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I don't think I've ever been on such a rollercoaster with a company's reputation in the developer space. I started in January on the $20 plan, essentially my fi

I don't think I've ever been on such a rollercoaster with a company's reputation in the developer space. I started in January on the $20 plan, essentially my first agentic AI programming. I quickly started hitting limits developing several apps at the same time. I went up to the $200 plan after seeing the value. After seeing my own issues with 4.6 and the mega-post on Github about declining metrics in a decent dataset of claude chats by Stella Laurenzo at AMD (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796), I downgraded to the $100 plan. Hallucinations. Laziness. Lack of thinking. The responses on those mega-threads from Anthropic rubbed me the wrong way in a "you're holding it wrong" kinda way. In the past week, I downgraded back to the $20 plan because the Codex $20 plan on 5.4 was working so well for me. Then throw in other oddball events like the source code leak, and the super positive Anthropic events like their interactions with the current administration. It's a wild ride. I can't understand removing Claude Code from $20. I'm interested to see whether this is confirmed or not. I'm a career engineer and I went from being one of their most outspoken proponents (at least within my circle) and now.... I'm not.

jmcodes 6mo ago
Same loved them, told my team about them, got them to switch off of cursor, now I'm telling them to swap to Codex. Anthropic really pissed me off with their harness crap. They're well within their rights but their communication over it was enough to get me to swap. I don't need extra hurdles when there's a perfectly valid alternative right there. They don't have the advantage they think they do.
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  I think we are inevitably heading to using the cheap Chinese models like Kimi, GLM, and Minimax for the bulk of engineering tasks. Within 3-6 months they will be at Opus 4.6 level.
  - robertkarl 6mo ago
    This was literally my task today, to try out Qwen 9B locally on my, albeit a bit memory-constrained at 18GB, macbook with pi or opencode. Before reading this update.
    - someuser54541 6mo ago
      Please report back, would be very interested in your findings.
      - sshine 6mo ago
        I ran OpenCode + GLM-5.1 for three weeks during my vacation. It’s okay. It thinks a lot more to get to a similar result as Claude. So it’s slower. It’s congested during peak hours. It has quirks as the context gets close to full. But if you’re stuck with no better model, it’s better than local models and no models. I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed. I’m playing around with TUI widgets trying to recreate and improve that experience
        taikon 6mo ago
        To be clear, was OpenCode a better in your opinion compared to ClaudeCode?
        sshine 5mo ago
        Better UI, worse model (GLM), probably slightly worse agentic runtime. In spite of how glitchy Claude feels, it makes decisions fast.
        TacticalCoder 6mo ago
        > I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed. Claude's TUI is not a TUI. It's the most WTF thing ever: the TUI is actually a GUI. A headless browser shipped the TUI that, in real-time, renders the entire screen, scrolls to the bottom, and converts that to text mode. There are several serious issues and I'll mention two that do utterly piss me off... 1. Insane "jumping" around where the text "scrolls back" then scrolls back down to your prompt: at this point, seen the crazy hack that TUI is, if you tell me the text jumping around in the TUI is because they're simulating mouse clicks on the scrollbar I would't be surprised. If I'm not mistaken we've seen people "fixing" this by patching other programs (tmux ?). 2. What you see in the TUI is not the output of the model. That is, to me, the most insane of it all. They're literally changing characters between their headlessly rendered GUI and the TUI. > Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed. "grown" or "hacked" are way too nice words for the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is. Codex is described as a: "Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal". It's 95%+ Rust code. I wonder if the "lightweight" is a stab at the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is.
- robertkarl 6mo ago
  One thing I enjoy about Cursor and Codex mac apps is the embedded preview window. I know it's not as hardcore as the terminal/tmux but it's hella convenient. But Cursor bugs me with the opacity around what model I'm using. It seems deliberately to be routing requests based on its perceived complexity. What draws you to codex vs cursor?
elschneider 6mo ago
I had a similar ride, but disagree with your conclusion. Opus 4.7 is so incredibly powerful from my experience, that nothing else really matters and I think at Anthropic they know it. People will pay a lot for access to this model.
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  >Opus 4.7 is so incredibly powerful from my experience, I'm not challenging your opinion, but this is an outlier in the general current public opinion about it.
  - elschneider 6mo ago
    Yea, I've seen a lot of whining online, because its more expensive, but from the interactions I've had I'd say, that it's well worth it. To me it feels like another step change, similar to when 4.5 was introduced. Definitely a different beast. EDIT: it is also surprising to me that everyone seems to believe the people at Anthropic are simply incompetent and recklessly risking their good reputation, while very few consider the possible good reasons they might have for taking such drastic measures. And I don't think it's because of financial pressures in their case
    - user34283 6mo ago
      I can’t say I’ve used it extensively enough to draw a conclusion, but it did seem similar to GPT 5.4 in Codex. When I threw it at a difficult issue in an iOS app, it like GPT came up with wrongly guessed explanations. It only found the issue after I had it instrument the app and add extensive logs. Usually GPT 5.4 is the same. Only that with GPT 5.4 it’s at least included in my subscription, while sending 3-4 messages to Opus 4.7 for this blew through my $20 plan limits and consumed $10 of extra usage on top. At that point I can’t help but bring up how much more expensive it is.
      - weikju 6mo ago
        > Only that with GPT 5.4 it’s at least included in my subscription, while sending 3-4 messages to Opus 4.7 for this blew through my $20 plan limits and consumed $10 of extra usage on top. At that point I can’t help but bring up how much more expensive it is. Rest assured OpenAI won’t want to leave that kind of money on the table…
strangattractor 6mo ago
[flagged]
- EstanislaoStan 6mo ago
  Claude often doesn't know the truth about Claude Code etc. lol
  - strangattractor 6mo ago
    I got down voted by 4 people just for pointing that out. lol
- civvv 6mo ago
  Do you understand how LLM's work and that they are always behind in their knowledge? Unless Claude does a network call to check its own website, it will give you outdated information. Its a prediction model, its not magic.
- ricardobeat 6mo ago
  The $20/month, which is now $17, should give you a hint? Models have a knowledge cut-off and will not reflect up to date information unless you trigger a web search.
  - operatingthetan 6mo ago
    That's just a billing trick. >$17 Per month with annual subscription discount ($200 billed up front). $20 if billed monthly.
- hannahstrawbrry 6mo ago
  FWIW their "Fin" agent on their web page tells me: "Claude Code is not included in the standard Pro plan. It's only available with premium seats on Team and Enterprise plans. However, Pro plans do include improved coding capabilities through our GitHub integration, which lets you connect code repositories directly to Claude. You also get access to code execution and file creation features in the Claude apps. For the full Claude Code terminal experience, you'd need to upgrade to a Team or Enterprise plan with premium seats"
eleventen 6mo ago
Matches my experience very well. All the goodwill earned from taking a stand against the DoD seemingly forgotten in a month. Coincidentally, I canceled my pro subscription and got set up with OpenCode and OpenRouter last night.
- bsder 6mo ago
  Got any good pointers to documentation for making the transition? I'd like to pull the trigger for OpenCode and OpenRouter as well.
  - eleventen 6mo ago
    I just installed it and continued about my business. I don't have a carefully tuned claude code setup. It has some skills, some CLAUDE.md files, and not much else. I did also migrate an app from Claude SDK to Pydantic AI to get off claude API pricing. https://pydantic.dev/docs/ai/overview/ https://pydantic.dev/docs/ai/overview/
alwillis 6mo ago
> I can't understand removing Claude Code from $20 Not according to their webpage: "Claude Code is included in your Pro plan. Perfect for short coding sprints in small codebases with access to both Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.7." [1] [1]: https://claude.com/product/claude-code https://claude.com/product/claude-code
- eleventen 6mo ago
  There are clear contradictions across their marketing site. As others have pointed out, it's being removed from some help articles and the pricing chart now shows it revoked. Confusing signals, but they seem to be changing all pages in this direction and haven't updated that one yet. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47854478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47854478
  - htrp 6mo ago
    what happened to agentic superintelligence based development?
    - jmalicki 6mo ago
      This is superintelligence. The mixed signals are tested to increase their revenues. Superintelligent AIs wouldn't be honest.
zormino 6mo ago
I think removing Claude Code from the $20 tier is a terrible idea, I never would've gone from nothing right into the $100/200 tier. The $20 plan let me get my feet wet and see how good it could be, and in less than a week I was on the $100 plan. I think they need to at least have a 1 month introductory rate for the max plan at $20, or devs that decide to try out agentic coding just won't go to Anthropic. That leads to downstream impacts, like when a company is deciding which AI coding tools to provide and the feedback management hears everyone is already used to (e.x.) Codex, then Anthropic starts losing the enterprise side of things.
- siva7 6mo ago
  They're not losing anything. They have much more demand than they could ever fulfill to care anymore about promotional or subsidized user groups.
  - bsder 6mo ago
    Until magically all their demand vaporizes. I suspect a lot of people are like me. They got into this at the $20/month level individually to check things out. I'm not stressing things out, so I haven't moved up, but the moment I bump into a limit, I'll pull the trigger by default. Until then, I'm the sleeping dog, and you should let me lie. Well, Anthropic decided to kick me. Now, I'm investing the time to figure out how to use the "open" and "Chinese" models assuming that Anthropic is about to screw me. Once I switch, Anthropic is going to have to demonstrate significant improvements over what I'm now using to get me to even consider them again.
    - tverbeure 6mo ago
      I don't think they need the $20/month users when there are some who use over $1000 in tokens per day.
      - bsder 5mo ago
        I know of 4 companies that are already starting to stomp down on the AI whales using the "$1000 per day". There was the cost of the entire AI usage of the company and then there was the cost of about a half-dozen people who dwarfed it individually. So, we've established a hard upper ceiling for what AI can extract per user at roughly $100K and more realistically at $10K per year. Basically, if using the AI costs the same as a human salary, it's going to get pushback. I mean, the whole point was to get rid of those pesky human salaries, after all. So, there are about 2 million-ish software jobs in the US? It's more than 1 million but a far cry from 10 million. So that pencils in at $20 billion in the US per year total? That means that if an AI company literally won all the US software programmers, it would be worth max $200 billion to be bought out (10x revenue). Now how much investment have the AI companies taken? Yeah, roughly that. And investors are going to want quite a bit more than that back. Even if they had zero delivery costs, the AI companies are cooked long term. The moment your number bumps into "All the X in the US/World", you've got a problem. Short term? Greater fool theory applies. And there appear to be a lot of them. And all this is before we start getting into people exploring the open models. Most people were like me; we started on something like Claude and just stayed put because it was straightforward. Now that we've been kicked, we'll start looking at the other options.
Yizahi 6mo ago
LLM monsters are deeply unprofitable, going by the industry hearsay (which is the only thing we have, given ultra secrecy of the LLM corporations). The only two LLM companies which disclosed their finances without lies, were two Chinese corporations and they, unsurprisingly, were deeply in red. Remember the old saying about boiling a frog? LLM corporations need to make most of their users pay hundreds per month, asap. This is Anthropic increasing temperature regulator under the pot just a tiny little bit. Not the first and not the last time.
- andrekandre 6mo ago
  > LLM corporations need to make most of their users pay hundreds per month, asap. it would explain why tech is so hard on forcing it down everyones throats (need to get that scale asap and hope it holds)
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- manoDev 6mo ago
  Their price point goal is a SWE salary.
- HWR_14 6mo ago
  I assume the Chinese corporations can operate in the red forever and be subsidized by the Chinese government.
  - simoncion 6mo ago
    That's true of any company in any country. If you can convince the government that your company is sufficiently important, you can get subsidized.
    - HWR_14 6mo ago
      My point was that the AI companies in China have already convinced the government to subsidize them.
surgical_fire 6mo ago
> I can't understand removing Claude Code from $20. I'm interested to see whether this is confirmed or not. Anthropic bleeds money per user. No matter if it's the $20 or $200 plan, every Claude Code user is unprofitable. The only way to not bleed money is to eventually move everyone to API pricing. Hiring a personal senior engineer will likely be cheaper.
lionkor 6mo ago
> I quickly started hitting limits developing several apps at the same time > I'm a career engineer I'm trying really hard here to be nice, but what the hell are you doing? Are you vibe coding multiple apps in parallel and calling it engineering? Is it like those people who eat 2-3x the amount of meat to ensure they offset the positive impact 1-2 vegans are having? :D
- zem 5mo ago
  I've noticed that there are some people who feel that their claude instance could be working on churning out multiple apps, and therefore if it isn't they are in some sense falling behind. it's the illusion of productivity raised to the level of a minor addiction.

jmcodes 6mo ago

Same loved them, told my team about them, got them to switch off of cursor, now I'm telling them to swap to Codex. Anthropic really pissed me off with their harness crap. They're well within their rights but their communication over it was enough to get me to swap. I don't need extra hurdles when there's a perfectly valid alternative right there. They don't have the advantage they think they do.

operatingthetan 6mo ago
I think we are inevitably heading to using the cheap Chinese models like Kimi, GLM, and Minimax for the bulk of engineering tasks. Within 3-6 months they will be at Opus 4.6 level.
- robertkarl 6mo ago
  This was literally my task today, to try out Qwen 9B locally on my, albeit a bit memory-constrained at 18GB, macbook with pi or opencode. Before reading this update.
  - someuser54541 6mo ago
    Please report back, would be very interested in your findings.
    - sshine 6mo ago
      I ran OpenCode + GLM-5.1 for three weeks during my vacation. It’s okay. It thinks a lot more to get to a similar result as Claude. So it’s slower. It’s congested during peak hours. It has quirks as the context gets close to full. But if you’re stuck with no better model, it’s better than local models and no models. I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed. I’m playing around with TUI widgets trying to recreate and improve that experience
      - taikon 6mo ago
        To be clear, was OpenCode a better in your opinion compared to ClaudeCode?
        sshine 5mo ago
        Better UI, worse model (GLM), probably slightly worse agentic runtime. In spite of how glitchy Claude feels, it makes decisions fast.
      - TacticalCoder 6mo ago
        > I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed. Claude's TUI is not a TUI. It's the most WTF thing ever: the TUI is actually a GUI. A headless browser shipped the TUI that, in real-time, renders the entire screen, scrolls to the bottom, and converts that to text mode. There are several serious issues and I'll mention two that do utterly piss me off... 1. Insane "jumping" around where the text "scrolls back" then scrolls back down to your prompt: at this point, seen the crazy hack that TUI is, if you tell me the text jumping around in the TUI is because they're simulating mouse clicks on the scrollbar I would't be surprised. If I'm not mistaken we've seen people "fixing" this by patching other programs (tmux ?). 2. What you see in the TUI is not the output of the model. That is, to me, the most insane of it all. They're literally changing characters between their headlessly rendered GUI and the TUI. > Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed. "grown" or "hacked" are way too nice words for the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is. Codex is described as a: "Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal". It's 95%+ Rust code. I wonder if the "lightweight" is a stab at the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is.
robertkarl 6mo ago
One thing I enjoy about Cursor and Codex mac apps is the embedded preview window. I know it's not as hardcore as the terminal/tmux but it's hella convenient. But Cursor bugs me with the opacity around what model I'm using. It seems deliberately to be routing requests based on its perceived complexity. What draws you to codex vs cursor?

elschneider 6mo ago

I had a similar ride, but disagree with your conclusion. Opus 4.7 is so incredibly powerful from my experience, that nothing else really matters and I think at Anthropic they know it. People will pay a lot for access to this model.

operatingthetan 6mo ago
>Opus 4.7 is so incredibly powerful from my experience, I'm not challenging your opinion, but this is an outlier in the general current public opinion about it.
- elschneider 6mo ago
  Yea, I've seen a lot of whining online, because its more expensive, but from the interactions I've had I'd say, that it's well worth it. To me it feels like another step change, similar to when 4.5 was introduced. Definitely a different beast. EDIT: it is also surprising to me that everyone seems to believe the people at Anthropic are simply incompetent and recklessly risking their good reputation, while very few consider the possible good reasons they might have for taking such drastic measures. And I don't think it's because of financial pressures in their case
  - user34283 6mo ago
    I can’t say I’ve used it extensively enough to draw a conclusion, but it did seem similar to GPT 5.4 in Codex. When I threw it at a difficult issue in an iOS app, it like GPT came up with wrongly guessed explanations. It only found the issue after I had it instrument the app and add extensive logs. Usually GPT 5.4 is the same. Only that with GPT 5.4 it’s at least included in my subscription, while sending 3-4 messages to Opus 4.7 for this blew through my $20 plan limits and consumed $10 of extra usage on top. At that point I can’t help but bring up how much more expensive it is.
    - weikju 6mo ago
      > Only that with GPT 5.4 it’s at least included in my subscription, while sending 3-4 messages to Opus 4.7 for this blew through my $20 plan limits and consumed $10 of extra usage on top. At that point I can’t help but bring up how much more expensive it is. Rest assured OpenAI won’t want to leave that kind of money on the table…

strangattractor 6mo ago

[flagged]

EstanislaoStan 6mo ago
Claude often doesn't know the truth about Claude Code etc. lol
- strangattractor 6mo ago
  I got down voted by 4 people just for pointing that out. lol
civvv 6mo ago
Do you understand how LLM's work and that they are always behind in their knowledge? Unless Claude does a network call to check its own website, it will give you outdated information. Its a prediction model, its not magic.
ricardobeat 6mo ago
The $20/month, which is now $17, should give you a hint? Models have a knowledge cut-off and will not reflect up to date information unless you trigger a web search.
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  That's just a billing trick. >$17 Per month with annual subscription discount ($200 billed up front). $20 if billed monthly.
hannahstrawbrry 6mo ago
FWIW their "Fin" agent on their web page tells me: "Claude Code is not included in the standard Pro plan. It's only available with premium seats on Team and Enterprise plans. However, Pro plans do include improved coding capabilities through our GitHub integration, which lets you connect code repositories directly to Claude. You also get access to code execution and file creation features in the Claude apps. For the full Claude Code terminal experience, you'd need to upgrade to a Team or Enterprise plan with premium seats"

eleventen 6mo ago

Matches my experience very well. All the goodwill earned from taking a stand against the DoD seemingly forgotten in a month. Coincidentally, I canceled my pro subscription and got set up with OpenCode and OpenRouter last night.

bsder 6mo ago
Got any good pointers to documentation for making the transition? I'd like to pull the trigger for OpenCode and OpenRouter as well.
- eleventen 6mo ago
  I just installed it and continued about my business. I don't have a carefully tuned claude code setup. It has some skills, some CLAUDE.md files, and not much else. I did also migrate an app from Claude SDK to Pydantic AI to get off claude API pricing. https://pydantic.dev/docs/ai/overview/ https://pydantic.dev/docs/ai/overview/

alwillis 6mo ago

> I can't understand removing Claude Code from $20 Not according to their webpage: "Claude Code is included in your Pro plan. Perfect for short coding sprints in small codebases with access to both Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.7." [1] [1]: https://claude.com/product/claude-code https://claude.com/product/claude-code

eleventen 6mo ago
There are clear contradictions across their marketing site. As others have pointed out, it's being removed from some help articles and the pricing chart now shows it revoked. Confusing signals, but they seem to be changing all pages in this direction and haven't updated that one yet. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47854478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47854478
- htrp 6mo ago
  what happened to agentic superintelligence based development?
  - jmalicki 6mo ago
    This is superintelligence. The mixed signals are tested to increase their revenues. Superintelligent AIs wouldn't be honest.

zormino 6mo ago

I think removing Claude Code from the $20 tier is a terrible idea, I never would've gone from nothing right into the $100/200 tier. The $20 plan let me get my feet wet and see how good it could be, and in less than a week I was on the $100 plan. I think they need to at least have a 1 month introductory rate for the max plan at $20, or devs that decide to try out agentic coding just won't go to Anthropic. That leads to downstream impacts, like when a company is deciding which AI coding tools to provide and the feedback management hears everyone is already used to (e.x.) Codex, then Anthropic starts losing the enterprise side of things.

siva7 6mo ago
They're not losing anything. They have much more demand than they could ever fulfill to care anymore about promotional or subsidized user groups.
- bsder 6mo ago
  Until magically all their demand vaporizes. I suspect a lot of people are like me. They got into this at the $20/month level individually to check things out. I'm not stressing things out, so I haven't moved up, but the moment I bump into a limit, I'll pull the trigger by default. Until then, I'm the sleeping dog, and you should let me lie. Well, Anthropic decided to kick me. Now, I'm investing the time to figure out how to use the "open" and "Chinese" models assuming that Anthropic is about to screw me. Once I switch, Anthropic is going to have to demonstrate significant improvements over what I'm now using to get me to even consider them again.
  - tverbeure 6mo ago
    I don't think they need the $20/month users when there are some who use over $1000 in tokens per day.
    - bsder 5mo ago
      I know of 4 companies that are already starting to stomp down on the AI whales using the "$1000 per day". There was the cost of the entire AI usage of the company and then there was the cost of about a half-dozen people who dwarfed it individually. So, we've established a hard upper ceiling for what AI can extract per user at roughly $100K and more realistically at $10K per year. Basically, if using the AI costs the same as a human salary, it's going to get pushback. I mean, the whole point was to get rid of those pesky human salaries, after all. So, there are about 2 million-ish software jobs in the US? It's more than 1 million but a far cry from 10 million. So that pencils in at $20 billion in the US per year total? That means that if an AI company literally won all the US software programmers, it would be worth max $200 billion to be bought out (10x revenue). Now how much investment have the AI companies taken? Yeah, roughly that. And investors are going to want quite a bit more than that back. Even if they had zero delivery costs, the AI companies are cooked long term. The moment your number bumps into "All the X in the US/World", you've got a problem. Short term? Greater fool theory applies. And there appear to be a lot of them. And all this is before we start getting into people exploring the open models. Most people were like me; we started on something like Claude and just stayed put because it was straightforward. Now that we've been kicked, we'll start looking at the other options.

Yizahi 6mo ago

LLM monsters are deeply unprofitable, going by the industry hearsay (which is the only thing we have, given ultra secrecy of the LLM corporations). The only two LLM companies which disclosed their finances without lies, were two Chinese corporations and they, unsurprisingly, were deeply in red. Remember the old saying about boiling a frog? LLM corporations need to make most of their users pay hundreds per month, asap. This is Anthropic increasing temperature regulator under the pot just a tiny little bit. Not the first and not the last time.

andrekandre 6mo ago
> LLM corporations need to make most of their users pay hundreds per month, asap. it would explain why tech is so hard on forcing it down everyones throats (need to get that scale asap and hope it holds)
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
manoDev 6mo ago
Their price point goal is a SWE salary.
HWR_14 6mo ago
I assume the Chinese corporations can operate in the red forever and be subsidized by the Chinese government.
- simoncion 6mo ago
  That's true of any company in any country. If you can convince the government that your company is sufficiently important, you can get subsidized.
  - HWR_14 6mo ago
    My point was that the AI companies in China have already convinced the government to subsidize them.

surgical_fire 6mo ago

> I can't understand removing Claude Code from $20. I'm interested to see whether this is confirmed or not. Anthropic bleeds money per user. No matter if it's the $20 or $200 plan, every Claude Code user is unprofitable. The only way to not bleed money is to eventually move everyone to API pricing. Hiring a personal senior engineer will likely be cheaper.

lionkor 6mo ago

> I quickly started hitting limits developing several apps at the same time > I'm a career engineer I'm trying really hard here to be nice, but what the hell are you doing? Are you vibe coding multiple apps in parallel and calling it engineering? Is it like those people who eat 2-3x the amount of meat to ensure they offset the positive impact 1-2 vegans are having? :D

zem 5mo ago
I've noticed that there are some people who feel that their claude instance could be working on churning out multiple apps, and therefore if it isn't they are in some sense falling behind. it's the illusion of productivity raised to the level of a minor addiction.