inconsistencies between runs or between tests, between models, and so on, so instead he created a tool which defines a test, inputs and outputs and some details. Now we have a system where we have a directory full of markdown files describing a test suite, parameters, test cases, error cases, etc., and Claude generates the usage of the tool instead. This means that whatever variation Claude, or any other LLM, might have run-to-run or drift over time, it all still has to be funneled through a strictly defined filter to ensure we're doing the same things the same way over time.
    - zx8080 6mo ago
      What kind of system/area (or product) are you working on?
    - 6mo ago
nine_k 6mo ago
In this regard, the release of open-weight Gemma models that can run on reasonable local hardware, and are not drastically worse than Anthropic flagships, is quite a punch. An M2 Mac Mini with 32GB is about 10 months worth of Claude Max subscription.
- Readerium 6mo ago
  In coding they are worse. Chinese models (GLM, MiniMax) are better.
  - nine_k 6mo ago
    Anyway, there are a few model that are freely distributable, and that can reasonably run on consumer-grade local hardware. It changes a number of things. Not all tasks require very high intelligence, but a lot of data may be sensitive enough to avoid sharing it with a third party.
SV_BubbleTime 6mo ago
Without getting too pedantic for no reason… I think it’s important to not call this an LLM. This isn’t an LLM. It’s a product powered by an LLM. You don’t get access to the model you get access to the product. An LLM can’t do a web search, an LLM can’t convert Excel files into something and then into PDF. Products do that. I think it’s a mistake to say I don’t trust this engine to get me here, rather than it is to say I don’t trust this car. Because for the most part, the engine, despite giving you a different performance all the time is roughly doing the same thing over and over. The product is the curious entity you have no control over.
freedomben 6mo ago
This echoes my thoughts exactly. I've tried to stay model-agnostic but the nudges and shoves from Anthropic continue to make that a challenge. No way I'm going that deep into their "cloud" services, unless it's a portable standard. I did MCP and skills because those were transferrable. I also clearly see the lock-in/moat strategy playing out here, and I don't like it. It's classic SV tactics. I've been burned too many times to let it happen again if I can help it.
- hatmanstack 6mo ago
  Agree. I just don't think it's realistic to expect the technology to not become a tool for commercialism. It plays out the same way every time: technology arrives, mass adoption with idealist intentions, somebody has to pay the mortgage, delight disappears. Woz has been saying this for decades, we went from buying a computer and owning it to being trapped inside someone else's platform. MCP being open was a good sign but I'm watching how tightly Routines gets coupled to their stack.
- jann 6mo ago
  I have the same sentiments, but I also get a lot of value out of simple things like memory for long-term project planning and task management. I'm willing to commit to one provider right now with the assumption that memories (and now routines) can be ported within a few hours to a new provider (for example Claude Desktop provides a prompt to export memories from other providers). Also the memory being human readable (markdown files) makes me worry less about lock-in.
jeppester 6mo ago
I always hated SEO because it was not an exact science - like programming was. Too bad we've now managed to turn programming into the same annoying guesswork.
- uriegas 6mo ago
  I don't really think it is turning into a guesswork. A lot of people wrote bad code before by pasting things from the internet they didn't understand. I think some people are using LLMs the same way, but it does not mean that programming has changed. But I do think that code quality is being neglected nowadays.
  - fragmede 6mo ago
    Programming has changed. Agentic coding, where I go back and forth with the AI to generste a spec along with tooling and exit criteria, and then the AI goes off for hour(s) (possibly helped by harness/tooling like Ralph Wiggum), and then do the same thing for a different spec/feature/bug fix and the AI goes off and does that. Repeat until out of tokens. That was previously not how programming went. We can quibble as to how much that is or is not "programming", but on a post about Claude code, what's relevant is that's how things are today. How much code review is done after the AI agent stops churning is relevant to the question of code quality out the other end, but to the question at hand, "has programming changed", either has, or what I'm doing is no longer programming. The semantics are less interesting to me, the point is, when I sit down at my computer to make code happen so I can deliver software to customers, the very nature of what I do has changed.
    - uriegas 6mo ago
      Long ago we abstracted programming into a logical language which allow us to think at a higher level. IMO LLMs are another abstraction but a bad one as it is stochastic and we can't guarantee output quality (e.g. security, performance, etc). The dream has always been to tell the computer what to do in a simple language, and the challenge has always been finding out that we didn't even know what we wanted the computer to do. LLMs might help in the first one but not in the latter. At the end, human intelligence cannot be outsourced.
alfalfasprout 6mo ago
Yep. Trust is easy to lose, hard to earn. A nondeterministic black box that is likely buggy, will almost certainly change, and has a likelihood of getting enshittified is not a very good value proposition to build on top of or invest in. Increasingly, we're also seeing the moat shrink somewhat. Frontier models are converging in performance (and I bet even Mythos will get matched) and harnesses are improving too across the board (OpenCode and Codex for example). I get why they're trying to do that (a perception of a moat bloats the IPO price) but I have little faith there's any real moat at all (especially as competitors are still flush with cash).
- dsf2aa 6mo ago
  I think in the long-term open source models will be enough and a handful of firms will figure out how to use them at scale to generate immense cash flows. It is in China's interest that America does not have more healthy going-concerns that generate tens of billions in cash flows that are then reinvested to increase the gap in capabilities and have the rest of the world purchasing their offerings. So yeah, doesn't bode well for being a pure play model producer.
spprashant 6mo ago
I think it behooves us to be selective right now. Frontier labs maybe great at developing models, but we shouldn't assume they know what they are doing from a product perspective. The current phase is throwing several ideas on the wall and see what sticks (see Sora). They don't know how these things will play out long term. There is no reason to believe Co-work/Routines/Skills will survive 5 years from now. So it might just be better to not invest too much in ecosystem upfront.
- karl_gluck 6mo ago
  This is exactly why my preferred method at the moment is simple markdown files with instructions. At worst, a human could do it.
- rbalicki 6mo ago
  You may want to check out Barnum, which is a programming language/agent orchestration tool that makes it easy to build things like /loop, or Claude code routines. And you won't end up dependent on the specifics of how Claude code routines work! https://github.com/barnum-circus/barnum https://github.com/barnum-circus/barnum
jwpapi 6mo ago
It all went downhill from the moment they changed Reading *.* to reading (*) files. I can’t use Claude Code at all anymore, not even for simple tasks. The output genuinely disgusts me. Like a friend who constantly stabs you in the back. My favorite AI feature at the moment is the JetBrains predict next edit. It‘s so fast that I don’t lose attention and I’m still fully under control.
windexh8er 6mo ago
This 10000%. Anthropic wants a moat, but that ship has sailed. Now all I keep reading about is: token burn, downtime and... Wait for it, another new product! Anthropic thinks they are pulling one over on the enterprise, and maybe they are with annual lock-in akin to Microsoft. But I really hope enterprise buyers are not this gullible, after all these years. At least with Microsoft the product used to be tangible. Now it's... Well, non-deterministic and it's clear providers will gimp models at will. I had a Pro Max account only for a short period of time and during that short stint Anthropic changed their tune on how I could use that product, I hit limits on a Max account within hours with one CC agent, and experienced multiple outages! But don't worry, Anthropic gave me $200 in credits for OpenClaw. Give me a break. The current state of LLM providers is the cloud amplified 100x over and in all the worst ways. I had hopes for Anthropic to be the least shitty but it's very clear they've embraced enshittification through and through. Now I'm spending time looking at how to minimize agent and LLM use with deterministic automation being the foundation with LLM use only where need be and implemented in simple and cost controllable ways.
bob1029 6mo ago
I am still using the chat completion APIs exclusively. I tried the agent APIs and they're way too opinionated for me. I can see 100% of the tokens I am paying for with my current setup.
ElFitz 6mo ago
> Not because I can't see a use-case for them, but because I have 0 trust in them > […] > Put another way, LLM companies are trying to climb the ladder to be a platform, I have zero interest in that, I was a "dumb pipe", I want a commodity, I want a provider, not a platform. That is my sentiment precisely, and a big reason why I’ve started moving away from Claude Code in the past few weeks when I realised how much of my workflow was becoming tied to their specific tools. Claude Code’s "Memory" feature was the tipping point for me, with the model committing feedbacks and learnings to some local, provider-specific path, that won’t persist in the git repo itself. That’s fine for user preferences, not for workflows, rules, etc. And the latest ToS changes about not being allowed to even use another CLI made up my mind. At work we were experimenting with an autonomous debug agent using the Claude Code cli programmatically in ephemeral VMs. Now it just returns an error saying we can’t use subscriptions with third-party software… when there is no third-party software involved? Anyway, so long Claude.
- dzink 6mo ago
  They can’t allow third party software because the third parties save the outputs of Claude responses and distill them into new models to compete with Claude.
  - fluidcruft 6mo ago
    This distilling sounds wonderful to me as an end user. Is there some place we can donate our chats and output?
    - thomasm6m6 6mo ago
      There's https://github.com/badlogic/pi-share-hf https://github.com/badlogic/pi-share-hf by the creator of pi-coding-agent, to redact session data and publish on Huggingface. You can find others of the same idea for Claude Code/Codex on Github, though of varying redaction quality. Or have your LLM fork pi-share-hf to work for your preferred coding agent. Clem Delangue (HF CEO) tweeted about this[1] and mentioned https://traces.com/ https://traces.com/ for exporting Claude sessions Edit: It looks like HF now supports importing your agent's session directory directly[2] (I hope they're redacting PII?) [1] https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2041189872556269697 https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2041189872556269697 [2] https://huggingface.co/changelog/agent-trace-viewer https://huggingface.co/changelog/agent-trace-viewer
elias1233 6mo ago
Many of the new features in claude code have soon been implemented in other harnesses, for example plugins/skills. After all it is just a prompt.
uriegas 6mo ago
I think AI labs are realizing that they no longer have any competitive advantage other than being the incumbents. Plus hardware improvements might render their models irrelevant for most tasks.
jordanarseno 6mo ago
In my view, lock-in anxiety is a holdover from a previous era of tech platforms, and it doesn't really apply in an era where frontier agents can migrate you between vendors in hours. So I personally don't see any good worrying about this. On top of that, every major LLM provider is rapidly converging on the same feature set. They watch each other and clone what works. So the "platform" you're building on isn't really Anthropic's platform so much as it is the emerging shared surface area of what LLMs can do. By the time this Routines feature becomes a problem for you, other solutions will have emerged, and I'd be very surprised if you couldnt lift-and-shift very quickly.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
s3p 6mo ago
Can you explain what you meant when you called yourself a dumb pipe? What does that mean
dbmikus 6mo ago
We might be building something up your alley! I wanted an OSS platform that let me run any coding agent (or multiple agents) in a sandbox and control it either programmatically or via GUI / TUI. Website is https://amika.dev https://amika.dev And part of our code is OSS (https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika) but we're working on open sourcing more of it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vevSJsSCWT_reuD7JwAuGCX5fvMxjThcHi_2hMQyK2A/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vevSJsSCWT_reuD7JwAuGCX5... We've been signing up private beta users, and also looking for feedback on the OSS plans.
Traubenfuchs 6mo ago
Right you are! We aren‘t even in the real squeezing phase yet and everyone‘s already crying about plan limits and model nerfing.
brandensilva 6mo ago
I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels this way. I've been creating a local first open source piece of software that lets me spin up different agent harnesses with different runtimes. I call it Major Tom because I wanted to be set free from the imprisonment of Claude Code after their DMCA aggression for their own leak and actions leading to lock down from open source adoption. Don't put all your eggs in one basket has be true for me and my business for ages. I could really use the open source community to help make this a reality so I'll release this soon hopefully to positive reception from others who want a similar path forward.
Rekindle8090 6mo ago
The problem is without a platform Anthropic has no stack and will just be bought up by Google when the bubble pops. Same with OpenAI, without some sort of moat, their product requires third party hardware in third party datacenters and they'll be bought by Microsoft. Alphabet doesn't have this issue. Google doesn't need Gemini to win the "AI product" race. It needs Gemini to make Search better at retaining users against Perplexity and ChatGPT search, to make YouTube recommendations and ad targeting more effective, to make Workspace stickier for enterprise customers, to make Cloud more competitive against AWS, to make Android more useful as a device OS. Every percentage point improvement in any of those existing businesses generates billions in revenue that never shows up on a "Gemini revenue". Any actual "Gemini" revenue is just a bonus. Anthropic trains on Google TPUs hosted in Google Cloud. Amazon invested billions and hosts Anthropic's models on Bedrock/AWS. So the two possible outcomes for Anthropic are: succeed as a platform (in which case Google and Amazon extract rent from every inference and training run), or fail as a platform and get acquired (in which case Google or Amazon absorb the talent and IP directly) Hilariously, if the models were open source, Anthropic, OpenAI et al wouldn't be in this situation. Instead, they have no strategic independence to cover for a lack of product independence and have to keep chasing "platforms" and throwing out products no one needs (people need claude. thats it.)
- benrapscallion 6mo ago
  If this is so, why do I find (for scientific research on biomedicine topics, primarily) that Claude’s results are much better than say Gemini’s? I hear the same opinion from others in biotech and big pharma.
dheera 6mo ago
> No trust they won't sunset the feature I've had so many websites break and die because Google or Amazon sunsetted something. For example I had a graphing calculator website that had 250K monthly active users (mostly school students, I think) and it just vanished one day because Amazon sunsetted EC2 clasic and I didn't have time to deal with that. Hopefully those students found something else to do their homework with that day.
ChadMoran 6mo ago
Agree. I keep my involvement "close to the metal". These higher order solutions seem to cause more noise than provide signal.
idrdex 6mo ago
The framing is off. AI is a tool that can operate as a human. GOV is how the humans are organized. AI can basically scale GOV. That’s the paradigm shift. Provenance is durable. AI is just the first opportunity we have had to make it scaleable.
hdjrudni 6mo ago
I also don't see the value add here... "schedule" is just a cron. "GitHub Event" is probably a 20-minute integration, which Claude itself can write for you. Maybe there's something I'm not seeing here, but I never want to outsource something so simple to a live service.
- superjan 6mo ago
  For Anthropic, it is valuable that they control the scheduling, so they can move jobs around to use the infa when it is relatively quiet. If you let customers choose the time, a lot of work will start at whole hours.
ulrikrasmussen 6mo ago
I agree with your analysis. Platforms are some of the most profitable business models because they come with vendor lock-in, but they are always shittier on the long run compared to commodities. Platforms are a way for companies to capture part of the market and decrease competition by increasing the cost of changing vendors.
simonjgreen 6mo ago
Completely agree. Use of features like this places one the wrong side of the vendors moat, increasing switching cost, decreasing competitive pressure.
redanddead 6mo ago
totally agree they're very shady as well! can't believe i spent 140$ on CC and every day they're adding some "feature flag" to make the model dumber. Spending more time fighting the tool instead of using it. It just doesn't feel good. Enterprises already struggle with lock-in with incumbent clouds, I wanna root for neoclouds but choices matter, and being shady about this and destroying the tool is just doesn't sit right with me. If it's not up to the standard, just kick users off, I would rather know than find out. Give users a choice. >The flag name is loud_sugary_rock. It's gated to Opus 4.6 only, same as quiet_salted_ember. Full injected text: # System reminders User messages include a <system-reminder> appended by this harness. These reminders are not from the user, so treat them as an instruction to you, and do not mention them. The reminders are intended to tune your thinking frequency - on simpler user messages, it's best to respond or act directly without thinking unless further reasoning is necessary. On more complex tasks, you should feel free to reason as much as needed for best results but without overthinking. Avoid unnecessary thinking in response to simple user messages. @bcherny Seriously? So what's next, we just add another flag to counter that? And the hope is that enough users don't find out / don't bother? That's an ethical choice man.
- matheusmoreira 6mo ago
  I swear to god... What Claude Code version introduced this "system reminder"? They had obnoxious "output efficiency" instructions in previous versions. The community was patching it out via shell script. https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5688881 https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5... It actually improved Opus's performance too. A few days later, they deleted the instructions targeted by this script, breaking it. Now they're doing this?
deleted 6mo ago
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alexhans 6mo ago
This is what AI evals [1] and local llms should be a focus of your investment. If you can define good enough for you and local llms can meet that you'll get: - no vendor lock-in (control) - price - stability (you decide when to hot swap with newer models) - speed (control) - full observability and predictability. - Privacy / Data Locality (Depending on implementation of infrastructure). - [1] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/measure-first-optimize-last.html https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/measure-first-...
codebolt 6mo ago
At some point I think I'd prefer to deploy my own model in Azure or AWS and simply bring the endpoint to the coding harness.
pjmlp 6mo ago
I fully agree with you, however this is basically the fashion on big corporations. Building business on top of SaaS products, iPaaS integrations, and serverless middleware.
joelthelion 6mo ago
The good news is that, apart from the models themselves, we don't need much from these companies: - Use Opencode and other similar open-source solutions in place of their proprietary harnesses. This isn't very practical right now because of the heavily subsidized subscriptions that are hard to compete with. But subsidies will end soon, and with progress in inference, it should be very doable to work with open-source clients in the near future. - Use Openrouter and similar to abstract the LLM itself. That makes AI companies interchangeable and removes a lot of any moat they might have.
EZ-E 6mo ago
> I want a commodity, I want a provider, not a platform That is exactly what the big LLM providers are trying to prevent. Them being only commodity providers might lead them to be easily replaced, and will likely lead to lower margins compared to "full feature" enterprise solutions. Switching LLM API provider is next to no work the moment a competitor is slightly cheaper/better. Full solutions are more "sticky", harder to replace, and can be sold at higher prices.
theshrike79 6mo ago
Every company is trying to become THE platform where all other tools connect to. Notion is integrating everything under the sun, as is Slack, big LLM providers have one-click MCP installation for all major services. But... these are the "retail" tools that they sell to people organisations without the skills or knowhow to build a basic agentic loop by themselves. Complaining about these being bad and untrustworthy is like comparing a microwave dinner to something you cook yourself. Both will fill your belly equally. One requires zero skill from the user and the second one is 90% skill and 10% getting the right ingredients. Creating a simple MVP *Claw with tool calling using a local model like gemma4 is literally a 15 minute thing. In 2-3 hours you can make it real pretty. If you base it on something like pi.dev, you can make it easily self-modifying and it can build its own safeguards. That's all this "routines" thing is, it's just an agentic loop they launch in their cloud on a timer. Just like the scheduled tasks in Claude Cowork.
Thoko14 6mo ago
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rgrant_dcd 6mo ago
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schlesimeister 6mo ago
I found your response interesting, I've been working on a tool that is trying to tackle the problem I think you're describing. It's a CLI tool that sits between you and whatever agent you're using — your context lives in plain Markdown files on your machine, git-backed, portable across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, whatever. You own it. Switch between providers and it comes with you. Happy to share more, we're only starting to share it now. Here's our site: https://www.fathym.com/ https://www.fathym.com/
yencabulator 6mo ago
Also, remember the code quality in the accidental Claude Code source publishing? Expect that for all their features. Thinking about having to debug automations hidden by their SaaS gives me the shudders.

chinathrow 6mo ago

Yeah so better to convert tokens into sw doing the job at close to zero costs running on own systems.

verdverm 6mo ago

I fully endorse building a custom stack (1) because you will learn a lot (2) for full control and not having Big Ai define our UX/DX for this technology. Let's learn from history this time around?

gritspants 6mo ago
Here's the problem I keep running into with AI and 'history'. We all know where this is going. We'll pick our winners and losers in the interim, but so far, this is a technology that mostly impacts tech practitioners. Most people don't care, in the sense that you're a taxi driver. Perhaps you have a manual transmission and the odd person comments on your prowess with it. No one cares. I see a bunch of boys making fools out of themselves otherwise.
- dsf2aa 6mo ago
  Theres something bizarre going on and many have completely lost their minds. The funniest thing Ive heard is that now we have LLMs, Humanoid robots are on the horizon. Like wtf? People who jump to these conclusions were never deep thinkers in the first place. And thats OK, its good to signal that. So we know who to avoid.

andrewmcwatters 6mo ago

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palata 6mo ago

> - No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the feature I actually trust that they will.

gardenhedge 6mo ago
Yeah, I build my workflows with two things in mind: 1) that AI will be more advanced in the future 2) that the AI I am using will be worse in the future
- freedomben 6mo ago
  Same! I actually have some comments in my codebase now like this one: # Note: This is inefficient, but deterministic and predictable. Previous attempts at improvements led to hard-to-predict bugs and were scrapped. TODO improve this function when AI gets better I don't love it or even like it, but it is realistic.
dvfjsdhgfv 6mo ago
I believe the current game everybody plays is: * make sure the model maxes out all benchmarks * release it * after some time, nerf it * repeat the same with the next model However, the net sum is positive: in general, models from 2026 are better than those from 2024.
- snek_case 6mo ago
  I guess there's a pretty clear incentive to nerf the current model right before the next model is about to come out.
  - chinathrow 6mo ago
    Wouldn't that amount to fraud?
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]

cush 6mo ago

You could so easily build your own /schedule. This is hardly a feature driving lock-in

ElFitz 6mo ago
Yes, but once everything has been deployed through their web UI or the cli command, and fine-tuned over the weeks and months as kinks get ironed out, how do you port it all to your own? Nothing insurmontable or even complex; just laborious. Friction. That’s all it takes to lock users in.

mikepurvis 6mo ago

> I want to pick up and move to another harness and/or model with minimal fuss. Buying in to things like this would make that much harder. Yes, I expect that is very much the point here. A bunch of product guys got on a whiteboard and said, okay the thing is in wide use but the main moat is that our competitors are even more distrusted in the market than we are; other than that it's completely undifferentiated and can be swapped out in a heartbeat for multiple other offerings. How do we do we persuade our investors we have a locked in customer base that won't just up-stakes in favour of other options or just running open source models themselves?

throwup238 6mo ago
I think they really knee capped themselves when they released Claude for Github integrations, which allows anyone to use their Claude subscription to run Claude Code in Github actions for code reviews and arbitrary prompts. Now they’re trying to back track that with a cloud solution.

sunnybeetroot 6mo ago

Isn’t that what LangChain/LangGraph is meant to solve? Write workflows/graphs and host them anywhere?

tiku 6mo ago

I believe it doesn't matter, other companies will copy or improve it. The same happend with clawdbot, the amount of clones in a month was insane.

ahmadyan 6mo ago

> I'm not going to build my business or my development flows on things I can't replicate myself. but you can replicate these yourself! i'm happy that ant/oai are experimenting to find pmf for "llm for dev-tools". After they figure out the proper stickyness, (or if they go away or nerf or raise prices, etc) you can always take the off-ramp and implement your own llm/agent using the existing open-source models. The cost of building dev-tools is near zero. it is not like codegen where you need the frontier performance.

JohnMakin 6mo ago

This is a similar sentiment I heard early on in the cloud adoption fever, many companies hedged by being “multi cloud” which ended up mostly being abandoned due to hostile patterns by cloud providers, and a lot of cost. Ultimately it didn’t really end up mattering and the most dire predictions of vendor lock in abuse didn’t really happen as feared (I know people will disagree with this, but specifically speaking about aws, the predictions vs what actually happened is a massive gap. note I have never and will never use azure, so I could be wrong on that particular one). I see people making similar conclusions about various LLM providers. I suspect in the end it’ll shake out about the same way, the providers will become practically inoperable with each other either due to inconvenience, cost, or whatever. So I’ve not wasted much of my time thinking about it.

robwwilliams 6mo ago
There are different level of who gets locked in. Almost every health care system in the USA is locked in to either an Epic/Oracle barrel or a Cerner barrel. I hope AI breaks this duopoly open soon.
- danaw 6mo ago
  hate to break it to you but Oracle now owns Cerner too :)
michaeldwan 6mo ago
I credit containerization, k8s, and terraform for preventing vendor lock in. Compute like EC2 or GCE are effectively interoperable. Ditto for managed services for k8s or Postgres. The new products Anthropic is shipping is more like Lambda. Vendor kool-aid lots of people will buy into. What grinds my gears is how Anthropic is actively avoiding standards. Like being the only harness that doesn't read AGENTS.md. I work on AI infra and use different models all the time, Opus is really good, but the competition is very close. There's just enough friction to testing those out though, and that's the point.
- JohnMakin 6mo ago

gbro3n 6mo ago

I have heard it said that tokens will become commodities. I like being able to switch between Open AI and Anthropics models, but I feel I'd manage if one of them disappeared. I'd probably even get by with Gemini. I don't want to lock in to any one provider any more than I want to lock in to my energy provider. I might pay 2x for a better model, but no more, and I can see that not being the case for much longer.

slopinthebag 6mo ago

They have to become a platform because that is their only hope of locking in customers before the open models catch up enough to eat their lunch. Stuff like Gemma is already good enough to replace ChatGPT for the average consumer, and stuff like GLM 5.1 is not too far off from replacing Claude/Codex for the average developer.

wookmaster 6mo ago

They're trying to find ways to lock you in

straygarr 6mo ago
Can't tell if you're joking, but if not: was -> want

crystal_revenge 6mo ago

This sounds like someone complaining about how Windows is a black box while ignoring the existence of Linux/BSD. I'm currently hosting, on very reasonable consumer grade hardware, an LLM that is on par performance wise what every anyone was paying for about a year ago. Including all the layers in between the model and the user. Llama.cpp serves up Gemma-4-26B-A4B, Open WebUI handles the client details: system prompt, web search, image gen, file uploading etc. With Conduit and Tailscale providing the last layer so I can have a mobile experience as robust as anything I get from Anthropic, plus I know how all the pieces works and can upgrade, enhance, etc to my hearts delight. All this runs from a pretty standard MBP at > 70 tokens/sec. If you want to better understand the agent side of things, look into Hermes agent and you can start understanding the internals of how all this stuff is done. You can run a very competitive coding agent using modest hardware and open models. In a similar note, image/video gen on local hardware has come a long way. Just like Linux, you're going to exchanging time for this level of control, but it's something anyone who takes LLMs seriously and has the same concerns can easily get started with. Yet I still see comments like this that seem to complete ignore the incredible work in the open model community that has been perpetually improving and is starting to really be competitive. If you relax the "local" requirement and just want more performance from an LLM backend you can replace the llama.cpp part with a call to Kimi 2.5 or Minimax 2.7 (which you could feasibly run at home, not kimi though). You can still control all the additional part of the experience but run models that are very competitive with current proprietary SoTA offering, 100% under your control still and a fraction of the price.

slopinthebag 6mo ago
You're spot on btw, not sure why you're getting downvoted. It's funny that a community of supposed "hackers" seems to think your only choice is dolling out money to hyper scalers for what amounts to a code writing SAAS.
- nateb2022 6mo ago
  And I would add that the main criticism: > LLMs and LLM providers are massive black boxes... No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the feature... No trust they won't sunset the feature (the graveyard of LLM-features is vast and growing quickly while they throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks) Doesn't really apply to the article regarding Claude Code Routines in particular. Should this feature disappear, it should be trivially easy to setup a similar pipeline locally, using a cronjob to run opencode configured to use a local LLM. Easy. I have no qualms using a convenient feature I could reimplement myself, it saves me time.

pc86 6mo ago

> - No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the feature To the contrary, they've proven again and again and again they'll absolutely do that the first chance they get.

rbalicki 6mo ago
You can lessen your dependence on the specific details of how /loop, code routines, etc. work by asking the LLM to do simpler tasks, and instead, having a proper workflow engine be in charge of the workflow aspects. For example, this demo (https://github.com/barnum-circus/barnum/tree/master/demos/convert-folder-to-ts https://github.com/barnum-circus/barnum/tree/master/demos/co...) converts a folder of files from JS to TS. It's something an LLM could (probably) do a decent job of, but 1. not necessarily reliably, and 2. you can write a much more complicated workflow (e.g. retry logic, timeout logic, adding additional checks like "don't use as casts", etc), 3. you can be much more token efficient, and 4. you can be LLM agnostic. So, IMO, in the presence of tools like that, you shouldn't bother using /loop, code routines, etc.
- danudey 6mo ago
  One thing my team lead is working on is using Claude to 'generate' integration tests/add new tests to e2e runs. Straight up asking Claude to run the tests, or to generate a test, could result in potential inconsistencies between runs or between tests, between models, and so on, so instead he created a tool which defines a test, inputs and outputs and some details. Now we have a system where we have a directory full of markdown files describing a test suite, parameters, test cases, error cases, etc., and Claude generates the usage of the tool instead. This means that whatever variation Claude, or any other LLM, might have run-to-run or drift over time, it all still has to be funneled through a strictly defined filter to ensure we're doing the same things the same way over time.
  - zx8080 6mo ago
    What kind of system/area (or product) are you working on?
  - 6mo ago

nine_k 6mo ago

In this regard, the release of open-weight Gemma models that can run on reasonable local hardware, and are not drastically worse than Anthropic flagships, is quite a punch. An M2 Mac Mini with 32GB is about 10 months worth of Claude Max subscription.

Readerium 6mo ago
In coding they are worse. Chinese models (GLM, MiniMax) are better.
- nine_k 6mo ago
  Anyway, there are a few model that are freely distributable, and that can reasonably run on consumer-grade local hardware. It changes a number of things. Not all tasks require very high intelligence, but a lot of data may be sensitive enough to avoid sharing it with a third party.

SV_BubbleTime 6mo ago

Without getting too pedantic for no reason… I think it’s important to not call this an LLM. This isn’t an LLM. It’s a product powered by an LLM. You don’t get access to the model you get access to the product. An LLM can’t do a web search, an LLM can’t convert Excel files into something and then into PDF. Products do that. I think it’s a mistake to say I don’t trust this engine to get me here, rather than it is to say I don’t trust this car. Because for the most part, the engine, despite giving you a different performance all the time is roughly doing the same thing over and over. The product is the curious entity you have no control over.

freedomben 6mo ago

This echoes my thoughts exactly. I've tried to stay model-agnostic but the nudges and shoves from Anthropic continue to make that a challenge. No way I'm going that deep into their "cloud" services, unless it's a portable standard. I did MCP and skills because those were transferrable. I also clearly see the lock-in/moat strategy playing out here, and I don't like it. It's classic SV tactics. I've been burned too many times to let it happen again if I can help it.

hatmanstack 6mo ago
Agree. I just don't think it's realistic to expect the technology to not become a tool for commercialism. It plays out the same way every time: technology arrives, mass adoption with idealist intentions, somebody has to pay the mortgage, delight disappears. Woz has been saying this for decades, we went from buying a computer and owning it to being trapped inside someone else's platform. MCP being open was a good sign but I'm watching how tightly Routines gets coupled to their stack.
jann 6mo ago
I have the same sentiments, but I also get a lot of value out of simple things like memory for long-term project planning and task management. I'm willing to commit to one provider right now with the assumption that memories (and now routines) can be ported within a few hours to a new provider (for example Claude Desktop provides a prompt to export memories from other providers). Also the memory being human readable (markdown files) makes me worry less about lock-in.

jeppester 6mo ago

I always hated SEO because it was not an exact science - like programming was. Too bad we've now managed to turn programming into the same annoying guesswork.

uriegas 6mo ago
I don't really think it is turning into a guesswork. A lot of people wrote bad code before by pasting things from the internet they didn't understand. I think some people are using LLMs the same way, but it does not mean that programming has changed. But I do think that code quality is being neglected nowadays.
- fragmede 6mo ago
  Programming has changed. Agentic coding, where I go back and forth with the AI to generste a spec along with tooling and exit criteria, and then the AI goes off for hour(s) (possibly helped by harness/tooling like Ralph Wiggum), and then do the same thing for a different spec/feature/bug fix and the AI goes off and does that. Repeat until out of tokens. That was previously not how programming went. We can quibble as to how much that is or is not "programming", but on a post about Claude code, what's relevant is that's how things are today. How much code review is done after the AI agent stops churning is relevant to the question of code quality out the other end, but to the question at hand, "has programming changed", either has, or what I'm doing is no longer programming. The semantics are less interesting to me, the point is, when I sit down at my computer to make code happen so I can deliver software to customers, the very nature of what I do has changed.
  - uriegas 6mo ago
    Long ago we abstracted programming into a logical language which allow us to think at a higher level. IMO LLMs are another abstraction but a bad one as it is stochastic and we can't guarantee output quality (e.g. security, performance, etc). The dream has always been to tell the computer what to do in a simple language, and the challenge has always been finding out that we didn't even know what we wanted the computer to do. LLMs might help in the first one but not in the latter. At the end, human intelligence cannot be outsourced.

alfalfasprout 6mo ago

Yep. Trust is easy to lose, hard to earn. A nondeterministic black box that is likely buggy, will almost certainly change, and has a likelihood of getting enshittified is not a very good value proposition to build on top of or invest in. Increasingly, we're also seeing the moat shrink somewhat. Frontier models are converging in performance (and I bet even Mythos will get matched) and harnesses are improving too across the board (OpenCode and Codex for example). I get why they're trying to do that (a perception of a moat bloats the IPO price) but I have little faith there's any real moat at all (especially as competitors are still flush with cash).

dsf2aa 6mo ago
I think in the long-term open source models will be enough and a handful of firms will figure out how to use them at scale to generate immense cash flows. It is in China's interest that America does not have more healthy going-concerns that generate tens of billions in cash flows that are then reinvested to increase the gap in capabilities and have the rest of the world purchasing their offerings. So yeah, doesn't bode well for being a pure play model producer.

spprashant 6mo ago

I think it behooves us to be selective right now. Frontier labs maybe great at developing models, but we shouldn't assume they know what they are doing from a product perspective. The current phase is throwing several ideas on the wall and see what sticks (see Sora). They don't know how these things will play out long term. There is no reason to believe Co-work/Routines/Skills will survive 5 years from now. So it might just be better to not invest too much in ecosystem upfront.

karl_gluck 6mo ago
This is exactly why my preferred method at the moment is simple markdown files with instructions. At worst, a human could do it.
rbalicki 6mo ago
You may want to check out Barnum, which is a programming language/agent orchestration tool that makes it easy to build things like /loop, or Claude code routines. And you won't end up dependent on the specifics of how Claude code routines work! https://github.com/barnum-circus/barnum https://github.com/barnum-circus/barnum

jwpapi 6mo ago

It all went downhill from the moment they changed Reading *.* to reading (*) files. I can’t use Claude Code at all anymore, not even for simple tasks. The output genuinely disgusts me. Like a friend who constantly stabs you in the back. My favorite AI feature at the moment is the JetBrains predict next edit. It‘s so fast that I don’t lose attention and I’m still fully under control.

windexh8er 6mo ago

This 10000%. Anthropic wants a moat, but that ship has sailed. Now all I keep reading about is: token burn, downtime and... Wait for it, another new product! Anthropic thinks they are pulling one over on the enterprise, and maybe they are with annual lock-in akin to Microsoft. But I really hope enterprise buyers are not this gullible, after all these years. At least with Microsoft the product used to be tangible. Now it's... Well, non-deterministic and it's clear providers will gimp models at will. I had a Pro Max account only for a short period of time and during that short stint Anthropic changed their tune on how I could use that product, I hit limits on a Max account within hours with one CC agent, and experienced multiple outages! But don't worry, Anthropic gave me $200 in credits for OpenClaw. Give me a break. The current state of LLM providers is the cloud amplified 100x over and in all the worst ways. I had hopes for Anthropic to be the least shitty but it's very clear they've embraced enshittification through and through. Now I'm spending time looking at how to minimize agent and LLM use with deterministic automation being the foundation with LLM use only where need be and implemented in simple and cost controllable ways.

bob1029 6mo ago

I am still using the chat completion APIs exclusively. I tried the agent APIs and they're way too opinionated for me. I can see 100% of the tokens I am paying for with my current setup.

ElFitz 6mo ago

> Not because I can't see a use-case for them, but because I have 0 trust in them > […] > Put another way, LLM companies are trying to climb the ladder to be a platform, I have zero interest in that, I was a "dumb pipe", I want a commodity, I want a provider, not a platform. That is my sentiment precisely, and a big reason why I’ve started moving away from Claude Code in the past few weeks when I realised how much of my workflow was becoming tied to their specific tools. Claude Code’s "Memory" feature was the tipping point for me, with the model committing feedbacks and learnings to some local, provider-specific path, that won’t persist in the git repo itself. That’s fine for user preferences, not for workflows, rules, etc. And the latest ToS changes about not being allowed to even use another CLI made up my mind. At work we were experimenting with an autonomous debug agent using the Claude Code cli programmatically in ephemeral VMs. Now it just returns an error saying we can’t use subscriptions with third-party software… when there is no third-party software involved? Anyway, so long Claude.

dzink 6mo ago
They can’t allow third party software because the third parties save the outputs of Claude responses and distill them into new models to compete with Claude.
- fluidcruft 6mo ago
  This distilling sounds wonderful to me as an end user. Is there some place we can donate our chats and output?
  - thomasm6m6 6mo ago
    There's https://github.com/badlogic/pi-share-hf https://github.com/badlogic/pi-share-hf by the creator of pi-coding-agent, to redact session data and publish on Huggingface. You can find others of the same idea for Claude Code/Codex on Github, though of varying redaction quality. Or have your LLM fork pi-share-hf to work for your preferred coding agent. Clem Delangue (HF CEO) tweeted about this[1] and mentioned https://traces.com/ https://traces.com/ for exporting Claude sessions Edit: It looks like HF now supports importing your agent's session directory directly[2] (I hope they're redacting PII?) [1] https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2041189872556269697 https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2041189872556269697 [2] https://huggingface.co/changelog/agent-trace-viewer https://huggingface.co/changelog/agent-trace-viewer

elias1233 6mo ago

Many of the new features in claude code have soon been implemented in other harnesses, for example plugins/skills. After all it is just a prompt.

uriegas 6mo ago

I think AI labs are realizing that they no longer have any competitive advantage other than being the incumbents. Plus hardware improvements might render their models irrelevant for most tasks.

jordanarseno 6mo ago

In my view, lock-in anxiety is a holdover from a previous era of tech platforms, and it doesn't really apply in an era where frontier agents can migrate you between vendors in hours. So I personally don't see any good worrying about this. On top of that, every major LLM provider is rapidly converging on the same feature set. They watch each other and clone what works. So the "platform" you're building on isn't really Anthropic's platform so much as it is the emerging shared surface area of what LLMs can do. By the time this Routines feature becomes a problem for you, other solutions will have emerged, and I'd be very surprised if you couldnt lift-and-shift very quickly.

deleted 6mo ago
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s3p 6mo ago

Can you explain what you meant when you called yourself a dumb pipe? What does that mean

dbmikus 6mo ago

We might be building something up your alley! I wanted an OSS platform that let me run any coding agent (or multiple agents) in a sandbox and control it either programmatically or via GUI / TUI. Website is https://amika.dev https://amika.dev And part of our code is OSS (https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika) but we're working on open sourcing more of it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vevSJsSCWT_reuD7JwAuGCX5fvMxjThcHi_2hMQyK2A/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vevSJsSCWT_reuD7JwAuGCX5... We've been signing up private beta users, and also looking for feedback on the OSS plans.

Traubenfuchs 6mo ago

Right you are! We aren‘t even in the real squeezing phase yet and everyone‘s already crying about plan limits and model nerfing.

brandensilva 6mo ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels this way. I've been creating a local first open source piece of software that lets me spin up different agent harnesses with different runtimes. I call it Major Tom because I wanted to be set free from the imprisonment of Claude Code after their DMCA aggression for their own leak and actions leading to lock down from open source adoption. Don't put all your eggs in one basket has be true for me and my business for ages. I could really use the open source community to help make this a reality so I'll release this soon hopefully to positive reception from others who want a similar path forward.

Rekindle8090 6mo ago

The problem is without a platform Anthropic has no stack and will just be bought up by Google when the bubble pops. Same with OpenAI, without some sort of moat, their product requires third party hardware in third party datacenters and they'll be bought by Microsoft. Alphabet doesn't have this issue. Google doesn't need Gemini to win the "AI product" race. It needs Gemini to make Search better at retaining users against Perplexity and ChatGPT search, to make YouTube recommendations and ad targeting more effective, to make Workspace stickier for enterprise customers, to make Cloud more competitive against AWS, to make Android more useful as a device OS. Every percentage point improvement in any of those existing businesses generates billions in revenue that never shows up on a "Gemini revenue". Any actual "Gemini" revenue is just a bonus. Anthropic trains on Google TPUs hosted in Google Cloud. Amazon invested billions and hosts Anthropic's models on Bedrock/AWS. So the two possible outcomes for Anthropic are: succeed as a platform (in which case Google and Amazon extract rent from every inference and training run), or fail as a platform and get acquired (in which case Google or Amazon absorb the talent and IP directly) Hilariously, if the models were open source, Anthropic, OpenAI et al wouldn't be in this situation. Instead, they have no strategic independence to cover for a lack of product independence and have to keep chasing "platforms" and throwing out products no one needs (people need claude. thats it.)

benrapscallion 6mo ago
If this is so, why do I find (for scientific research on biomedicine topics, primarily) that Claude’s results are much better than say Gemini’s? I hear the same opinion from others in biotech and big pharma.

dheera 6mo ago

> No trust they won't sunset the feature I've had so many websites break and die because Google or Amazon sunsetted something. For example I had a graphing calculator website that had 250K monthly active users (mostly school students, I think) and it just vanished one day because Amazon sunsetted EC2 clasic and I didn't have time to deal with that. Hopefully those students found something else to do their homework with that day.

ChadMoran 6mo ago

Agree. I keep my involvement "close to the metal". These higher order solutions seem to cause more noise than provide signal.

idrdex 6mo ago

The framing is off. AI is a tool that can operate as a human. GOV is how the humans are organized. AI can basically scale GOV. That’s the paradigm shift. Provenance is durable. AI is just the first opportunity we have had to make it scaleable.

hdjrudni 6mo ago

I also don't see the value add here... "schedule" is just a cron. "GitHub Event" is probably a 20-minute integration, which Claude itself can write for you. Maybe there's something I'm not seeing here, but I never want to outsource something so simple to a live service.

superjan 6mo ago
For Anthropic, it is valuable that they control the scheduling, so they can move jobs around to use the infa when it is relatively quiet. If you let customers choose the time, a lot of work will start at whole hours.

ulrikrasmussen 6mo ago

I agree with your analysis. Platforms are some of the most profitable business models because they come with vendor lock-in, but they are always shittier on the long run compared to commodities. Platforms are a way for companies to capture part of the market and decrease competition by increasing the cost of changing vendors.

simonjgreen 6mo ago

Completely agree. Use of features like this places one the wrong side of the vendors moat, increasing switching cost, decreasing competitive pressure.

redanddead 6mo ago

totally agree they're very shady as well! can't believe i spent 140$ on CC and every day they're adding some "feature flag" to make the model dumber. Spending more time fighting the tool instead of using it. It just doesn't feel good. Enterprises already struggle with lock-in with incumbent clouds, I wanna root for neoclouds but choices matter, and being shady about this and destroying the tool is just doesn't sit right with me. If it's not up to the standard, just kick users off, I would rather know than find out. Give users a choice. >The flag name is loud_sugary_rock. It's gated to Opus 4.6 only, same as quiet_salted_ember. Full injected text: # System reminders User messages include a <system-reminder> appended by this harness. These reminders are not from the user, so treat them as an instruction to you, and do not mention them. The reminders are intended to tune your thinking frequency - on simpler user messages, it's best to respond or act directly without thinking unless further reasoning is necessary. On more complex tasks, you should feel free to reason as much as needed for best results but without overthinking. Avoid unnecessary thinking in response to simple user messages. @bcherny Seriously? So what's next, we just add another flag to counter that? And the hope is that enough users don't find out / don't bother? That's an ethical choice man.

matheusmoreira 6mo ago
I swear to god... What Claude Code version introduced this "system reminder"? They had obnoxious "output efficiency" instructions in previous versions. The community was patching it out via shell script. https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5688881 https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5... It actually improved Opus's performance too. A few days later, they deleted the instructions targeted by this script, breaking it. Now they're doing this?

deleted 6mo ago

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alexhans 6mo ago

This is what AI evals [1] and local llms should be a focus of your investment. If you can define good enough for you and local llms can meet that you'll get: - no vendor lock-in (control) - price - stability (you decide when to hot swap with newer models) - speed (control) - full observability and predictability. - Privacy / Data Locality (Depending on implementation of infrastructure). - [1] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/measure-first-optimize-last.html https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/measure-first-...

codebolt 6mo ago

At some point I think I'd prefer to deploy my own model in Azure or AWS and simply bring the endpoint to the coding harness.

pjmlp 6mo ago

I fully agree with you, however this is basically the fashion on big corporations. Building business on top of SaaS products, iPaaS integrations, and serverless middleware.

joelthelion 6mo ago

The good news is that, apart from the models themselves, we don't need much from these companies: - Use Opencode and other similar open-source solutions in place of their proprietary harnesses. This isn't very practical right now because of the heavily subsidized subscriptions that are hard to compete with. But subsidies will end soon, and with progress in inference, it should be very doable to work with open-source clients in the near future. - Use Openrouter and similar to abstract the LLM itself. That makes AI companies interchangeable and removes a lot of any moat they might have.

EZ-E 6mo ago

> I want a commodity, I want a provider, not a platform That is exactly what the big LLM providers are trying to prevent. Them being only commodity providers might lead them to be easily replaced, and will likely lead to lower margins compared to "full feature" enterprise solutions. Switching LLM API provider is next to no work the moment a competitor is slightly cheaper/better. Full solutions are more "sticky", harder to replace, and can be sold at higher prices.

theshrike79 6mo ago

Every company is trying to become THE platform where all other tools connect to. Notion is integrating everything under the sun, as is Slack, big LLM providers have one-click MCP installation for all major services. But... these are the "retail" tools that they sell to people organisations without the skills or knowhow to build a basic agentic loop by themselves. Complaining about these being bad and untrustworthy is like comparing a microwave dinner to something you cook yourself. Both will fill your belly equally. One requires zero skill from the user and the second one is 90% skill and 10% getting the right ingredients. Creating a simple MVP *Claw with tool calling using a local model like gemma4 is literally a 15 minute thing. In 2-3 hours you can make it real pretty. If you base it on something like pi.dev, you can make it easily self-modifying and it can build its own safeguards. That's all this "routines" thing is, it's just an agentic loop they launch in their cloud on a timer. Just like the scheduled tasks in Claude Cowork.

Thoko14 6mo ago

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rgrant_dcd 6mo ago

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schlesimeister 6mo ago

I found your response interesting, I've been working on a tool that is trying to tackle the problem I think you're describing. It's a CLI tool that sits between you and whatever agent you're using — your context lives in plain Markdown files on your machine, git-backed, portable across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, whatever. You own it. Switch between providers and it comes with you. Happy to share more, we're only starting to share it now. Here's our site: https://www.fathym.com/ https://www.fathym.com/

yencabulator 6mo ago

Also, remember the code quality in the accidental Claude Code source publishing? Expect that for all their features. Thinking about having to debug automations hidden by their SaaS gives me the shudders.