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I feel like we are seeing agentic coding tools morph into walled gardens with these acquisitions. Anthropic has restricted claude code usage while OpenAI has s

by pplante 5mo ago

I feel like we are seeing agentic coding tools morph into walled gardens with these acquisitions. Anthropic has restricted claude code usage while OpenAI has sort of let Codex fill the void. I am curious to see how this continues to evolve.

nielsbot 5mo ago
I think that's the normal path for new markets as they consolidate...
Analemma_ 5mo ago
I don’t really see where the “walled garden” complaint is coming from. Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through trillions of tokens on their flat-rate subscription plan, but that’s a billing detail, and one that I honestly don’t share the outrage about. The technology part of CC is still totally open: skills, MCP, etc. are all open informal standards and there hasn’t been any movement to lock that down.
- nijave 5mo ago
  Claude subscription is restricted to Claude Code harness Really walled garden is the only direction that makes sense--models will slowly become commodities
- airstrike 5mo ago
  No, Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through those tokens with any binary other than their own. Allowing users to take advantage of their monthly/weekly/daily token limits with the software of their choosing is a perfectly valid expectation. Restricting it to their own underperforming, buggy TUI client is textbook walled garden.
  - solenoid0937 5mo ago
    > Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through those tokens with any binary other than their own. Because that's what the API is for. This isn't hard to understand. The cost you pay for subsidized tokens is lock-in. If you don't want lock-in, there's the API. This isn't egregious or wrong or anything. It's exactly what you'd expect out of a heavily subsidized product option.
    - airstrike 5mo ago
      This is missing the forest for the trees and it comes across as adulation for a corporation, when in fact, customers come first. Why are you trying to police people's opinion about a product? I never said I didn't _understand_ why Anthropic is doing this. What I'm saying is nobody wants Claude Code, the product. They want access to the model. Feeling strapped to a harness you don't enjoy working with and which may limit your productivity is not a good experience for users. Voicing that dissatisfaction is perfectly valid. No, it's not "egregious" or "wrong", but it's also _something_ rather than "not anything". Do you know what also give users access to the model without forcing lock-in? A better product. Building it is a choice Anthropic decided not to make.
      - solenoid0937 5mo ago
        Probably 99.9% of people subscribe to Max for Claude Code. I'd bet the amount of devs going for a custom harness is vanishingly small, and, well, the API exists for those use cases.
        airstrike 5mo ago
        None of that refutes my argument? Devs don't go for a custom harness because said harnesses aren't allowed to compete in equal standing with Claude Code. Why are you on the side of making the lives of developers worse by giving them fewer choices?
asdff 5mo ago
This is the whole point and the reason for the lofty valuations. Get everyone to shift their work to be dependent on these tooling, to the point they can't imagine working in any other way, and then raise prices. Tale as old as enterprise software.
- dgellow 5mo ago
  Actually that wasn’t the plan, no
  - pitched 5mo ago
    The moment a group accepts VC money, this becomes the plan
    - dgellow 5mo ago
      I was at stainless since the very beginning, I can tell you it wasn’t the plan
      - vincnetas 5mo ago
        Yeah, but they now have new owner who might be having different plan.
        mmcclure 5mo ago
        The new owner's plan is...to sunset the paid product immediately and give customers access to tooling to be able to continue generating SDKs on their own. From Stainless's post: As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available. If you’re a Stainless customer, visit app.stainless.com/transition for help transitioning from Stainless-managed products to other options. As always, you own the SDKs you’ve generated to date, and have full rights to modify and extend them however you wish. As a customer, all-in-all, we were pretty pleased with the outcome. Stainless was a great partner to us, even in "the end," and I'm really happy for the team.
noir_lord 5mo ago
That was always going to be the end point. The amount of money thrown at it means at some point the words Return on Investment were going to appear. It’s the classic loss leader applied to trillion dollar (across the market) capital investments.
MangoCoffee 5mo ago
Frontier AI labs is pivoting to something that can justified their IPO. just like OpenAI shut down other services and pivot more into coding. They want to show profitability before their mega IPO.
scottcha 5mo ago
I use claude code and pi.dev side by side most days and i'm mostly choosing pi for most work in last couple of weeks.
geodel 5mo ago
True. But this sounds: "I feel like Mondays are coming after Sundays...".
allknowingfrog 5mo ago
Claude is just a tool. My team members are each free to choose the text editor or IDE that they are happiest with. In the near future, I hope to be able to say the same for coding agents. I really like Claude, but I don't track Claude resources in our repos. If something better comes along, I'm betting it will be perfectly happy to parse the markdown of my existing memory files, and nothing in the repo itself will force anyone else to know that I switched. It kind of blows my mind that the majority of Claude users have just accepted that CLAUDE.md is a tracked file that the whole team has to standardize on and share. Coding agents are the ultimate API. They conform to however you prefer to interact. Is anyone really expecting to enforce standard operating procedures with this non-deterministic black box of magic?
- Computer0 5mo ago
  I can just rename the CLAUDE.md files to AGENTS.md when I would like to. They're all just sitting there on my system.

by pplante 5mo ago

nielsbot 5mo ago

I think that's the normal path for new markets as they consolidate...

Analemma_ 5mo ago

I don’t really see where the “walled garden” complaint is coming from. Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through trillions of tokens on their flat-rate subscription plan, but that’s a billing detail, and one that I honestly don’t share the outrage about. The technology part of CC is still totally open: skills, MCP, etc. are all open informal standards and there hasn’t been any movement to lock that down.

nijave 5mo ago
Claude subscription is restricted to Claude Code harness Really walled garden is the only direction that makes sense--models will slowly become commodities
airstrike 5mo ago
No, Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through those tokens with any binary other than their own. Allowing users to take advantage of their monthly/weekly/daily token limits with the software of their choosing is a perfectly valid expectation. Restricting it to their own underperforming, buggy TUI client is textbook walled garden.
- solenoid0937 5mo ago
  > Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through those tokens with any binary other than their own. Because that's what the API is for. This isn't hard to understand. The cost you pay for subsidized tokens is lock-in. If you don't want lock-in, there's the API. This isn't egregious or wrong or anything. It's exactly what you'd expect out of a heavily subsidized product option.
  - airstrike 5mo ago
    This is missing the forest for the trees and it comes across as adulation for a corporation, when in fact, customers come first. Why are you trying to police people's opinion about a product? I never said I didn't _understand_ why Anthropic is doing this. What I'm saying is nobody wants Claude Code, the product. They want access to the model. Feeling strapped to a harness you don't enjoy working with and which may limit your productivity is not a good experience for users. Voicing that dissatisfaction is perfectly valid. No, it's not "egregious" or "wrong", but it's also _something_ rather than "not anything". Do you know what also give users access to the model without forcing lock-in? A better product. Building it is a choice Anthropic decided not to make.
    - solenoid0937 5mo ago
      Probably 99.9% of people subscribe to Max for Claude Code. I'd bet the amount of devs going for a custom harness is vanishingly small, and, well, the API exists for those use cases.
      - airstrike 5mo ago
        None of that refutes my argument? Devs don't go for a custom harness because said harnesses aren't allowed to compete in equal standing with Claude Code. Why are you on the side of making the lives of developers worse by giving them fewer choices?

asdff 5mo ago

This is the whole point and the reason for the lofty valuations. Get everyone to shift their work to be dependent on these tooling, to the point they can't imagine working in any other way, and then raise prices. Tale as old as enterprise software.

dgellow 5mo ago
Actually that wasn’t the plan, no
- pitched 5mo ago
  The moment a group accepts VC money, this becomes the plan
  - dgellow 5mo ago
    I was at stainless since the very beginning, I can tell you it wasn’t the plan
    - vincnetas 5mo ago
      Yeah, but they now have new owner who might be having different plan.
      - mmcclure 5mo ago
        The new owner's plan is...to sunset the paid product immediately and give customers access to tooling to be able to continue generating SDKs on their own. From Stainless's post: As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available. If you’re a Stainless customer, visit app.stainless.com/transition for help transitioning from Stainless-managed products to other options. As always, you own the SDKs you’ve generated to date, and have full rights to modify and extend them however you wish. As a customer, all-in-all, we were pretty pleased with the outcome. Stainless was a great partner to us, even in "the end," and I'm really happy for the team.

noir_lord 5mo ago

That was always going to be the end point. The amount of money thrown at it means at some point the words Return on Investment were going to appear. It’s the classic loss leader applied to trillion dollar (across the market) capital investments.

MangoCoffee 5mo ago

Frontier AI labs is pivoting to something that can justified their IPO. just like OpenAI shut down other services and pivot more into coding. They want to show profitability before their mega IPO.

scottcha 5mo ago

I use claude code and pi.dev side by side most days and i'm mostly choosing pi for most work in last couple of weeks.

geodel 5mo ago

True. But this sounds: "I feel like Mondays are coming after Sundays...".

allknowingfrog 5mo ago

Claude is just a tool. My team members are each free to choose the text editor or IDE that they are happiest with. In the near future, I hope to be able to say the same for coding agents. I really like Claude, but I don't track Claude resources in our repos. If something better comes along, I'm betting it will be perfectly happy to parse the markdown of my existing memory files, and nothing in the repo itself will force anyone else to know that I switched. It kind of blows my mind that the majority of Claude users have just accepted that CLAUDE.md is a tracked file that the whole team has to standardize on and share. Coding agents are the ultimate API. They conform to however you prefer to interact. Is anyone really expecting to enforce standard operating procedures with this non-deterministic black box of magic?

Computer0 5mo ago
I can just rename the CLAUDE.md files to AGENTS.md when I would like to. They're all just sitting there on my system.