7 ms·

Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps

247 points by raheelrjunaid 3mo ago

Zambyte 3mo ago
Not sure why this was flagged, Anthropic has obviously been burning bridges. I thought this line was funny though: > If you want to autocomplete, like I do, you don’t need Fable, or even Opus; Sonnet works fine. It reads like "if you want to go to the grocery store, you don't need a space shuttle, or even a SR-71 Blackbird; a Cessna works fine."
- raheelrjunaid 3mo ago
  I agree that without context, Sonnet is overkill for just autocomplete code suggestions. My point later in that section is that to have an autocomplete mindset (where an AI is a helpful tool rather than a driver), you only need a decent subset of models, not the best of the best.
- gruez 3mo ago
  Sounds like the author is using "autocomplete" as a derogatory way of referring to LLMs in general (eg. "LLMs can't code, they're just autocomplete on steroids")
  - stingraycharles 3mo ago
    Then the author needs to be more specific because there are special models for code autocomplete that are much faster.
    - jboss10 3mo ago
      For people who saw this and might want a recomendation, I like running a tiny qwen model with llama cpp. Qwen2.5 coder 0.5B or 1.5B (not the instruct version) On a modern-ish GPU these should run really fast with little latency. They cost nothing and don't send your data to anyone.
  - wmorgan 3mo ago
    It’s talking about how you can type def frobQux(Qux qux, int radians) { And it goes and reads your code and suggests a reasonable way to frob a qux a certain number of radians. Which is at the same time (a) pretty useful!, (b) fairly new, we’ve only been able to do this since 2023 or so, but (c) also not that hard by 2026 standards because capabilities have advanced so much in the last three years.
    - stingraycharles 3mo ago
      Why would anyone be using Fable, Opus or even Sonnet for that type of work? You don’t need an advanced reasoning model for that at all.
      - noduerme 3mo ago
        If you already knew that the answer was to frob a qux, you wouldn't need the reasoning trash either.
      - dcrazy 3mo ago
        Generative autocomplete with an underpowered model is pretty annoying. It hallucinates parameters and APIs. Something like Sonnet seems like the right level of sophistication.
      - tasuki 3mo ago
        > Why would anyone be using Fable, Opus or even Sonnet for that type of work? You don’t need an advanced reasoning model for that at all. Don't leave me hanging: how do you frob a qux a certain number of radians?
    - jefftk 3mo ago
      "int radians" is a pretty strong code smell! I would be very worried about any struggle l autocomplete that followed something like that ;)
  - spongebobism 3mo ago
    > To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. [...] If you want to autocomplete [...] But if you want to use FOSS trusted tools like Zed, OpenCode, Pi, Nanocoder, etc. [...] isn't he just contrasting 2 use cases of LLMs?
- uberman 3mo ago
  While I did not flag this, it is clearly a hit piece. Why write an article to publish in July that does not include June data? Unless of course one looks at June uptime and finds that does not align with their story.
  - Barbing 3mo ago
    In June, I figure Anthropic subscriptions were partially powered by those big mobile gas generators that are pushed around the xAI parking lots. Makes sense availability improved.
  - raheelrjunaid 3mo ago
    I began writing this article a while back and forgot to update the screenshot. The June uptime has significantly improved, but that may not always be the case
- tmtvl 3mo ago
  Are you saying that using LLMs for code autocomplete is like using an aeroplane to go to the grocery store? Because clearly there was no autocomplete before the new AI spring.
sscaryterry 3mo ago
The lawsuits will come, paying the piper is inevitable.
- imglorp 3mo ago
  Who would sue, and on what ground? They basically gave stuff away for free and now they're speed-running enshittification. The end state will be an abusive, adversarial, fully monetized, vendor lockin experience like Oracle or Broadcom. Nobody is forced to play.
  - cthor 3mo ago
    Switching costs are still low. Anthropic can only do this while they maintain frontier status, and while they do, they can charge whatever they want. An Oracle or Broadcom would fall behind and lose all its customers in an instant.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
philipwhiuk 3mo ago
> Each changelog entry has a bug fix in almost every release, which is a sign of reliable and stable software! This is a non-sequitur. Most consumer apps don't even list all the bugfixes.
bakies 3mo ago
Think I'm about to switch. I can't build the automations i'm trying to with claude code anymore. Since they locked away the non-interactive usage and channels can't be used without interacting with the console on startup. I had a good web interface for running CC in containers in k8s but I think it's time to bail out and build around a codex subscription and pi.dev now. I have local models hooked up to pi dev and that's working well. Had it build itself Channels equivalent so agents can talk to each other and receive webhooks. I bet Anthropic will build these things into their ecosystem eventually, but I want it now and running on my cloud. Edit: I forgot they also don't let me use remote control (which isn't that good anyway) with a oauth key in the env var! So i have to get on a terminal and do the whole login flow for my containerized agents. Massive pain, so lame.
- lioeters 3mo ago
  It reminds me of people who built businesses on top of APIs provided by Facebook, Reddit, etc. One day the company decides to rug pull the public interface, either to replace it with their own competing product or nothing at all. The anti-competitive pratice makes sense but what I don't understand is the latter case, which is common, where the company is just removing possibilities of how users can participate in their ecosystem and platform. Not only destroying third-party opportunities for profit, but not even providing their own alternative.
  - rapsey 3mo ago
    Wasn't facebooks pull a result of the huge Cambridge analytica scandal.
    - watwut 3mo ago
      Afaik no. That scandal was not about their public api.
    - disgruntledphd2 3mo ago
      No, but the original data leak occurred because of their really open API.
tekacs 3mo ago
It worth noting that – just to add to the confusion – they apparently cancelled the June 15th change just before it was due to go live: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-claude-agent-sdk-with-your-claude-plan https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau... https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-backs-off-unpopular-billing-overhaul-as-price-war-with-openai-looms/ https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-backs-off-unpopular-billin... So... maybe we can still use third party harnesses with Claude Code subscriptions... for now? Until they change their mind again?
- ac29 3mo ago
  > So... maybe we can still use third party harnesses with Claude Code subscriptions... for now? The way I read this is: yes, if the third party harness uses Anthropic's Agent SDK. Most of them do not, AFAIK, and are still against ToS (though maybe its not enforced for now)
  - tekacs 3mo ago
    I believe you're right and I'm familiar with the actual distinction – the confusion is mostly about how they _feel_ about it, and what'll change from here.
  - btown 3mo ago
    Something that many don't realize is that Claude Desktop and the Agent SDK are both just wrappers around pools of CLI instances, literally running `claude --input-format stream-json --output-format stream-json`. So this wasn't even about third-party harnesses that replace the toolset Claude has access to, and try to call the Claude API with subsidized credentials. No, this was literally a blessing for their desktop UI's over others, all driving Claude Code's CLI at the end of the day. To the broader point, it's hard not to see that as arbitrary and borderline spyware. Software that sniffs the context in which it's executed and uses that to phone home about billing is the type of thing you'd expect from the most corporate parts of the gaming industry, not a frontier lab, but here we are.
    - 3mo ago
m_ke 3mo ago
It's looking like Anthropic is realizing that they're about to get squeezed so they need to juice revenue for their IPO before it becomes obvious to everyone else. Open models like GLM 5.2 are getting good enough to handle 90% of tasks, and will eat most of their usage unless they start serving it at cost. And on the 1% work they fearmongered their way into falling under government control, which will limit how much they can commercialize the frontier. Nobody will keep paying their premiums and put up with their BS when they can have similar models at cost of inference in any harness that they want.
- hnlmorg 3mo ago
  > Open models like GLM 5.2 are getting good enough to handle 90% of tasks, and will eat most of their usage unless they start serving it at cost. Most people either don’t have the money to buy hardware to run open models and/or don’t have the utilisation to make renting cost effective.
  - Systemerror7A69 3mo ago
    GLM 5.2 is monstrous in size, no one is running that on their own hardware. But it's a very competitively priced model other providers can offer (since it's open) so it's a much cheaper alternative than claude in practice. I assume that is what they meant.
  - Aeolos 3mo ago
    Fortunately, multiple model providers are offering open weights models at significantly lower prices than closed models.
  - m_ke 3mo ago
    https://openrouter.ai/models https://openrouter.ai/models you can use these in hermes, cursor, openclaw, opencode, etc with 2 lines of config that claude code will happily do for you if you ask GLM 5.2, deepseek 4 Flash and the newly released Hy3 are Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 level models at a tiny fraction of the cost. I'm on the $200 claude plan and blew through my weekly limits with Fable in a day, then ended up wasting $20 with opus 4.8 overages in an hour to finish out work in active sessions. Since then I've been using GLM 5.2 with openrouter + opencode and am spending less than $5/day for equivalent output.
iterateoften 3mo ago
Anthropic takes every chance they make not only to behave suspicious and anti-consumer but also announce that they are acting in ways that hurt you while telling you it’s a feature. Fable returning wrong answers if it suspects the topic is sensative is the ultimate icing on the huge cake of lies and gaslighting they’ve been baking the past 6 months.
- karahime 3mo ago
  It's the nature of the safetyist position. It creates everything that it claims to avoid (duplicitous behavior, misaligned outputs, unresponsive systems).
- mwigdahl 3mo ago
  > Fable returning wrong answers if it suspects the topic is sensative Citation, please? On the original release they downgraded models silently to Opus 4.8 when they suspected it was being used for LLM development, but they stopped doing that. Now when you hit one of the guardrail subjects it downgrades to Opus 4.8 visibly in all cases. I've never seen anything suggesting they're deliberately returning wrong answers. Maybe you're thinking of Gemini's anti-distillation tech?
- datakan 3mo ago
  I haven't seen leadership this bad since the late 90's. I'm pretty sure at this point that Claude could run the company better than Dario.
baron3dl 3mo ago
I do find it challenging to understand what the TOS/AUP allow and not, and what qualifies for subscription and not. If I somehow muster confidence in my interpretation, I continue to doubt that it will be stable over even the short term.
tomaytotomato 3mo ago
I have been using Claude code for a while and have recently migrated to Pi Migrating my skills/agents and config was fairly straightforward. Pi's agent harness seems to be more responsive and quicker than CC (perhaps with the prompt caching and squashing it does behind the scenes) Tempted to do a write-up on migration. I am only using Pi with Github Copilot as I am scared I will get my Claude account banned if I use the Oauth with Pi. pi.dev
- dsrtslnd23 3mo ago
  what is the current statement on Oauth Claude use with Pi. I remember there was some back and forth from Anthropic? I currently use my Claude sub with Pi.
  - tomaytotomato 3mo ago
    No idea, Anyone from Anthropic here who could answer this?
- spudlyo 3mo ago
  Pi is the first, and and only agent I've ever seriously used, which I picked up after watching one of Marco Zechner's talks about it. His design approach and vision for pi resonated with me, and I've pretty much used it every day since. I, like Marco, am also a grumpy old person, so that might have had something to do with it. I have my own customizations for things like fuzzy autocompleting the name of Emacs buffers and symbols from my project's TAGS file, and a handful of skills. It's a pleasure to work with, and so far it's been my experience that if pi doesn't behave the way I want, it's pretty easy to modify to suit my needs. OpenAI, as much as I dislike them, seems to be the only big AI lab that doesn't care what agent harness you use, so that's where my $100 a month goes.
  - tasuki 3mo ago
    FYI the name is Mario Zechner[0]. I'm also grumpy and old and also use Pi for the same reasons as you. I also use an OpenAI subscription (the models aren't entirely bad), but am ready to jump ship to OpenCode Go or GLM Coding Plan any minute. And I've been watching the Claude Code shitshow with glee! [0]: https://mariozechner.at/ https://mariozechner.at/
jdw64 3mo ago
I agree with everything in this post, but that doesn't mean I want to go back to a life without Claude Code. I've been working alone all this time, and finally it feels like I have someone to talk to
- mamsouuu 3mo ago
  Sounds like Claude Code is not what you're looking for
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
mesmertech 3mo ago
As long as they have the best model they can afford to lose goodwill. People who don't wanna spend too much on LLMs and are trying to optimize whats subsidized even on the Max plans are customers Anthropic is honestly better off without.
- lelanthran 3mo ago
  That's like saying as long as expensive cars are faster than cheaper cars, the expensive manufacturer can afford losing goodwill. We have yet to see any company use Fablr to increase their profits. Until and unless you can increase your profits with the expensive models, it makes no sense to pay for them. IOW, the expensive AI providers only draw is goodwill.
Zababa 3mo ago
>Dario and Boris have us convinced that “coding is solved” with their loops. But microwaves didn’t solve cooking. If you want a look at the timeline where the microwave solved cooking, this was an interesting article: https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/my-journey-to-the-microwave-alternate https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/my-journey-to-the-microwav.... You can apparently sear meat with a microwave (provided you have the necessary pan).
- rho4 3mo ago
  Haha thanks for that article (I microwave most of my meals). I wonder if this statement from the article will apply to AI: > Second, microwave cooking fell victim to the same curse that threatens every new easy-to-use technology: it became low-status tech.
  - Zababa 3mo ago
    Oh that's an interesting parallel
elzbardico 3mo ago
Complaining about external providers not supporting the subsidized prices Claude charge to its subscribers makes no sense. Of course, Claude Code subscription is a loss leader, it is an offering built to create a market for a new product in a very competitive environment in the hopes of capturing a dominant market position with a fully validated product with a healthy demand from business. Of course they won't give you thousands of dollars of inference for a couple hundred bucks without making sure you're properly tied to their walled garden. Yeah, of course Dario and any other Anthropic spoke person will vastly exaggerate the capabilities of their product and promote vibe coding and now "loop engineering", just like Coca-Cola would love for you to drink gallons of Diet Coke everyday, just like Oracle some twenty ago promoted for Enterprises that they could just use Oracle Databases to serve web applications right from the DB, as this would force you to use more CPUs and Oracle DB is licensed by core. The business model for inference is metered usage, more usage => mode money. Again, the subscription model is just a bump in the road to acquire customers, once you're metered, the more you use, the better for anthropic. Why people get surprised with that stuff?
- jelling 3mo ago
  > Why people get surprised with that stuff? Whenever you don't understand how people can think things on the internet, consider that they might be younger than you. They may not be, but it makes the world far less rage inducing. None of us are born knowing everything.
- lelanthran 3mo ago
  > Of course, Claude Code subscription is a loss leader, it is an offering built to create a market for a new product in a very competitive environment in the hopes of capturing a dominant market position with a fully validated product with a healthy demand from business. I agree that this is their goal. The reason that people don't understand why Anthropic wont let the subscription be used with other harnesses is because they believe that this hope of Anthropic is just that: a hope. I personally don't believe that a harness is a moat.
  - wgd 3mo ago
supermatt 3mo ago
> Your Claude subscription—which is a cheaper version of the Anthropic API—is restricted to use with the Claude Code CLI/Desktop, Claude CoWork, or @Claude in Slack. Thats not true at all. You can use the Agent SDK [1], which uses your subscription [2]. I use it via ACP [3] with custom system prompts and tooling. I have found it very powerful and flexible. It has its own agent loop, of course, so maybe thats the limitation using it with opencode? [1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview [2] They were talking about giving credits for the SDK usage rather than it using your allowance directly, but that seems to have been put on hold for now. If and when that changes, I will likely jump ship, but I am more than happy with it right now. [3] there isn't an official ACP wrapper - zed have one but its quite limited. its trivial to build one though, or you can just use the SDK directly and wire it into your interface of choice.
- bakies 3mo ago
  The fun part is they planned for this to change to API pricing. When they announced that I started shifting off claude code immediately so I could keep my custom tooling. Damage is done. I won't build up around claude code or agent sdk any longer because I expect this to change. The announcement says they're "pausing" the change so expect this and avoid the lock-in! linked by another comment: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-claude-agent-sdk-with-your-claude-plan https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...
- raheelrjunaid 3mo ago
  You're correct, but my point was that it was going to shift to API pricing. Although it looks like that's been put on hold as others have pointed out.
haktan 3mo ago
How do you use API keys with Claude subscription? I can't see any keys at claude.ai settings. Only panel I could find was behind another login and it didn't have a subscription option.
- auspiv 3mo ago
  you don't. they are distinct entities. https://platform.claude.com https://platform.claude.com -> api keys
Grombobulous 3mo ago
I think this article is contradictory of the reality that Anthropic is picking up B2B marketshare like crazy, recently overtaking OpenAI. I wouldn’t call Fable “enshittification.” Anthropic knows what they have. I’m looking around for the article with the marketshare chart over time and I’ll update my comment if I find it. This is the closest article I could find, though the one I had read earlier had a nice graph and was updated to 2026: https://chatforest.com/guides/anthropic-overtakes-openai-enterprise-market-share/ https://chatforest.com/guides/anthropic-overtakes-openai-ent... Here’s a decent one: https://menlovc.com/perspective/2025-the-state-of-generative-ai-in-the-enterprise/ https://menlovc.com/perspective/2025-the-state-of-generative... LLM Market Share: Anthropic Extends Its Lead in the Enterprise
zeppelin_7 3mo ago
Btw, they are also getting aggressive with bans. Furthermore the process to repeal is broken in the UI, and there is no way to get support
internet2000 3mo ago
They're subsidizing their tokens as long as you use their software. That's a fair exchange, I never understood why people took issue with it. If you don't want to get locked in to Claude Code, you can pay more. Just like you can pay more for an unlocked non-carrier subsidized phone. (Which I personally do.)
- lfuller 3mo ago
  In Canada at least it’s not legal to charge for unlocking a carrier-locked phone as it’s considered anti-competitive.
- cyberax 3mo ago
  This method of bundling should be illegal in general, as it stiffles competition.
  - jack_pp 3mo ago
    How does it stifle competition / innovation? You can use other harnesses, pay API for anthropic models or cheap chinese models. You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol. It either is a good deal or it isn't, if it is just say, thanks free VC money, if it isn't say fuck you.
    - thfuran 3mo ago
      Any service or product delivered at a loss seems pretty plainly anti-competetive. Whether it is actually subsidized to that extent, I’m not sure.
      - dcrazy 3mo ago
        The entire LLMaaS industry is priced below cost. Even if the marginal cost of electricity and bandwidth to produce one token is less than the price of that token, the amortized infrastructure and R&D costs make the entire venture unprofitable. If pricing below cost were illegal, it would essentially make starting up a business—any business—impossible.
rvz 3mo ago
> As of writing, Claude Code CLI only has around 9100 open Github issues, with small unresolved issues like it completely freezing for the last 6+ months or a screen flickering issue open for more than a year. But surely those fully autonomous coding loops will solve all those 9,100+ open issues on GitHub? Why haven't they? What happened to Claude's C Compiler [0], or that browser "built from scratch" by Cursor? [1] Why aren't the agents maintaining it if they are supposed to be cheaper than humans? > But why do they have us by the balls? Dario and Boris have us convinced that “coding is solved” with their loops. But microwaves didn’t solve cooking. They have you by the balls if you allow them to, if you continue to listen to their bullshit. Both of them are essentially salesmen at this point. They don't care if they are wrong and will sell Claude to whoever is thinking of planning the next mass layoff. Their definition of "AGI" is different to yours. The correct answer to all of this pricing nonsense that Anthropic and others are doing is local open weight models that you run on your own machine. They know this and powerful local models undercut their entire business model if hosted by others or if a smaller local model matches the performance of larger ones. [1] https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler [0] https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender
- khurs 3mo ago
  >But surely those fully autonomous coding loops will solve all those 9,100+ open issues on GitHub? Why haven't they? Shhh, you may pop the bubble and cause the collapse of the US economy.
- killix 3mo ago
  [flagged]
ngriffiths 3mo ago
One way of reading this is an article about how good Anthropic's product is. "Look at how many serious flaws users have been willing to accept in order to keep using this thing"
- m_ke 3mo ago
  Model is the product, people will put up with anything as long as you're on the pareto frontier of performance x cost.
- skydhash 3mo ago
  Work as long as you’re the only one (or the few) in town. Nad giving it for free (or nearly free). I have Cursor and when I use it, I keep it to auto, never caring about which model I use.
- anematode 3mo ago
  It also contextualizes the urgency of their attempts at regulatory capture. Once Chinese models have the same capabilities, there's almost no reason not to use them.
- gck1 3mo ago
  IF they were light years ahead of competition, then that would make sense and would be a perfectly valid strategy. But it's not, so you're burning very important bridges that you may need in 3-4 months.
  - ngriffiths 3mo ago
    Fair, but it's hard because falling behind on the models themselves is a killer. Maybe they're saying they can't spend resources on anything except staying ahead.
mococa 3mo ago
It was so good when it was possible to use Claude subscription on OpenCode. Nowadays I went from Claude 20x to 5x and been using the GLM model on OpenCode... No regrets.
- cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
  Codex GPT sub works perfect in opencode FWIW. But actually their own codex harness is quite decent on its own and doesn't have the quality issues or bloat that Claude Code does. Native Rust and open source. And in fact I've got a configuration here to point it at GLM which I also use (via Neuralwatt subscription) in addition to OpenAI's sub. I do not like opencode's philosophy on the clipboard, it tries to be too clever.
  - imron 3mo ago
    Codex works great in opencode until it gets up to around 200k context. Then it starts doing things like: me: Can you implement the next thing OpenCode+Codex: Yep I'll do that next. <does nothing and returns to prompt> me: Well? OpenCode+Codex: <starts implementing> me: Looks good, let's fix this one issue. OpenCode+Codex: Sure let's do that. <does nothing and returns to prompt> me: <bangs head against wall> -- I've found the codex cli to be much better in this regard, it doesn't nearly derp out so much at higher token counts. Opus is still my favourite model (I've found 4.6 specifically gives me the best results in OpenCode), but with all the shenanigans Anthropic is pulling, Codex is a close enough substitute.
    - cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
      I went back and forth between the two for months, often having both in various proportions. But I had enough reliability issues with Anthropic back in March timeframe that I just threw in the towel. I find GPT "boring" to work with but it's a steady hand and there's really nothing I throw at it that it can't do. And yeah, I am supplementing with GLM 5.2 and have actually found it quite complimentary. One of Codex's weaknesses is "excessive staging" -- basically it's quite cautious and pushes a very incremental approach. This is good for working in an established codebase (which most work is anyways). But for yeeting new projects, Claude always shone better for me (though it often left a mess of race conditions and unhandled negative cases that I had to clean up by hand or with codex) GLM actually does pretty well in this regard, with the right prompting. It's more "creative" than GPT.
logravia 3mo ago
The more interesting question is why would you at any point ever extend any goodwill to an unbounded corporate entity? Whenever you are faced with a corpo you should conceptualize it as a system that will happily mow you over for increased profits, unless it is legally bound to not prioritize profits above everything else and its structural incentives push it in a pro-social direction.
- dofm 3mo ago
  It is weird how IT people either forget, or don't know, that the only reason we have PCs as a standard is that IBM insisted AMD also be able to make the x86 architecture so that they had two possible suppliers. People do like to join corporate brand loyalty teams, which just seems to me like a way to guarantee disappointment. I've used a Mac essentially continuously for 28 years. Always the not-quite cheapest, often secondhand, and always in the context of a job that required deep understanding of Linux; the Mac itself offers complementary, somewhat overlapping tools. Macs never quite frustrate me more than the alternatives, but I maintain an interest in possible alternatives, and at any point if switching made a fundamental difference, I'd switch. I have found a Windows convertible tablet to be a better lightweight travel companion than a Mac or an iPad, and I have a solid, reliable Kubuntu machine on my desk. IMO as a professional tech user you should always have options, and you should often re-evaluate those options wherever you can do that at no real cost.
rarisma 3mo ago
Their api stability genuinely makes no sense, how are they a near trillion dollar company with models so good they are treated as weapons yet have almost no 9's of uptime. If agi why not agi shaped?
- vanviegen 3mo ago
  Reliability issues occuring in the hypergrowth stage of a company's lifetime has always been pretty common, way before agents were involved in the scaling. And that was for products for which the computational load for a single client was negligible. For inference though, even a single client's load is pretty terrifying.
sergiotapia 3mo ago
Anthropic's behavior is why I don't use their models or advocate for them anymore. They behave icky, like a tick trying to suck the blood from everyones public web contributions THEN lock down everything THEN attempt to legislate open source. If you're a software engineer you should do your best to advocate for more open tools and treat this company as radioactive. Opencode/Pi/ohmypi are much better than claude code. And with models like GLM/Kimi/Qwen you can get really really far. Add in a design tool like Paper so your AI can "see" what it's designing and you can close the gap incredibly tight. Try it and free yourself.
SoftTalker 3mo ago
> enshittification, vendor lock in Their only options. They have to eventually show a return on the investment bonfire that they have been burning. This is apparently all they are teaching at business school now, since it seems to be what almost all companies are doing. In another year the open source models will be good enough for almost anything. When your choices are a Cadillac or a bicycle, a lot of people will take the Cadillac. When you add in the option of a Hyundai, that gets the job done for a huge number of needs.
phyzix5761 3mo ago
There seems to be a smear campaign against Anthropic ever since the DoD incident.
- solenoid0937 3mo ago
  OpenAI has a $8B PR budget. Makes you wonder if they'd spend any of that on social media. I saw a guy trashing Anthropic on Threads the other day, looked up his LinkedIn and he worked for OpenAI in PR.
  - ArchieT4 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - bigyabai 3mo ago
    People use Threads? Seems like an empty place to do native marketing.
  - aryehof 3mo ago
    > OpenAI has a $8B PR budget No. It is the primarily the cost of providing their free service.
sunnybeetroot 3mo ago
I don’t get the comparison images; they’re of Claude’s start up and open code’s code diff and the author then claims that they prefer open code’s based off those images.
- raheelrjunaid 3mo ago
  You're correct and if I showed Claude Code's diff, it would still just be an inline editor. I prefer OpenCode for its sidebar UI and that it isn't riddled with unresolved issues.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
solenoid0937 3mo ago
Anthropic bad! Straight to the top of HN please!
ToucanLoucan 3mo ago
They stole the entire internet to create tools with the explicit goal of taking away people's ability to earn a living. The fact that they have goodwill to lose at all is a testament to our unbelievably short attention spans.
shermantanktop 3mo ago
Comparisons to Microsoft’s monopoly power are pretty lame when Anthropic’s hold on the market is so tenuous. How many businesses are actually dependent on Claude? As in - Anthropic’s pricing or licensing changes can kill their business? How many developers are “Claude developers” and can’t be effective with other tools? This discussion is full of people saying they won’t use Claude anymore, and presumably some of them will actually do that. That’s good, there are alternatives.
hbn 3mo ago
Feels weird to be complaining about this stuff when all of these AI companies are still haemorrhaging money to offer these services. You can say it's inconvenient but it's hard to argue they're being greedy when they do these things to merely lose a little bit less money on every subscription they sell.
- solenoid0937 3mo ago
  Harder to make a spicy article if you can't argue the companies are greedy.
- JeremyNT 3mo ago
  > You can say it's inconvenient but it's hard to argue they're being greedy when they do these things to merely lose a little bit less money on every subscription they sell. TFA is probably overly inflammatory but it's worth pointing out how this loss leader cycle works. These companies are not your friends, they're burning VC money to subsidize services before the eventual rug pull, enshittification is coming.
trentnix 3mo ago
For companies that supposedly are worth trillions, Anthropic and their competitors sure have awfully weak moats.
andai 3mo ago
[dead]
wartywhoa23 3mo ago
> To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. I’m only against unethical companies with anti-consumer practices, and the perpetrators behind them. No need to picture general anti-AI stance as some kind of herecy to be punished by the Inquisition Of The Holy Progress.
ArchieT4 3mo ago
[dead]
andai 3mo ago
Anthropic's behavior regarding restricting the subscription to their own products is rational, and matches Google's behavior on this front too. I spent a few weeks in the OpenClaw Discord and there was a competitive sport there where people were posting screenshots of how many hundreds of billions of tokens they were burning per day. It was like what I saw a while back with people on r/DataHoarder abusing the unlimited free storage plans and putting petabytes of torrents onto them. (Well, not technically abusing ;) --- EDIT: Oh my goodness and I forgot the black market for Anthropic tokens (70-90% discounted, which seems to strongly imply they come from the subscriptions) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5paRa6E5rCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5paRa6E5rCM --- That being said it does also of course make normal users sad. (My harness uses less tokens than Claude Code! But I'm not allowed to use it, because we can't have nice things.) Don't quote me on this but I recall (in March?) OpenAI saying it's totally cool to use your sub with 3rd party stuff, on like the same day when Anthropic was being grilled hard for their changes. (Never interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake!) I don't know if they can keep that up though, now that the VC money apparently ran out and everyone needs to actually become profitable overnight.
Amir6 3mo ago
It's been almost 3 weeks since my Claude account has been suspended with ZERO explanation. They initially gave an appeal review timeline of 10 days which has long passed and again no accountability or even an estimated date. Please be careful putting your trust and professional life on such tools! More details below; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861
movpasd 3mo ago
I don't expect technology companies to do the right thing by the consumer. There is a niche for companies or NGOs that manage to stick to their core mission, but the incentive structure for software (very high capital cost, near zero marginal cost, huge opportunities for rent-seeking) is just always going to push them to these behaviours. It's not a conspiracy theory, either. VCs deliberately bank on this --- they have to if they want to get return on investment. By all means, put pressure on companies who are doing this. Public opinion does matter. But the fundamentals are just not going to change without regulation. It is a tough nut to crack.
Barbing 3mo ago
This post is now number 83 on the third page (at +3hr). When I commented on it earlier, it was near the top of the first page. A result of lots of flagging? Edit: Compare to the fourth article on the front page: 4. - Road to Elm 1.0 (elm-lang.org) | 181 points, 4 hours ago This more recent post has 219 points.
novoreorx 3mo ago
There's one thing you forgot to mention, that Fable would be taken down tomorrow :(

247 points by raheelrjunaid 3mo ago

Not sure why this was flagged, Anthropic has obviously been burning bridges. I thought this line was funny though: > If you want to autocomplete, like I do, you don’t need Fable, or even Opus; Sonnet works fine. It reads like "if you want to go to the grocery store, you don't need a space shuttle, or even a SR-71 Blackbird; a Cessna works fine."

raheelrjunaid 3mo ago
I agree that without context, Sonnet is overkill for just autocomplete code suggestions. My point later in that section is that to have an autocomplete mindset (where an AI is a helpful tool rather than a driver), you only need a decent subset of models, not the best of the best.
gruez 3mo ago
Sounds like the author is using "autocomplete" as a derogatory way of referring to LLMs in general (eg. "LLMs can't code, they're just autocomplete on steroids")
- stingraycharles 3mo ago
  Then the author needs to be more specific because there are special models for code autocomplete that are much faster.
  - jboss10 3mo ago
    For people who saw this and might want a recomendation, I like running a tiny qwen model with llama cpp. Qwen2.5 coder 0.5B or 1.5B (not the instruct version) On a modern-ish GPU these should run really fast with little latency. They cost nothing and don't send your data to anyone.
- wmorgan 3mo ago
  It’s talking about how you can type def frobQux(Qux qux, int radians) { And it goes and reads your code and suggests a reasonable way to frob a qux a certain number of radians. Which is at the same time (a) pretty useful!, (b) fairly new, we’ve only been able to do this since 2023 or so, but (c) also not that hard by 2026 standards because capabilities have advanced so much in the last three years.
  - stingraycharles 3mo ago
    Why would anyone be using Fable, Opus or even Sonnet for that type of work? You don’t need an advanced reasoning model for that at all.
    - noduerme 3mo ago
      If you already knew that the answer was to frob a qux, you wouldn't need the reasoning trash either.
    - dcrazy 3mo ago
      Generative autocomplete with an underpowered model is pretty annoying. It hallucinates parameters and APIs. Something like Sonnet seems like the right level of sophistication.
    - tasuki 3mo ago
      > Why would anyone be using Fable, Opus or even Sonnet for that type of work? You don’t need an advanced reasoning model for that at all. Don't leave me hanging: how do you frob a qux a certain number of radians?
  - jefftk 3mo ago
    "int radians" is a pretty strong code smell! I would be very worried about any struggle l autocomplete that followed something like that ;)
- spongebobism 3mo ago
  > To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. [...] If you want to autocomplete [...] But if you want to use FOSS trusted tools like Zed, OpenCode, Pi, Nanocoder, etc. [...] isn't he just contrasting 2 use cases of LLMs?
uberman 3mo ago
While I did not flag this, it is clearly a hit piece. Why write an article to publish in July that does not include June data? Unless of course one looks at June uptime and finds that does not align with their story.
- Barbing 3mo ago
  In June, I figure Anthropic subscriptions were partially powered by those big mobile gas generators that are pushed around the xAI parking lots. Makes sense availability improved.
- raheelrjunaid 3mo ago
  I began writing this article a while back and forgot to update the screenshot. The June uptime has significantly improved, but that may not always be the case
tmtvl 3mo ago
Are you saying that using LLMs for code autocomplete is like using an aeroplane to go to the grocery store? Because clearly there was no autocomplete before the new AI spring.

sscaryterry 3mo ago

The lawsuits will come, paying the piper is inevitable.

imglorp 3mo ago
Who would sue, and on what ground? They basically gave stuff away for free and now they're speed-running enshittification. The end state will be an abusive, adversarial, fully monetized, vendor lockin experience like Oracle or Broadcom. Nobody is forced to play.
- cthor 3mo ago
  Switching costs are still low. Anthropic can only do this while they maintain frontier status, and while they do, they can charge whatever they want. An Oracle or Broadcom would fall behind and lose all its customers in an instant.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]

philipwhiuk 3mo ago

> Each changelog entry has a bug fix in almost every release, which is a sign of reliable and stable software! This is a non-sequitur. Most consumer apps don't even list all the bugfixes.

bakies 3mo ago

Think I'm about to switch. I can't build the automations i'm trying to with claude code anymore. Since they locked away the non-interactive usage and channels can't be used without interacting with the console on startup. I had a good web interface for running CC in containers in k8s but I think it's time to bail out and build around a codex subscription and pi.dev now. I have local models hooked up to pi dev and that's working well. Had it build itself Channels equivalent so agents can talk to each other and receive webhooks. I bet Anthropic will build these things into their ecosystem eventually, but I want it now and running on my cloud. Edit: I forgot they also don't let me use remote control (which isn't that good anyway) with a oauth key in the env var! So i have to get on a terminal and do the whole login flow for my containerized agents. Massive pain, so lame.

lioeters 3mo ago
It reminds me of people who built businesses on top of APIs provided by Facebook, Reddit, etc. One day the company decides to rug pull the public interface, either to replace it with their own competing product or nothing at all. The anti-competitive pratice makes sense but what I don't understand is the latter case, which is common, where the company is just removing possibilities of how users can participate in their ecosystem and platform. Not only destroying third-party opportunities for profit, but not even providing their own alternative.
- rapsey 3mo ago
  Wasn't facebooks pull a result of the huge Cambridge analytica scandal.
  - watwut 3mo ago
    Afaik no. That scandal was not about their public api.
  - disgruntledphd2 3mo ago
    No, but the original data leak occurred because of their really open API.

tekacs 3mo ago

It worth noting that – just to add to the confusion – they apparently cancelled the June 15th change just before it was due to go live: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-claude-agent-sdk-with-your-claude-plan https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau... https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-backs-off-unpopular-billing-overhaul-as-price-war-with-openai-looms/ https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-backs-off-unpopular-billin... So... maybe we can still use third party harnesses with Claude Code subscriptions... for now? Until they change their mind again?

ac29 3mo ago
> So... maybe we can still use third party harnesses with Claude Code subscriptions... for now? The way I read this is: yes, if the third party harness uses Anthropic's Agent SDK. Most of them do not, AFAIK, and are still against ToS (though maybe its not enforced for now)
- tekacs 3mo ago
  I believe you're right and I'm familiar with the actual distinction – the confusion is mostly about how they _feel_ about it, and what'll change from here.
- btown 3mo ago
  Something that many don't realize is that Claude Desktop and the Agent SDK are both just wrappers around pools of CLI instances, literally running `claude --input-format stream-json --output-format stream-json`. So this wasn't even about third-party harnesses that replace the toolset Claude has access to, and try to call the Claude API with subsidized credentials. No, this was literally a blessing for their desktop UI's over others, all driving Claude Code's CLI at the end of the day. To the broader point, it's hard not to see that as arbitrary and borderline spyware. Software that sniffs the context in which it's executed and uses that to phone home about billing is the type of thing you'd expect from the most corporate parts of the gaming industry, not a frontier lab, but here we are.
  - 3mo ago

m_ke 3mo ago

It's looking like Anthropic is realizing that they're about to get squeezed so they need to juice revenue for their IPO before it becomes obvious to everyone else. Open models like GLM 5.2 are getting good enough to handle 90% of tasks, and will eat most of their usage unless they start serving it at cost. And on the 1% work they fearmongered their way into falling under government control, which will limit how much they can commercialize the frontier. Nobody will keep paying their premiums and put up with their BS when they can have similar models at cost of inference in any harness that they want.

hnlmorg 3mo ago
> Open models like GLM 5.2 are getting good enough to handle 90% of tasks, and will eat most of their usage unless they start serving it at cost. Most people either don’t have the money to buy hardware to run open models and/or don’t have the utilisation to make renting cost effective.
- Systemerror7A69 3mo ago
  GLM 5.2 is monstrous in size, no one is running that on their own hardware. But it's a very competitively priced model other providers can offer (since it's open) so it's a much cheaper alternative than claude in practice. I assume that is what they meant.
- Aeolos 3mo ago
  Fortunately, multiple model providers are offering open weights models at significantly lower prices than closed models.
- m_ke 3mo ago
  https://openrouter.ai/models https://openrouter.ai/models you can use these in hermes, cursor, openclaw, opencode, etc with 2 lines of config that claude code will happily do for you if you ask GLM 5.2, deepseek 4 Flash and the newly released Hy3 are Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 level models at a tiny fraction of the cost. I'm on the $200 claude plan and blew through my weekly limits with Fable in a day, then ended up wasting $20 with opus 4.8 overages in an hour to finish out work in active sessions. Since then I've been using GLM 5.2 with openrouter + opencode and am spending less than $5/day for equivalent output.

iterateoften 3mo ago

Anthropic takes every chance they make not only to behave suspicious and anti-consumer but also announce that they are acting in ways that hurt you while telling you it’s a feature. Fable returning wrong answers if it suspects the topic is sensative is the ultimate icing on the huge cake of lies and gaslighting they’ve been baking the past 6 months.

karahime 3mo ago
It's the nature of the safetyist position. It creates everything that it claims to avoid (duplicitous behavior, misaligned outputs, unresponsive systems).
mwigdahl 3mo ago
> Fable returning wrong answers if it suspects the topic is sensative Citation, please? On the original release they downgraded models silently to Opus 4.8 when they suspected it was being used for LLM development, but they stopped doing that. Now when you hit one of the guardrail subjects it downgrades to Opus 4.8 visibly in all cases. I've never seen anything suggesting they're deliberately returning wrong answers. Maybe you're thinking of Gemini's anti-distillation tech?
datakan 3mo ago
I haven't seen leadership this bad since the late 90's. I'm pretty sure at this point that Claude could run the company better than Dario.

baron3dl 3mo ago

I do find it challenging to understand what the TOS/AUP allow and not, and what qualifies for subscription and not. If I somehow muster confidence in my interpretation, I continue to doubt that it will be stable over even the short term.

tomaytotomato 3mo ago

I have been using Claude code for a while and have recently migrated to Pi Migrating my skills/agents and config was fairly straightforward. Pi's agent harness seems to be more responsive and quicker than CC (perhaps with the prompt caching and squashing it does behind the scenes) Tempted to do a write-up on migration. I am only using Pi with Github Copilot as I am scared I will get my Claude account banned if I use the Oauth with Pi. pi.dev

dsrtslnd23 3mo ago
what is the current statement on Oauth Claude use with Pi. I remember there was some back and forth from Anthropic? I currently use my Claude sub with Pi.
- tomaytotomato 3mo ago
  No idea, Anyone from Anthropic here who could answer this?
spudlyo 3mo ago
Pi is the first, and and only agent I've ever seriously used, which I picked up after watching one of Marco Zechner's talks about it. His design approach and vision for pi resonated with me, and I've pretty much used it every day since. I, like Marco, am also a grumpy old person, so that might have had something to do with it. I have my own customizations for things like fuzzy autocompleting the name of Emacs buffers and symbols from my project's TAGS file, and a handful of skills. It's a pleasure to work with, and so far it's been my experience that if pi doesn't behave the way I want, it's pretty easy to modify to suit my needs. OpenAI, as much as I dislike them, seems to be the only big AI lab that doesn't care what agent harness you use, so that's where my $100 a month goes.
- tasuki 3mo ago
  FYI the name is Mario Zechner[0]. I'm also grumpy and old and also use Pi for the same reasons as you. I also use an OpenAI subscription (the models aren't entirely bad), but am ready to jump ship to OpenCode Go or GLM Coding Plan any minute. And I've been watching the Claude Code shitshow with glee! [0]: https://mariozechner.at/ https://mariozechner.at/

jdw64 3mo ago

I agree with everything in this post, but that doesn't mean I want to go back to a life without Claude Code. I've been working alone all this time, and finally it feels like I have someone to talk to

mamsouuu 3mo ago
Sounds like Claude Code is not what you're looking for
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

mesmertech 3mo ago

As long as they have the best model they can afford to lose goodwill. People who don't wanna spend too much on LLMs and are trying to optimize whats subsidized even on the Max plans are customers Anthropic is honestly better off without.

lelanthran 3mo ago
That's like saying as long as expensive cars are faster than cheaper cars, the expensive manufacturer can afford losing goodwill. We have yet to see any company use Fablr to increase their profits. Until and unless you can increase your profits with the expensive models, it makes no sense to pay for them. IOW, the expensive AI providers only draw is goodwill.

Zababa 3mo ago

>Dario and Boris have us convinced that “coding is solved” with their loops. But microwaves didn’t solve cooking. If you want a look at the timeline where the microwave solved cooking, this was an interesting article: https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/my-journey-to-the-microwave-alternate https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/my-journey-to-the-microwav.... You can apparently sear meat with a microwave (provided you have the necessary pan).

rho4 3mo ago
Haha thanks for that article (I microwave most of my meals). I wonder if this statement from the article will apply to AI: > Second, microwave cooking fell victim to the same curse that threatens every new easy-to-use technology: it became low-status tech.
- Zababa 3mo ago
  Oh that's an interesting parallel

elzbardico 3mo ago

Complaining about external providers not supporting the subsidized prices Claude charge to its subscribers makes no sense. Of course, Claude Code subscription is a loss leader, it is an offering built to create a market for a new product in a very competitive environment in the hopes of capturing a dominant market position with a fully validated product with a healthy demand from business. Of course they won't give you thousands of dollars of inference for a couple hundred bucks without making sure you're properly tied to their walled garden. Yeah, of course Dario and any other Anthropic spoke person will vastly exaggerate the capabilities of their product and promote vibe coding and now "loop engineering", just like Coca-Cola would love for you to drink gallons of Diet Coke everyday, just like Oracle some twenty ago promoted for Enterprises that they could just use Oracle Databases to serve web applications right from the DB, as this would force you to use more CPUs and Oracle DB is licensed by core. The business model for inference is metered usage, more usage => mode money. Again, the subscription model is just a bump in the road to acquire customers, once you're metered, the more you use, the better for anthropic. Why people get surprised with that stuff?

jelling 3mo ago
> Why people get surprised with that stuff? Whenever you don't understand how people can think things on the internet, consider that they might be younger than you. They may not be, but it makes the world far less rage inducing. None of us are born knowing everything.
lelanthran 3mo ago
> Of course, Claude Code subscription is a loss leader, it is an offering built to create a market for a new product in a very competitive environment in the hopes of capturing a dominant market position with a fully validated product with a healthy demand from business. I agree that this is their goal. The reason that people don't understand why Anthropic wont let the subscription be used with other harnesses is because they believe that this hope of Anthropic is just that: a hope. I personally don't believe that a harness is a moat.
- wgd 3mo ago

supermatt 3mo ago

> Your Claude subscription—which is a cheaper version of the Anthropic API—is restricted to use with the Claude Code CLI/Desktop, Claude CoWork, or @Claude in Slack. Thats not true at all. You can use the Agent SDK [1], which uses your subscription [2]. I use it via ACP [3] with custom system prompts and tooling. I have found it very powerful and flexible. It has its own agent loop, of course, so maybe thats the limitation using it with opencode? [1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview [2] They were talking about giving credits for the SDK usage rather than it using your allowance directly, but that seems to have been put on hold for now. If and when that changes, I will likely jump ship, but I am more than happy with it right now. [3] there isn't an official ACP wrapper - zed have one but its quite limited. its trivial to build one though, or you can just use the SDK directly and wire it into your interface of choice.

bakies 3mo ago
The fun part is they planned for this to change to API pricing. When they announced that I started shifting off claude code immediately so I could keep my custom tooling. Damage is done. I won't build up around claude code or agent sdk any longer because I expect this to change. The announcement says they're "pausing" the change so expect this and avoid the lock-in! linked by another comment: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-claude-agent-sdk-with-your-claude-plan https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...
raheelrjunaid 3mo ago
You're correct, but my point was that it was going to shift to API pricing. Although it looks like that's been put on hold as others have pointed out.

haktan 3mo ago

How do you use API keys with Claude subscription? I can't see any keys at claude.ai settings. Only panel I could find was behind another login and it didn't have a subscription option.

auspiv 3mo ago
you don't. they are distinct entities. https://platform.claude.com https://platform.claude.com -> api keys

Grombobulous 3mo ago

I think this article is contradictory of the reality that Anthropic is picking up B2B marketshare like crazy, recently overtaking OpenAI. I wouldn’t call Fable “enshittification.” Anthropic knows what they have. I’m looking around for the article with the marketshare chart over time and I’ll update my comment if I find it. This is the closest article I could find, though the one I had read earlier had a nice graph and was updated to 2026: https://chatforest.com/guides/anthropic-overtakes-openai-enterprise-market-share/ https://chatforest.com/guides/anthropic-overtakes-openai-ent... Here’s a decent one: https://menlovc.com/perspective/2025-the-state-of-generative-ai-in-the-enterprise/ https://menlovc.com/perspective/2025-the-state-of-generative... LLM Market Share: Anthropic Extends Its Lead in the Enterprise

zeppelin_7 3mo ago

Btw, they are also getting aggressive with bans. Furthermore the process to repeal is broken in the UI, and there is no way to get support

internet2000 3mo ago

They're subsidizing their tokens as long as you use their software. That's a fair exchange, I never understood why people took issue with it. If you don't want to get locked in to Claude Code, you can pay more. Just like you can pay more for an unlocked non-carrier subsidized phone. (Which I personally do.)

lfuller 3mo ago
In Canada at least it’s not legal to charge for unlocking a carrier-locked phone as it’s considered anti-competitive.
cyberax 3mo ago
This method of bundling should be illegal in general, as it stiffles competition.
- jack_pp 3mo ago
  How does it stifle competition / innovation? You can use other harnesses, pay API for anthropic models or cheap chinese models. You're just upset that you don't get to use their VC money the way you want to use it lol. It either is a good deal or it isn't, if it is just say, thanks free VC money, if it isn't say fuck you.
  - thfuran 3mo ago
    Any service or product delivered at a loss seems pretty plainly anti-competetive. Whether it is actually subsidized to that extent, I’m not sure.
    - dcrazy 3mo ago
      The entire LLMaaS industry is priced below cost. Even if the marginal cost of electricity and bandwidth to produce one token is less than the price of that token, the amortized infrastructure and R&D costs make the entire venture unprofitable. If pricing below cost were illegal, it would essentially make starting up a business—any business—impossible.

rvz 3mo ago

> As of writing, Claude Code CLI only has around 9100 open Github issues, with small unresolved issues like it completely freezing for the last 6+ months or a screen flickering issue open for more than a year. But surely those fully autonomous coding loops will solve all those 9,100+ open issues on GitHub? Why haven't they? What happened to Claude's C Compiler [0], or that browser "built from scratch" by Cursor? [1] Why aren't the agents maintaining it if they are supposed to be cheaper than humans? > But why do they have us by the balls? Dario and Boris have us convinced that “coding is solved” with their loops. But microwaves didn’t solve cooking. They have you by the balls if you allow them to, if you continue to listen to their bullshit. Both of them are essentially salesmen at this point. They don't care if they are wrong and will sell Claude to whoever is thinking of planning the next mass layoff. Their definition of "AGI" is different to yours. The correct answer to all of this pricing nonsense that Anthropic and others are doing is local open weight models that you run on your own machine. They know this and powerful local models undercut their entire business model if hosted by others or if a smaller local model matches the performance of larger ones. [1] https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler [0] https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender

khurs 3mo ago
>But surely those fully autonomous coding loops will solve all those 9,100+ open issues on GitHub? Why haven't they? Shhh, you may pop the bubble and cause the collapse of the US economy.
killix 3mo ago
[flagged]

ngriffiths 3mo ago

One way of reading this is an article about how good Anthropic's product is. "Look at how many serious flaws users have been willing to accept in order to keep using this thing"

m_ke 3mo ago
Model is the product, people will put up with anything as long as you're on the pareto frontier of performance x cost.
skydhash 3mo ago
Work as long as you’re the only one (or the few) in town. Nad giving it for free (or nearly free). I have Cursor and when I use it, I keep it to auto, never caring about which model I use.
anematode 3mo ago
It also contextualizes the urgency of their attempts at regulatory capture. Once Chinese models have the same capabilities, there's almost no reason not to use them.
gck1 3mo ago
IF they were light years ahead of competition, then that would make sense and would be a perfectly valid strategy. But it's not, so you're burning very important bridges that you may need in 3-4 months.
- ngriffiths 3mo ago
  Fair, but it's hard because falling behind on the models themselves is a killer. Maybe they're saying they can't spend resources on anything except staying ahead.

mococa 3mo ago

It was so good when it was possible to use Claude subscription on OpenCode. Nowadays I went from Claude 20x to 5x and been using the GLM model on OpenCode... No regrets.

cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
Codex GPT sub works perfect in opencode FWIW. But actually their own codex harness is quite decent on its own and doesn't have the quality issues or bloat that Claude Code does. Native Rust and open source. And in fact I've got a configuration here to point it at GLM which I also use (via Neuralwatt subscription) in addition to OpenAI's sub. I do not like opencode's philosophy on the clipboard, it tries to be too clever.
- imron 3mo ago
  Codex works great in opencode until it gets up to around 200k context. Then it starts doing things like: me: Can you implement the next thing OpenCode+Codex: Yep I'll do that next. <does nothing and returns to prompt> me: Well? OpenCode+Codex: <starts implementing> me: Looks good, let's fix this one issue. OpenCode+Codex: Sure let's do that. <does nothing and returns to prompt> me: <bangs head against wall> -- I've found the codex cli to be much better in this regard, it doesn't nearly derp out so much at higher token counts. Opus is still my favourite model (I've found 4.6 specifically gives me the best results in OpenCode), but with all the shenanigans Anthropic is pulling, Codex is a close enough substitute.
  - cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
    I went back and forth between the two for months, often having both in various proportions. But I had enough reliability issues with Anthropic back in March timeframe that I just threw in the towel. I find GPT "boring" to work with but it's a steady hand and there's really nothing I throw at it that it can't do. And yeah, I am supplementing with GLM 5.2 and have actually found it quite complimentary. One of Codex's weaknesses is "excessive staging" -- basically it's quite cautious and pushes a very incremental approach. This is good for working in an established codebase (which most work is anyways). But for yeeting new projects, Claude always shone better for me (though it often left a mess of race conditions and unhandled negative cases that I had to clean up by hand or with codex) GLM actually does pretty well in this regard, with the right prompting. It's more "creative" than GPT.

logravia 3mo ago

The more interesting question is why would you at any point ever extend any goodwill to an unbounded corporate entity? Whenever you are faced with a corpo you should conceptualize it as a system that will happily mow you over for increased profits, unless it is legally bound to not prioritize profits above everything else and its structural incentives push it in a pro-social direction.

dofm 3mo ago
It is weird how IT people either forget, or don't know, that the only reason we have PCs as a standard is that IBM insisted AMD also be able to make the x86 architecture so that they had two possible suppliers. People do like to join corporate brand loyalty teams, which just seems to me like a way to guarantee disappointment. I've used a Mac essentially continuously for 28 years. Always the not-quite cheapest, often secondhand, and always in the context of a job that required deep understanding of Linux; the Mac itself offers complementary, somewhat overlapping tools. Macs never quite frustrate me more than the alternatives, but I maintain an interest in possible alternatives, and at any point if switching made a fundamental difference, I'd switch. I have found a Windows convertible tablet to be a better lightweight travel companion than a Mac or an iPad, and I have a solid, reliable Kubuntu machine on my desk. IMO as a professional tech user you should always have options, and you should often re-evaluate those options wherever you can do that at no real cost.

rarisma 3mo ago

Their api stability genuinely makes no sense, how are they a near trillion dollar company with models so good they are treated as weapons yet have almost no 9's of uptime. If agi why not agi shaped?

vanviegen 3mo ago
Reliability issues occuring in the hypergrowth stage of a company's lifetime has always been pretty common, way before agents were involved in the scaling. And that was for products for which the computational load for a single client was negligible. For inference though, even a single client's load is pretty terrifying.

sergiotapia 3mo ago

Anthropic's behavior is why I don't use their models or advocate for them anymore. They behave icky, like a tick trying to suck the blood from everyones public web contributions THEN lock down everything THEN attempt to legislate open source. If you're a software engineer you should do your best to advocate for more open tools and treat this company as radioactive. Opencode/Pi/ohmypi are much better than claude code. And with models like GLM/Kimi/Qwen you can get really really far. Add in a design tool like Paper so your AI can "see" what it's designing and you can close the gap incredibly tight. Try it and free yourself.

SoftTalker 3mo ago

> enshittification, vendor lock in Their only options. They have to eventually show a return on the investment bonfire that they have been burning. This is apparently all they are teaching at business school now, since it seems to be what almost all companies are doing. In another year the open source models will be good enough for almost anything. When your choices are a Cadillac or a bicycle, a lot of people will take the Cadillac. When you add in the option of a Hyundai, that gets the job done for a huge number of needs.

phyzix5761 3mo ago

There seems to be a smear campaign against Anthropic ever since the DoD incident.

solenoid0937 3mo ago
OpenAI has a $8B PR budget. Makes you wonder if they'd spend any of that on social media. I saw a guy trashing Anthropic on Threads the other day, looked up his LinkedIn and he worked for OpenAI in PR.
- ArchieT4 3mo ago
  [dead]
- bigyabai 3mo ago
  People use Threads? Seems like an empty place to do native marketing.
- aryehof 3mo ago
  > OpenAI has a $8B PR budget No. It is the primarily the cost of providing their free service.

sunnybeetroot 3mo ago

I don’t get the comparison images; they’re of Claude’s start up and open code’s code diff and the author then claims that they prefer open code’s based off those images.

raheelrjunaid 3mo ago
You're correct and if I showed Claude Code's diff, it would still just be an inline editor. I prefer OpenCode for its sidebar UI and that it isn't riddled with unresolved issues.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

solenoid0937 3mo ago

Anthropic bad! Straight to the top of HN please!

ToucanLoucan 3mo ago

They stole the entire internet to create tools with the explicit goal of taking away people's ability to earn a living. The fact that they have goodwill to lose at all is a testament to our unbelievably short attention spans.

shermantanktop 3mo ago

Comparisons to Microsoft’s monopoly power are pretty lame when Anthropic’s hold on the market is so tenuous. How many businesses are actually dependent on Claude? As in - Anthropic’s pricing or licensing changes can kill their business? How many developers are “Claude developers” and can’t be effective with other tools? This discussion is full of people saying they won’t use Claude anymore, and presumably some of them will actually do that. That’s good, there are alternatives.

hbn 3mo ago

Feels weird to be complaining about this stuff when all of these AI companies are still haemorrhaging money to offer these services. You can say it's inconvenient but it's hard to argue they're being greedy when they do these things to merely lose a little bit less money on every subscription they sell.

solenoid0937 3mo ago
Harder to make a spicy article if you can't argue the companies are greedy.
JeremyNT 3mo ago
> You can say it's inconvenient but it's hard to argue they're being greedy when they do these things to merely lose a little bit less money on every subscription they sell. TFA is probably overly inflammatory but it's worth pointing out how this loss leader cycle works. These companies are not your friends, they're burning VC money to subsidize services before the eventual rug pull, enshittification is coming.

trentnix 3mo ago

For companies that supposedly are worth trillions, Anthropic and their competitors sure have awfully weak moats.

andai 3mo ago

[dead]

wartywhoa23 3mo ago

> To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. I’m only against unethical companies with anti-consumer practices, and the perpetrators behind them. No need to picture general anti-AI stance as some kind of herecy to be punished by the Inquisition Of The Holy Progress.

ArchieT4 3mo ago

[dead]

andai 3mo ago

Anthropic's behavior regarding restricting the subscription to their own products is rational, and matches Google's behavior on this front too. I spent a few weeks in the OpenClaw Discord and there was a competitive sport there where people were posting screenshots of how many hundreds of billions of tokens they were burning per day. It was like what I saw a while back with people on r/DataHoarder abusing the unlimited free storage plans and putting petabytes of torrents onto them. (Well, not technically abusing ;) --- EDIT: Oh my goodness and I forgot the black market for Anthropic tokens (70-90% discounted, which seems to strongly imply they come from the subscriptions) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5paRa6E5rCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5paRa6E5rCM --- That being said it does also of course make normal users sad. (My harness uses less tokens than Claude Code! But I'm not allowed to use it, because we can't have nice things.) Don't quote me on this but I recall (in March?) OpenAI saying it's totally cool to use your sub with 3rd party stuff, on like the same day when Anthropic was being grilled hard for their changes. (Never interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake!) I don't know if they can keep that up though, now that the VC money apparently ran out and everyone needs to actually become profitable overnight.

Amir6 3mo ago

It's been almost 3 weeks since my Claude account has been suspended with ZERO explanation. They initially gave an appeal review timeline of 10 days which has long passed and again no accountability or even an estimated date. Please be careful putting your trust and professional life on such tools! More details below; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861

movpasd 3mo ago

I don't expect technology companies to do the right thing by the consumer. There is a niche for companies or NGOs that manage to stick to their core mission, but the incentive structure for software (very high capital cost, near zero marginal cost, huge opportunities for rent-seeking) is just always going to push them to these behaviours. It's not a conspiracy theory, either. VCs deliberately bank on this --- they have to if they want to get return on investment. By all means, put pressure on companies who are doing this. Public opinion does matter. But the fundamentals are just not going to change without regulation. It is a tough nut to crack.

Barbing 3mo ago

This post is now number 83 on the third page (at +3hr). When I commented on it earlier, it was near the top of the first page. A result of lots of flagging? Edit: Compare to the fourth article on the front page: 4. - Road to Elm 1.0 (elm-lang.org) | 181 points, 4 hours ago This more recent post has 219 points.

novoreorx 3mo ago

There's one thing you forgot to mention, that Fable would be taken down tomorrow :(