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[HN Gopher] Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party ...
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Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients
Author : codesparkle
Score : 305 points
Date : 2026-01-12 10:57 UTC (1 days ago)
web link (archaeologist.dev)
w3m dump (archaeologist.dev)
| zzzeek wrote:
| "renowned vibe-coder Peter Steinberger"
|
| what? that's a thing ? why would a vibe coder be "renowned"? I
| use Claude every day but this is just too much.
| hakanderyal wrote:
| He is pretty popular in the AI/vibe coding niche on X and
| amassed a good following with his posts. Clearly the user is in
| the same bubble as him.
| eddyg wrote:
| He vibe-coded Clawdbot and lots of people are spinning up their
| own.
|
| https://clawd.bot/ https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot
|
| He's also the guy behind https://github.com/steipete/oracle/
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Isnt claude code more popular than codex?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yeah I think Anthropic has the "right" to do this. That's fine.
|
| But they also have shown a weakness by failing to understand why
| people might _want_ to do this (use their Max membership with
| OpenCode etc instead).
|
| People aren't using opencode or crush with their Claude Code
| memberships because they're trying to exploit or overuse tokens
| or something. That isn't possible.
|
| They do it because Claude Code the tool itself is full of bugs
| and has performance issues, and OpenCode is of higher quality,
| has more open (surprise) development, is more responsive to bug
| fixes, and gives them far more knobs and dials to control how it
| works.
|
| I use Claude Code quite a bit and there isn't a session that goes
| by where I don't bump into a sharp edge of some kind. Notorious
| terminal rendering issues, slow memory leaks, or compaction
| related bugs that took them _3 months_ to fix...
|
| Failure to deal with quality issues and listen to customers is
| hardly a good sign of company culture, leading up to IPO... If
| they're trying to build a moat... this isn't a strong way to do
| it.
|
| If you want to own the market and have complete control at the
| tooling level, you're simply going to have to make a better
| product. With their mountain of cash and army of engineers at
| their disposal ... they absolutely _could_. But they 're not.
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| Meh. I've never used my x20 Max account in OpenCode because the
| Oauth solution was clearly "hacky".
|
| But to me the appeal of OpenCode is that I can mix and match
| APIs and local models. I have DeepSeek R1 doing research while
| KLM is planning and doing code reviews and o4 mini breaking
| down screenshots into specs while local QWEN is doing the work.
|
| My experience with bugs has also been the exact opposite of
| what you described.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| KLM the airline ;) ? Or do you mean GLM?
|
| And you let local QWEN write the code for you? Is the output
| any good or comparable to frontier models?
| pella wrote:
| > _" For me personally, I have decided I will never be an
| Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a
| company that takes its customers for granted."_
|
| The best pressure on companies comes from viable alternatives,
| not from boycotts that leave you without tools altogether.
| nicce wrote:
| The context is here that Anthropic tried to suppress
| alternatives. Boycott works here because there are
| alternatives, like writer addressed.
| pella wrote:
| If "never" means never, you are not leverage, you are just
| gone.
| nicce wrote:
| "Just gone" is the biggest leverage against business? Note
| that boycott is usually conditional. If they change things,
| the customer might come back.
| pella wrote:
| If "never" means never ...
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| > For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic
| customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that
| takes its customers for granted.
|
| Archaeologist.dev Made a Big Mistake
|
| If guided by this morality column, Archaeologist should
| immediately stop using pretty-much anything they are using in
| their life. There's no company today that doesn't have their
| hands dirty. The life is a dance between choosing the least bad
| option, not radically cutting off any sight of "bad".
| nwienert wrote:
| A good example of an extremely small but extremely vocal minority
| doing their best to punish a company for not catering to their
| explicitly disallowed use case for no reason other than they want
| it. I'd bet this has 0 negative impact on their business.
| jsumrall wrote:
| illegal?
| nwienert wrote:
| my 3am writing tends to be less precise, updated
| joelthelion wrote:
| 650,000 monthly active users is not "extremely small". I wonder
| how many total users Claude Code has?
| nwienert wrote:
| I'm referring to the ones willing to cancel, especially ones
| who also feel the need to make a public statement about it.
| And I'd guess your number is high % churn, and even still CC
| is much higher.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| That seems a bit dramatic.
|
| What I learned from all this is that OpenAI is willing to offer
| a service compatible with my preferred workflow/method of
| billing and Anthropic clearly is not. That's fine but
| disappointing, I'm keeping my Codex subscription and letting my
| Claude subscription lapse but sure, it would be nice if
| Anthropic changed their mind to keep that option available
| because yes, I do want it.
|
| I'm a bit perplexed by some comments describing the situation
| like OpenCode users were getting something for free and
| stealing from CC users when the plan quota was enforced either
| way and were paying the same amount for it. Or why you seem to
| think this post pointing out that Anthropic's direct competitor
| endorses that method of subscription usage is somehow malicious
| or manipulative behavior.
|
| Commerce is a two-way street and customers giving
| feedback/complaining/cancelling when something changes is
| normal and healthy for competition. As evidenced by OpenAI
| immediately jumping in to support OpenCode users on Codex
| without needing to break their TOS.
| nwienert wrote:
| Idk if I disagree with anything you're saying, I'm just
| saying it's a very small minority that and are upset enough
| to both cancel and announce they are cancelling their
| subscription is all.
|
| I think I just understand that companies only offer heavily
| subsidized services in return for something - in this case
| Anthropic gets a few things - to tell investors how many
| daily actives are on CC, and a % of CC users opting into data
| sharing. Plus control of their UX, more feedback on their
| product, future opportunities to show messages, etc. It's
| really just obvious and normal and I don't get why anyone
| would be upset that they removed OC access.
| kentonv wrote:
| I mean... I don't like it either but this is pretty standard
| stuff and it's obvious why they're doing it.
|
| Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok are all more or less on par
| with each other, or a couple months behind at most. Chinese open
| models are also not far behind.
|
| There's nothing inherent to these products to make them "sticky".
| If your tooling is designed for it, you can trivially switch
| models at any time. Mid-conversation, even. And it just works.
|
| When you have basically equivalent products with no switching
| cost, you have perfect competition. They are all commodities. And
| that means: none of them can make a profit. It's a basic law of
| economics.
|
| If they can't make a profit, no matter how revolutionary the tech
| is, their valuation is not justified, and they will be in big
| trouble when people figure this out.
|
| So they need to make the product sticky somehow. So they:
|
| 1. Add a subscription payment model. Once you are paying a
| subscription fee, then the calculus on switching changes: if you
| only maintain one subscription, you have a strong reason to stick
| with it for everything.
|
| 2. Force you to use their client app, which only talks to their
| model, so you can't even try other models without changing your
| whole workflow, which most people won't bother to do.
|
| These are bog standard tactics across the tech industry and
| beyond for limiting competitive pressure.
|
| Everyone is mad about #2 but honestly I'm more mad about #1. The
| best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers
| strictly provided usage-based API pricing, which makes switching
| easy. But right now the subscription prices offer an enormous
| discount over API pricing, which just shows how much they are
| really desperate to create some sort of stickiness. The
| subscriptions don't even provide the "peace of mind" benefit that
| Spotify-like subscription models provide, where you don't have to
| worry about usage, because they still have enforced usage limits
| that people regularly hit. It's just purely a discount offered
| for locking yourself in.
|
| But again I can't really be _that_ mad because _of course_ they
| are doing this, not doing it would be terrible business strategy.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I'm not "mad", I'm "sad" -- because I was very much on "Team
| Anthropic" a few months ago ... but the tool has failed to keep
| up in terms of quality.
|
| If they're going to close the sub off to other tools, they need
| to make very strong improvements to the tool. And I don't
| really see that. It's "fine" but I actually think these tools
| are _letting developers down_.
|
| They take over too much. They fail to give good insights into
| what's happening. They have poor stop/interrupt/correct
| dynamics. They don't properly incorporate a basic _review
| cycle_ which is something we demand of junior developers and
| interns on our teams, but somehow not our AIs?
|
| They're producing mountains of sometimes-good but often
| unreviewable code and it isn't the "AI"'s fault, it's the
| heuristics in the tools.
|
| So I want to see innovation here. And I was hoping to see it
| from Anthropic. But I just saw the opposite.
| kentonv wrote:
| There is so much low-hanging fruit in the tooling side right
| now. There's no way Anthropic alone can stay ahead of it all
| -- we need lots of different teams trying different things.
|
| I myself have been building a special-purpose vibe-coding
| environment and it's just astounding how easy it is to get
| great results by trying totally random ideas that are just
| trivial to implement.
|
| Lots of companies are hoping to _win_ here by creating the
| tool that everyone uses, but I think that 's folly. The more
| likely outcome is that there are a million niche tools and
| everyone is using something different. That means nobody ends
| up with a giant valuation, and open source tools can compete
| easily. Bad for business, great for users.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yep. And in a way this has always been the story. It's why
| there's just so few companies making $$ in the pure
| devtooling space.
|
| I have no idea what JetBrain's financials are like, but I
| doubt they're raking in huge $$ despite having very good
| tools & unfortunately their attempts to keep abreast of the
| AI wave have been middling.
|
| Basically, I need Claude Code with a proper review phase
| built in. I need it to slow-the-fuck-down and work with me
| more closely instead of shooting mountains of text at me
| and making me jam on the escape key over and over (and
| shout WTF I didn't ask for that!) at least twice a day.
|
| IHMO these are not professional SWE tools right now. I use
| them on hobby projects but struggle to integrate them into
| professional day jobs where I have to be responsible in a
| code review for the output they produced.
|
| And, again, it's not the LLM that's at fault. It's the
| steering wheel driving it missing a basic non-yeet process
| flow.
| hakanderyal wrote:
| Try plan mode if you haven't already. Stay in plan mode
| until it is to your satisfaction. With Opus 4.5, when you
| approve the plan it'll implement the exact spec without
| getting off track 95% of the time.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's fine, but it's still "make big giant plan then yeet
| the impl" at the end. It's still not appropriate for the
| kind of incremental, chunked, piecework that's needed in
| a shop that has a decent review cycle.
|
| It's irresponsible to your teammates to dump very large
| giant finished pieces of work on them for review. I try
| to impress that on my coworkers, and I don't appreciate
| getting code reviews like that for submission, and feel
| bad if I did the same.
|
| Even worse if the code review contains blocks of code
| which the author doesn't even fully understand themselves
| because it came as one big block from and LLM.
|
| I'll give you an example -- I have a longer term bigger
| task at work for a new service. I had discussions and
| initial designs I fed into Claude. "We" came to a
| concensus and ... it just built it. In one go mainly. It
| looks fine. That was Friday.
|
| But now I have to go through that and say -- let's now
| turn this into something reviewable for my teammates.
| Which means basically learning everything this thing did,
| and trying to parcel it up into individual commits.
|
| Which is something that the tool should have done for me,
| and involved me in.
|
| Yes, you can prompt it to do that kind of thing. Plan is
| part of that, yes. But planning, implement, review in
| small chunks should be the _default_ way of working, not
| something I have to force externally on it.
|
| What I'd say is this: these tools right now are are
| _programmer_ tools, but they 're not _engineer_ tools
| teiferer wrote:
| > Which means basically learning everything this thing
| did
|
| I expect that from all my team mates, coworkers and
| reports. Submitting something for code review that they
| don't understand is unacceptable.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| That was my point.
| 8note wrote:
| i think the review cycles weve been doing for the past
| decade or two are going to change to match the output of
| the LLMs and how the LLMs prefer to make whole big
| changes.
|
| i immediately see that the most important thing to have
| understand a change is future LLMs more than people. we
| still need to understand whats going on, but if my LLM
| and my coworkers LLM are better aligned, chances are my
| coworker will have a better time working with the code
| that i publish than if i got them to understand it well
| but without their LLM understanding it.
|
| with humans as the architects of LLM systems that build
| and maintain a code based system, i think the constraints
| are different, and that we dont ahve a great idea on what
| the actual requirements are yet.
|
| it certainly mismatches with how we've been doing things
| in publishing small change requests that only do a part
| of a whole
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I think any workflow that doesn't cater to human
| constraints is suspect, until genAI tooling is a lot more
| mature.
|
| Or to put it another way -- understandable piecemeal
| commits are a best practice for a fundamental human
| reason; moving away from them is risking lip-service
| reviews and throwing AI code right into production.
|
| Which I imagine we'll get to (after there are _much_ more
| robust auto-test /scan wrap-arounds), but that day isn't
| today.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Well, if the plan is large, it splits into stages and
| asks if it needs to continue when it's done with a stage.
| This is a good time to run `git diff` and review changes.
| You review this code just like you would review code from
| your coworker.
| porker wrote:
| > Basically, I need Claude Code with a proper review
| phase built in. I need it to slow-the-fuck-down and work
| with me more closely instead of shooting mountains of
| text at me and making me jam on the escape key over and
| over (and shout WTF I didn't ask for that!) at least
| twice a day.
|
| It sounds like you want Codex (for the second part)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| (Also, Kenton, I'd add that I'm an admirer more broadly of
| your work, and so if by chance you end up creating some
| public project commercial or open source in the general
| vein we're talking about here, I'd love to contribute)
| vrosas wrote:
| > And that means: none of them can make a profit
|
| Well, no. It just means no single player can dominate the field
| in terms of profits. Anthropic is probably still losing money
| on subscribers, so other companies "reselling" their offering
| does them no good. Forcing you to use their TUI at least gives
| them control of how you interact with the models back. I'm
| guessing but since they've gone full send into the developer
| tooling space, their pitch to investors likely highlights the #
| of users on CC, not their subscriber numbers (which again, lose
| money). The move makes since in that respect.
| bambax wrote:
| Well, yes. When competition is "pure and perfect" then
| profits eventually tend to be zero. That's a law of economics
| that is always true regardless of the industry.
| bambax wrote:
| > _The best thing for consumers would be if all these model
| providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing_
|
| Using openrouter myself I find the costs of APIs to be
| extremely low and affordable? I don't send the whole codebase
| to every question, I just ask about what I need, and everything
| is actually ridiculously cheap? $20 lasts about 3 months.
| nake89 wrote:
| I have not had the same experience. I pay 10 dollars a month
| for GitHub Copilot, where I get to use Claude Sonnet 4.5.
|
| I tried the same with OpenRouter and I used up 2.5 dollars in
| a day using Sonnet 4.5. Similar use on copilot has could
| maybe make me use 10% of my quota (and that's being generous
| for OpenRouter).
|
| I think GitHub Copilot is way more affordable than
| OpenRouter.
| visarga wrote:
| > they really, really want to own the entire value chain rather
| than being relegated to becoming just another "model provider"
|
| I remember the story used to be the other way around - "just a
| wrapper", "wrapper AI startups" were everywhere, nobody trusted
| they can make it.
|
| Maybe being "just a model provider" or "just a LLM wrapper"
| matter less than the context of work. What I mean is that
| benefits collect not at the model provider, nor at the wrapper
| provider, but where the usage takes place, who sets the prompts
| and uses the code gets the lion share of benefits from AI.
| estearum wrote:
| Those are two sides of the same coin.
|
| Being "just a wrapper" wouldn't be a risky position if the LLMs
| would be content to be "just a model." But they clearly
| wouldn't be, and so it wasn't.
| alvsilvao wrote:
| Just checked https://opencode.ai/.
|
| It looks like they need to update their FAQ:
|
| Q: Do I need extra AI subscriptions to use OpenCode? A: Not
| necessarily, OpenCode comes with a set of free models that you
| can use without creating an account. Aside from these, you can
| use any of the popular coding models by creating a Zen account.
| While we encourage users to use Zen, OpenCode also works with all
| popular providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI etc. You can
| even connect your local models.
| Philpax wrote:
| That's not inaccurate. You can still use all of those
| providers: you just need to pay API costs, instead of reusing
| your subscription.
| falloutx wrote:
| It still works with Claude Opus, just need to get a key from
| platform.claude.ai
| Philpax wrote:
| I'll be honest; I'm pretty sure this "mistake" will be completely
| forgotten by the next month. Their enforcing that their
| subscription only works with their product should not really come
| as a surprise to anyone, and the alt-agent users are a small
| enough minority that they'll get over it.
| jrsj wrote:
| I'm starting to think you're right but only because software
| engineers don't seem to actually value or care about open
| source anymore. Apparently we have collectively forgotten how
| bad it can be to let your tools own you instead of the other
| way around.
|
| Maybe another symptom of Silicon Valley hustle culture --
| nobody cares about the long term consequences if you can make a
| quick buck.
| Philpax wrote:
| There's nothing stopping you from using OpenCode with any
| other provider, _including_ Anthropic: you just can 't get
| the subsidised pricing while doing so. This is irritating,
| yes - it certainly disincentivises me from trying out
| OpenCode - but it's also, like, not unexpected?
|
| In any case, the long-term solution for true openness is to
| be able to run open-weight models locally or through third-
| party inference providers.
| jrsj wrote:
| Yes but _why_ are they subsidizing the pricing and
| requiring to use their closed source client to benefit from
| it? It's the same reason the witch in the story of Hansel
| and Gretel was giving out free candy.
| motoxpro wrote:
| Is this a serious question? Why would they subsidize
| people when there is no benifet to them? Subsidization
| means they are LOSING money when people use it. If the
| customers that are using 3rd party clients are unwilling
| to pay a price that is profitable for them, that is a
| very positive, not negative, thing for Anthropic to lose
| them.
|
| The reason to subsidize is the exact reason you are
| worried about. Lock in, network effects, economies of
| scale, etc.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Yes, why is there a discount when I buy a bundle? This is
| clearly sign of nefarious behaviour.
| array_key_first wrote:
| It very obviously is, you'd have to be the most naive of
| the most naive to think there isn't a path for them to
| jack prices later. Maybe that's not nefarious depending
| on your definition, but the point is you will
| _definitely_ be paying more in the future.
|
| I mean, this is the playbook of every tech company for
| the past 30 years. You sell something at a huge loss to
| gain market share and force your competitors to exit, and
| then you begin value extraction from your, now captive,
| customer base. You lower quality, raise prices, and cut
| support, and you do it slowly enough that nobody is hit
| with enough friction at one time to walk.
|
| If you expect anything else, I don't know what to tell
| you. This is very much the standard. In fact it's SO much
| the standard that companies don't even have a choice. If
| you choose not to do this, then the people who _are_
| doing this will just undercut you and run you out.
|
| The key piece in this is that, once the value extraction
| begins, it can't just strive for profitability. No, it
| also has to make up for the past 10 or 15 years of losses
| on top of that. So it's not like the product will just
| get expensive enough to sustain itself like you'd expect
| with a typical product. It'll get much more expensive
| than that.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's not a bundle discount. A bundle discount lets you
| buy both and still use only one.
| bpt3 wrote:
| > Apparently we have collectively forgotten how bad it can be
| to let your tools own you instead of the other way around.
|
| We've collectively forgotten because a large enough number of
| professional developers have never experienced anything other
| than a thriving open source ecosystem.
|
| As with everything else (finance and politics come to mind in
| particular), humans will have to learn the same lessons the
| hard way over and over. Unfortunately, I think we're at the
| beginning of that lesson and hope the experience doesn't
| negatively impact me too much.
| conartist6 wrote:
| We're going to learn that lesson again in a big hurry at this
| point.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| > software engineers don't seem to actually value or care
| about open source anymore.
|
| Hate to break it to you, but the vast majority never did. See
| any thread about Linux on HN. Maybe the Open Source wave was
| before my time, but ever since I came into the industry
| around 2015 "caring about open source" has been the minority
| view. It's Windows/Mac/Photo Shop/etc all the way up and
| down.
| kzahel wrote:
| Can't Opencode just modify their implementation to use the
| anthropic claude code SDK directly? The issue is they were
| spoofing oauth. I tried OpenCode before this whole drama and
| immediately noticed the oauth spoofing and never authorized it.
| Doesn't opencode speak ACP?
| https://agentclientprotocol.com/overview/agents
| macinjosh wrote:
| The SDK bundles Claude code and uses it for its agentic work.
| The SDK really only lets you control the UI layer. It als
| doesn't yet fully support plan mode.
| kzahel wrote:
| I use the SDK in my app and it works fine with plan mode. I
| don't deal with auth at all. I detect if the CLI is installed
| and it just reuses whatever auth the user has already setup.
| Works fine.
| nmfisher wrote:
| > I detect if the CLI is installed and it just reuses
| whatever auth the user has already setup.
|
| Isn't this what they just explicitly banned?
| kzahel wrote:
| no, they banned use of the model without the CLI
| harness/SDK when using the subscription plans. Opencode
| was spoofing requests as if they were coming from claude
| code CLI, and controlling the agent loop / tool call
| totally internally. Anthropic wants subscription plans to
| use the CLI/SDK.
| dd8601fn wrote:
| It already does.
|
| You can use the Anthropic API in any tool, but these users
| wanted to use the claude code subscription.
| kzahel wrote:
| OpenCode wasn't using claude CLI at all (or claude SDK). They
| were using their own agent loop and bypassing claude cli
| entirely (except for spoofing auth).
| netdur wrote:
| Anthropic thinks highly of its "moat", yet it is spreading FUD to
| kill open weights
| jrsj wrote:
| The people defending Anthropic because "muh terms of service" are
| completely missing the point. These are bad terms. You should not
| accept these terms and bet the future of your business on
| proprietary tooling like this. It might be a good deal right now,
| but they only want to lock you in so that they can screw you
| later.
| solumunus wrote:
| How exactly are they going to lock me in?
| jrsj wrote:
| By only supporting their own cloud service for remote
| execution & slowly adding more and more proprietary
| integration points that are incompatible with other tools.
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| But switching cost to a different CLI coding tool is close
| to zero... I truly don't understand the argument that using
| Claude Code means betting your business on that particular
| tool. I use Claude Code daily, but if tomorrow they
| massively raised prices, made the tool worse, or whatever
| I'd just switch to a competitor and keep working like
| nothing happened.
|
| To be clear, I've seen this sentiment across various
| comments not just yours, but I just don't agree with it.
| jrsj wrote:
| They wouldn't require you to use their closed source
| client if they weren't planning on using it to extract
| value from you later. It's still early & a lot more
| capabilities are going to be coming to these tools in the
| coming months. Claude Code or an equivalent will be a
| full IDE replacement and a lot of the integration and
| automation mechanisms are going to be proprietary. Want
| to offload some of that to the cloud? Claude Code Web is
| your only option. Someone else drops a better model or a
| model that's situationally better at certain types of
| tasks? You can't use it unless you move everything off of
| that stack.
| jrsj wrote:
| As an example, this is the exact type of thing Anthropic
| doesn't want you to be able to build with Claude & it's
| why they want you on their proprietary tooling:
|
| https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-
| background-a...
| tolerance wrote:
| This reads like an overreaction. I think both OpenAI and
| Anthropic are soon to settle upon their target markets; that each
| of them are attracting separate crowds/types of coders and that
| the people already sold on Claude Code don't care about this
| decision.
| ojosilva wrote:
| They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude
| Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among
| devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in
| 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are
| incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market,
| where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image
| generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now.
|
| Apparently nobody gets the Anthropic move: they are only good at
| coding and that's a very thin layer. Opencode and other tools are
| game for collecting inputs and outputs that can later be used to
| train their own models - not necessarily being done now, but they
| could - Cursor did it. Also Opencode makes it all easily
| swappable, just eval something by popping another API key and
| let's see if Codex or GLM can replicate the CC solution. Oh, it
| does! So let's cancel Claude and save big bucks!
|
| Even though CC the agent supports external providers (via the
| ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL env var), they are working hard on making it
| impossible for other models to support their every increasing
| agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP,
| Chrome integration, etc). The move totally makes sense, like it
| or not.
| jrsj wrote:
| It might make sense from Anthropics perspective but as a user
| of these tools I think it would be a huge mistake to build your
| workflow around Claude Code when they are pushing vendor lock
| in this aggressively.
|
| Making this mistake could end up being the AI equivalent of
| choosing Oracle over Postgres
| solumunus wrote:
| I've done that and unless I'm missing something it seems like
| it would be trivial for me to switch to an alternative.
| jrsj wrote:
| If you've only got a CLAUDE.md and sub agent definitions in
| markdown it is pretty easy to do at the moment, although
| more of their feature set is moving in a direction that
| doesn't have 1:1 equivalents in other tools.
|
| The client is closed source for a reason and they issued
| DMCA takedowns against people who published sourcemaps for
| a reason.
| Terretta wrote:
| As a user of Claude Code via API (the expensive way),
| Anthrophic's "huge mistake" is capping monthly spend (billed
| _in advance_ and _pay as you go_ some $500 - $1500 at a time,
| by credit card) at just $5,000 a month.
|
| It's a supposedly professional tool with a value proposition
| that requires being in your work flow. Are you going to keep
| using a power drill on your construction site that bricks
| itself the last week or two of every month?
|
| An error message says contact support. They then point you to
| an enterprise plan for 150 seats when you have only a couple
| dozen devs. Note that 5000 / 25 = 200 ... coincidence? Yeah,
| you are forbidden to give them more than Max-like
| $200/dev/month for the _usage-based API_ that 's "so
| expensive".
|
| They are literally "please don't give us money any more this
| month, thanks".
| johnpaulkiser wrote:
| This sounds like a stop loss? Are they losing money per
| token even through the api?
| notahacker wrote:
| Sounds plausible they're not really making any. Arbitrary
| and inflexible pricing policies aren't unusual, but it
| sounds easy enough for a new rapidly-growing company to
| let the account managers decide which companies they
| might have a chance of upselling 150 seat enterprise
| licenses to and just bill overage for everyone else...
| Terretta wrote:
| Sure does.
|
| I imagine a combination of stop loss and market share. If
| larger shops use up compute, you can't capture as many
| customers by headcount.
|
| // There was a figure around o3, an astonishing model
| punching far above the weights (ahem) of models that came
| after, that suggested the thinkiest mode cost on the
| order of $3500 to do a deep research. Perhaps OpenAI can
| afford that, while Anthropic can't.
| ojosilva wrote:
| Their target is the Enterprise anyway. So they are apparently
| willing to enrage their non-CC user base over vendor-locking.
|
| But this is not the equivalent of Oracle over Postgres, as
| these are different technology stacks that implement an
| independent relational database. Here were talking about
| Opencode which depends on Claude models to work "as a better
| Claude" (according to the enraged users in the webs). Of
| course, one can still use OC with a bazillion other models,
| but Anthropic is saying that if you want the Claude Code
| experience, you gotta use the CC agent period.
|
| Now put yourself in the Anthropic support person shoes, and
| suppose you have to answer an issue of a Claude Max user who
| is mad that OC is throwing errors when calling a tool during
| a vibe session, probably because the multi-million dollar
| Sonnet model is telling OC to do something it can't because
| its not the claude agent. Claude models are fine-tuned for
| their agent! If the support person replies "OC is an
| unsupported agent for Claude Code Max" you get an enraged
| customer anyway, so you might as well cut the crap all
| together by the root.
| adw wrote:
| Switching tools is _very easy_.
| Palmik wrote:
| I am pretty sure most people get Anthropic's move. I also think
| "getting it" is perfectly compatible with being unhappy about
| it and voicing that opinion online.
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| OP is responding to an article that largely frames Anthropic
| as clueless.
| shawnz wrote:
| I don't think it is intending to frame the move as
| clueless, but rather short-sighted. It could very well be a
| good move for them in the short term.
| Majromax wrote:
| > Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value
| chain
|
| Why is that their "huge asset?" The genus of this complaint is
| that Opencode et al replace everything but the LLM, so it seems
| like the latter is the true "huge asset."
|
| If Clause Code is being offered at or near operational
| breakeven, I don't see the advantage of lock-in. If it's being
| offered at a subsidy, then it's a hint that Claude Code itself
| is medium-term unsustainable.
|
| "Training data" is a partial but not full explanation of the
| gap, since it's not obviously clear to me how Anthropic can
| learn from Claude Code sessions but not OpenCode sessions.
| dchftcs wrote:
| Anthropic and OpenAI are essentially betting that a somewhat
| small difference in accuracy translates to a huge advantage,
| and continuing to be the one that's slightly but consistently
| better than others is the only way they can justify
| investments in them at all. It's natural to then consider
| that an agent trained to use a specific tool will be better
| at using that tool. If Claude continues to be slightly better
| than other models at coding, and Claude Code continues to be
| slightly better than OpenCode, combined it can be difficult
| to beat them even at a cheaper price. Right now, even though
| Kimi K2 and the likes are cheaper with OpenCode and perform
| decently, I spend more than 10x the amount on Claude Code.
| Majromax wrote:
| In that case though, why the lock-in? If the combination
| really does have better performance than competitors'
| offerings, then Anthropic should encourage an open
| ecosystem, confident in winning the comparison.
| cowl wrote:
| If developers are using Claude code with it's quirks,
| Anthropic controls the backend LLM. If developers are using
| OpenCode, it's easy for developers to try different LLMs and
| maybe substitute it (temporarily or permanently). In an
| enterprise market, once they choose a tool they tend to stay
| with that even if it is not the best, the cost and timeframe
| of changing is too high. if developers could swap LLMs freely
| on their own tool that is big missed opportunity for
| Anthropic. Not a User friendly move, but the norm in
| Enterprise.
|
| Right now, most enterprises are experimenting with different
| LLMs and once they chose they will be locked for a long time.
| If they cant can't chose because their coding agent doesn't
| let them they be locked to that.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| They're betting that the stickiness of today's regular users is
| more valuable than the market research and training data they
| _were_ receiving from those nerdy, rule-breaking users.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I rather have a product that is only good at one single thing
| than mid for everything else especially when the developer
| experience for me is much more consistent than using gemini and
| chatgpt to the point that I only have chatgpt for productivity
| reasons and also sometimes making better prompts to claude
| (when I don't use claude to make a better prompt). After
| realizing that Anthropic is discounting token usages for claude
| code they should have made that more explicit and also the API
| key (but hindsight is 20/20) they should already have been
| blocking third party apps or just have you make another API key
| that has no discount but even then this could have pissed off
| developers.
| ndespres wrote:
| You're asking two different LLMs to help you talk more better
| to another LLM?
| djvdq wrote:
| This sounds like way too much for me.
|
| I wonder when they will add another level and talk to LLM
| how to talk to another LLM how to talk to another LLM
| rstupek wrote:
| It's LLMs all the way down
| sergiotapia wrote:
| The model is the best.
|
| The CLI tool is terrible compared to opencode.
|
| That is the unfortunate reality, we are now being foisted
| claude code. :( I wish they just fork opencode.
| stefan_ wrote:
| It's crazy how bad the interface it is. I'm generally a fan
| of the model performance but there is not a day where their
| CLI will not flash random parts of scrollback or have a
| second of input lag just typing in the initial prompt (how is
| that even possible? you are not doing anything?). If this is
| their "premier tool" no vending machine business can save
| them.
| bloppe wrote:
| > Also Opencode makes it all easily swappable
|
| It's all easily swappable without OpenCode. Just symlink
| CLAUDE.md -> AGENTS.md and run `codex` instead of `claude`.
|
| > they are working hard on making it impossible for other
| models to support their every increasing agent feature set
| (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration,
| etc).
|
| Every feature you listed has an open-source MCP server
| implementation, which means every agent that supports MCP
| already has all those features. MCP is so epic because it has
| already nailed the commodification coffin firmly shut. Besides,
| Anthropic has way less funding than OAI or Google. They
| wouldn't win the moat-building race even if there were one.
|
| That said, the conventional wisdom is that lowering switching
| costs benefits the underdogs, because the incumbents have more
| market share to lose.
| submeta wrote:
| > symlink CLAUDE.md -> AGENTS.md and run `codex` instead of
| `claude`.
|
| This is simple and beautiful. Thank you for sharing it :)
| albert_e wrote:
| indeed!
|
| is there a way to do this on windows?
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| mklink: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
| server/administrat...
| gpm wrote:
| The problem the second you stop subsidizing Claude Code and
| start making money on it the incentive to use it over opencode
| disappears. If opencode is the better tool than claude code -
| and that's the reason people are using their claude
| subscription with it instead of claude code - people will end
| up switching to it.
|
| Maybe they can hope to murder opencode in the meantime with
| predatory pricing and build an advantage that they don't
| currently have. It seems unlikely though - the fact that
| they're currently behind proves the barrier to building this
| sort of tool isn't that high, and there's lots of developers
| who build their own tooling for fun that you can't really
| starve out of doing that.
|
| I'm not convinced that attempting to murder opencode is a
| mistake - if you're losing you might as well try desperate
| tactics. I think the attempt is a pretty clear signal that
| Antrhopic is losing though.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| It's possible that tokens become cheap enough that they don't
| need to raise prices to make a profit. The latest opus is 3x
| less expensive than the previous.
| gpm wrote:
| Then the competitors drop prices though. The current
| justification for claude code is just that it's an order of
| magnitude (or more) cheaper per token than comparable
| alternatives. That's a terrible business model to be stuck
| in.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| If everyone is dropping prices in this scenario then I
| don't see how the user eventually gets squeezed.
|
| I mean I guess they could do a bait and switch (drop
| prices so low that Anthropic goes bankrupt, then raises
| price) but that's possible in literally any industry, and
| sees unlikely given the current number of competitors
| gpm wrote:
| Terrible for Anthropic I mean, not the user.
| nikcub wrote:
| > ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did
| and Gemini has a shot at the market now.
|
| They're after the enterprise market - where office / workspace
| + app + directory integration, security, safety, compliance
| etc. are more important. 80% of their revenue is from
| enterprise - less churn, much higher revenue per W/token,
| better margins, better $/user.
|
| Microsoft adopting the Anthropic models into copilot and Azure
| - despite being a large and early OpenAI investor - is a much
| bigger win than yet another image model used to make memes for
| users who balk at spending $20 per month.
|
| Same with the office connector - which is only available to
| enterprises[0] (further speaking to where their focus is).
| There hasn't yet been a "claude code" moment for office
| productivity, but Anthropic are the closest to it.
|
| [0] This may be a mistake as Claude Code has been adopted from
| the ground up
| ozim wrote:
| People underestimate enterprise market.
|
| Usually you can see it when someone nags about "call us"
| pricing that is targeted at enterprise. People that nag about
| it are most likely not the customers someone wants to cater
| to.
| projektfu wrote:
| When I was a software developer, I mostly griped about this
| when I wanted to experiment to see if I would even ask my
| larger enterprise if they would be interested in looking
| into it. I always felt like companies were killing a useful
| marketing stream from the enterprise's own employees. I
| think Tailscale has really nailed it, though. They give
| away the store to casual users, but make it so that a
| business will want to talk to sales to get all the features
| they need with better pricing per user. Small businesses
| can survive quite well on the free plan.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'm sure everyone "wants to" land a many million dollar
| deal with a big company that has mild demands, but that
| doesn't mean those naggers are _bad_ customers. Bad
| customers have much more annoying and unreasonable demands
| than a pricing sheet.
| leokennis wrote:
| > They're after the enterprise market
|
| I am curious how big of a chance they have. I could imagine
| many enterprises that are already (almost by default)
| Microsoft customers (Windows, Office, Entra etc.) will just
| default to Copilot (and maybe Azure) to keep everything
| neatly integrated.
|
| So an enterprise would need to be very dedicated to use
| everything Microsoft, but then go through the trouble use
| Claude as their AI just because it is slightly better for
| coding.
|
| I have a feeling I am missing something here though, I would
| be happy for anyone to educate me!
| Rastonbury wrote:
| I think at the current price point the capability of office
| copilot (which I don't use, only read reviews) is that it's
| basically email writer/summarizer/meeting notes.
|
| Can't light a candle to Opus 4.5 who can now create and
| modify financial models from PDFs and augmented with
| websearch and the Excel skill (gpt-5.2 can do this too).
| That said the market IS smaller
| themafia wrote:
| > Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing
| their great models in the chat market
|
| The types of people who would use this tool are precisely the
| types of people who don't pay for licenses or tools. They're in
| a race to the bottom and they don't even know it.
|
| > and that's a very thin layer
|
| I don't think Anthropic understands the market they just made
| massive investments in.
| 8note wrote:
| i think they're trading future customer acquisition and model
| quality for the current claude code userbase which they might
| also lose from this choice.
|
| the reason i got the subscription wasnt to use claude code.
| when i subscribed you couldnt even use it for claude code. i
| got it because i figured i could use those tokens for anything,
| and as i figured out useful stuff, i could split it off onto
| api calls.
|
| now that exploration of "what can i do with claude" will need
| to be elsewhere, and the results of a working thing will want
| to stay with the model that its working on.
| socketcluster wrote:
| Agreed. The system is ALL about who controls the customer
| relationship.
|
| If Anthropic ended up in a position that they had to beg
| various Client providers to be integrated (properly) and had to
| compete with other LLMs on the same clients and could be
| swapped out at a moment's notice, they would just become a
| commodity and lose all leverage. They don't want to end up in
| such situation. They do need to control the delivery of the
| product end-to-end to ensure that they control the customer
| relationship and the quality.
|
| This is also going to be KEY in terms of democratizing the AI
| industry for small startups because this model of ai-outside-
| tools-inside provides an alternative to tools-outside-ai-inside
| platforms like Lovable, Base44 and Replit which don't leave as
| much flexibility in terms of swapping out tooling.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > making it impossible for other models to support their every
| increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote
| sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc)
|
| I use CC as my harness but switch between third party models
| thanks to ccs. If Anthropic decided to stop me from using third
| party models in CC, I wouldn't just go "oh well, let's buy
| another $200/mo Claude subscription now". No. I'd be like: "Ok,
| I invested in CC--hooks/skills/whatever--but now let's ask CC
| to port them all to OpenCode and continue my work there".
| gigatexal wrote:
| Exactly this. Ditto.
| apstls wrote:
| > they are working hard on making it impossible for other
| models to support their every increasing agent feature set
| (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration,
| etc). The move totally makes sense, like it or not.
|
| I don't understand, why would other models not be able to
| support any, or some, or even a particular single one of these?
| I don't even see most of these as relevant to the model itself,
| but rather the harness/agentic framework around it. You could
| argue these require a base degree of model competence for
| following instructions, tool calling, etc, but these things are
| assumed for any SOTA model today, we are well past this. Almost
| all of these things, if not all, are already available in other
| CLI + IDE-based agentic coding tools.
| lvl155 wrote:
| This is really not the point. Anthropic isn't cutting off
| third-party. You can use their models via API all you want. Why
| are people conflating this issue? Anthropic doesn't owe anyone
| anything to offer their "unlimited" pro tiers outside of Claude
| Code. It's not hard to build your own Opencode and use API
| keys. CLI interface by itself is not a moat.
| noosphr wrote:
| People should take this as a lesson on how much we are being
| subsidized right now.
|
| Claude code runs into use limitations for everyone at every
| tier. The API is too expensive to use and it's _still_
| subsidized.
|
| I keep repeating myself but no one seems to listen: quadratic
| attention means LLMs will always cost astronomically more
| than you expect after running the pilot project.
|
| Going from 10k loc to 100k loc isn't a 10x increase, it's a
| 99x increase. Going from 10k loc to 1m loc isn't a 100x
| increase, it's a 9999x increase. This is fundamental to how
| transformers work and is the _best case scenario_. In
| practice things are worse.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| I don't see LLMs ingesting the LoCs. I see CC finding and
| grepping and reading file contents piecewise, precisely
| because it is too expensive to ingest a whole project.
|
| So what you say is not true: cost does not directly
| correlate with LoC.
| anonym29 wrote:
| >Claude code runs into use limitations for everyone at
| every tier
|
| What do you mean by this? I know plenty of people who never
| hit the upgraded Opus 4.5 limits anymore even on the $100
| plan, even those who used to hit the limits on the $200
| plan w/ Opus 4 and Opus 4.1.
|
| >The API is too expensive to use and it's _still_
| subsidized.
|
| What do you mean by saying the API is subsidized? Anthropic
| is a private company that isn't required to (and doesn't)
| report detailed public financial statements. The company
| operating at a loss doesn't mean all inference is operating
| at a loss, it means that the company is spending an
| enormous amount of money on R&D. The fact that the net loss
| is shrinking over time tells us that the inference is
| producing net profit over time. In this business, there is
| enormous up front cost to train a model. That model then
| goes on to generate initially large, but subsequently
| gradually diminishing revenue until the model is
| deprecated. That said, at any given snapshot-in-time, while
| there is likely large ongoing R&D expenditure on the next
| model causing the overall net profit for the entire company
| to still be negative, it's entirely possible that several,
| if not many or even most of the previously trained models
| have fully recouped their training costs in inference
| revenue.
|
| It's fairly obvious that the monthly subscriptions are
| subsidized to gain market share the same way Uber rides
| were on early on, but what indication do you have that the
| PAYG API is being subsidized? How would total losses have
| shrunk from $5.6B in 2024 to just $3B in 2025 while ARR
| grew from ~$1B to ~$7B over the same time period (one where
| usage of the platform dramatically expanded) if PAYG API
| inference wasn't running at a net profit for the company?
|
| >quadratic attention means LLMs will always cost
| astronomically more than you expect after running the pilot
| project
|
| This is only true as long as O(n2) quadratic attention
| remains the prevailing paradigm. As Qwen3-Next and Nemotron
| 3 Nano have shown with hybrid linear attention + sparse
| quadratic layers and a hybrid Mamba SSM, not all modern,
| performant LLMs necessarily need to run strictly O(n2)
| quadratic attention models. Sure, these aren't frontier
| models competitive with Opus 4.5 or Gemini 3 Pro or GPT 5.2
| xhigh, but these aren't experimental tiny toy models like
| RWKV or Falcon Mamba that serve as little more than PoCs
| for alternative architectures, either. Qwen3-Next and
| Nemotron 3 Nano are solid players in their respective local
| weight classes.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Nemotron 3 is amazing. 60 tokens/s on my 128GB Nvidia
| GB10, and actually emits some pretty reasonable "smart"
| content" for its size.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Good architecture (eg separation of concerns) means you
| won't need to expose 1M loc to the llm all at once.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| > Anthropic did not invest in image generation
|
| I'd be pretty happy if Anthropic acquired Midjourney
| serf wrote:
| >They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the
| Claude Code value chain
|
| that's just it, it has been proven over and over again with
| alternatives that CC isn't the moat that Anthropic seems to
| think it is. This is made evident with the fact that they're
| pouring R&D into DE/WM automation meanwhile CC has all the same
| issues it has had for months/years -- it's as if they think CC
| is complete.
|
| if anything MCP was a bigger moat than CC.
|
| also : I don't get the opencode reference. Yes, it's nice --
| but codex and gemini-cli are largely compatible with cc
| generated codebases.
|
| There will be some initial bumpiness as you tell the agent to
| append the claude.md file to all agent reads -- or better yet
| just merge it into agent file.) -- but that's about as rough as
| it'll get.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I am sure the company is going to get very upset at people no
| longer paying who were using their product in a way that they did
| not intend. Just going to be heartbroken. I will never understand
| the people that make a big deal about "I will never support this
| business again because of x" when X not something the company
| ever officially said they cared about.
|
| In all seriousness, I really don't think it should be a
| controversial opinion that if you are using a companies servers
| for something that they have a right to dictate how and the
| terms. It is up to the user to determine if that is acceptable or
| not.
|
| Particularly when there is a subscription involved. You are very
| clearly paying for "Claude Code" which is very clearly a piece of
| software connected to an online component. You are not paying for
| API access or anything along those lines.
|
| Especially when they are not blocking the ability to use the
| normal API with these tools.
|
| I really don't want to defend any of these AI companies but if I
| remove the AI part of this and just focus on it being a tool,
| this seems perfectly fine what they are doing.
| Palmik wrote:
| To me it's very easy to understand why people would be upset
| and post about it online.
|
| 1. The company did something the customers did not like.
|
| 2. The company's reputation has value.
|
| 3. Therefore highlighting the unpopular move online, and
| throwing shade at the company so to speak, is (alongside with
| "speaking with your wallet") one of the few levers customers
| have to push companies to do what they want them to do.
| nerdjon wrote:
| Sure, it is perfectly valid to complain all you want. But it
| is also important to remember the context here.
|
| I could write an article and complain about Taco Bell not
| selling burgers and that is perfectly within my right but
| that is something they are clearly not interested in doing.
| So me saying I am not going to give them money until they
| start selling burgers is a meaningless too them.
|
| Everything I have seen about how they have marketed Claude
| Code makes it clear that what you are paying for is a tool
| that is a combination of a client-side app made by them and
| the server component.
|
| Considering the need to tell the agent that the tool you are
| using is something it isn't, it is clear that this ever
| working was not the intention.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > So me saying I am not going to give them money until they
| start selling burgers is a meaningless too them.
|
| Sure, but that's because you're you. No offense, but you
| don't have a following that people use to decide what fast
| food to eat. You don't have posts about how Taco Bell
| should serve burgers, frequently topping one of the main
| internet forums for people interested in fast food.
|
| HN front page articles do matter. They get huge numbers of
| eyeballs. They help shape the opinions of developers. If
| lots of people write articles like this one, and it front
| pages again and again, Anthropic will be at serious risk of
| losing their mindshare advantage.
|
| Of course, that may not happen. But people are aware it
| could.
| themafia wrote:
| > I will never understand the people that make a big deal
|
| > It is up to the user to determine if that is acceptable or
| not.
|
| It sounds like you understand it perfectly.
| msxT wrote:
| Anthropic doesn't want you to use a tool that makes it easy to
| switch to a competitor's model when you reach a cap. They want to
| nudge you toward upgrading - Pro -> Max -> Max 20x -> extra usage
| - rather than switching to Codex. They can afford to make moves
| like this as long as they stay on top. OpenAI isn't the good guy
| here - it's just an opportunity for them to bite off a bit more
| of the cake.
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| I'd say the vast majority of people on OpenCode aren't using CC
| in combination with Codex.
|
| It's CC with Qwen and KLM and other OSS and/or local models.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| I just cancelled, citing this as the reason. I'm actually not all
| that torn up about it. I mostly want to see how Anthropic
| responds to the community about this issue.
| mohsen1 wrote:
| I was paying for Max but after trying GLM 4.7 I am a convert.
| Hardly hit the limit but even if I do it is cheaper to get two
| accounts from Z.ai than one Max from Anthropic
| dmezzetti wrote:
| It's too bad that Anthropic is so hostile to open source. It's a
| big missed opportunity for them.
| jsumrall wrote:
| Honestly very confused by the people happy or agreeing with
| Anthropic here. You can use their API on a pay-per-use basis, or
| (as I interpreted the agreement) you can prepay as a subscription
| and use their service with hourly & weekly session limits.
|
| What's changed is that I thought I was subscribing to use their
| API services, claude code as a service. They are now pushing it
| more as using only their specific CLI tool.
|
| As a user, I am surprised, because why should it matter to them
| whether I open my terminal and start up using `claude code`,
| `opencode`, `pi`, or any other local client I want to send bits
| to their server.
|
| Now, having done some work with other clients, I can kind of see
| the point of this change (to play devils' advocate): their
| subscription limits likely assume aggregate usage among all users
| doing X amount of coding, which when used with their own cli tool
| for coding works especially well with client side and service
| caching and tool-calls log filtering-- something 3rd party
| clients also do to varying effectivness.
|
| So I can imagine a reason why they might make this change, but
| again, I thought I was subscribing to a prepaid account where I
| can use their service within certain session limits, and I see no
| reason why the cli tool on my laptop would matter then.
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| This is like asking why you can use ChatGPT in the Claude
| desktop app. "They are both Electron apps. What's the problem?"
| awestroke wrote:
| Because they get no telemetry or usage data if you use a third
| party tool.
|
| Just pay per token if you want to use third party tools. Stop
| feeling entitled to other people's stuff.
| fathermarz wrote:
| After reading this opinion ten times today. Can someone explain
| to me why OpenCode is a "better harness"? Or is it just because
| it's open source that people support it?
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| All these harnesses are free and grateful for any use they get.
| It might be worthwhile to try it and see.
| fathermarz wrote:
| Good call. Will test it out today
| hakanderyal wrote:
| It's mostly based on feelings/"vibes", and hugely dependent on
| the workflow you use. I'm so happy with Claude Code, Opus and
| plan mode that I don't feel any need to check the others.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| OpenCode has some more advanced features and plays nicely in
| more advanced setups. ClaudeCode isn't bad at all, but OpenCode
| has some tricks up it's sleeve.
| dionian wrote:
| e.g. ?
| eikenberry wrote:
| No matter what the answer to the question is.. IMO "just" is
| out of place here. Being free/open source software is a big
| deal, particularly for a developer tool.
| orwin wrote:
| > they really, really want to own the entire value chain rather
| than being relegated to becoming just another "model provider"
|
| This is really the salient point for everything. The models are
| expensive to train but ultimately worthless if paying customers
| aren't captive and can switch at will. The issue it that a lot of
| the recent gains are in the prefill inference, and in the model's
| RAG, which aren't truly a most (except maybe for Google, if their
| RAG include Google scholar). That's where the bubble will pop.
| m0llusk wrote:
| I'm supposed to adopt these wonderful new tools, but no one can
| figure out exactly what they are, how they should work, how much
| they cost, or other basics. This is worse than the early days of
| the cloud. Hopefully most of this goes the way of SOAP.
| lemontheme wrote:
| Before this drama started, OpenCode was just another item on a
| long list of tools I've been meaning to test. I was 100% content
| with CC (still am, mostly). But it was nice to know that there
| were alternatives, and that I could try them, maybe even switch
| to them, without having to base my decision on token pricing. The
| idea of there being escape hatch made me less concerned about
| vendor lock-in and encouraged me to a) get my entire team onto CC
| and b) invest time into building CC's flavor of agents, skills,
| commands, hooks, etc., as well as setting up a marketplace to
| distribute them internally.
|
| While Anthropic was within their right to enforce their ToS, the
| move has changed my perspective. In the language of moats and
| lock-ins, it all makes sense, sure, but as a potential sign of
| the shape of things to come, it has hurt my trust in CC as
| something I want to build on top of.
|
| Yesterday, I finally installed OpenCode and tried it. It feels
| genuinely more polished, and the results were satisfactory.
|
| So while this is all very anecdotal, here's what Anthropic
| accomplished:
|
| 1) I no longer feel like evangelizing for their tool 2) I
| installed a competitor and validated it's as good as others are
| claiming.
|
| Perhaps I'm overly dramatic, but I can't imagine I'm the only one
| who has responded this way.
| gpm wrote:
| I responded in a similar way. More than that I preemptively
| canceled my claude subscription (which just cancels auto-
| renewal) to make sure it was an affirmative choice to continue
| with it next month, after I have some time to try out the
| alternative they are so worried about and see if I should
| switch to it instead.
| falloutx wrote:
| Claude already played their card, from threatening that 90% of
| the code will be written by Ai then cutting off their most
| enthusiastic followers. Opencode and others haven't threatened
| the industry and generally have better standing with most devs.
| I do not see how Claude can ever be profitable at this point,
| they don't have any stickyness and they actively propose
| cutting their own market.
| TylerJewell wrote:
| Note - we primarily make use of Gemini CLI, which is very
| promising, but have made pretty extensive trials as Claude Code.
|
| Anthropic hasn't changed their licensing, just enforcing what the
| licensing always required by closing a loophole.
|
| Business models aside - what is interesting is whether the agent
| :: model relationship requires a proprietary context and language
| such that without that mutual interaction, will the coding
| accuracy and safety be somehow degraded? Or, will it be possible
| for agentic frameworks to plug and play with models that will
| generate similar outcomes.
|
| So far, we tend to see the former is needed --- that there are
| improvements that can be had when the agentic framework and model
| language understanding are optimized to their unique properties.
| Not sure how long this distinction will matter, though.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Discussion:
|
| _Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46549823
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| @dang any way to fix the clickbait headline here?
| dang wrote:
| I've taken a crack at it. Is it accurate?
|
| (@dang often doesn't work, I just happened to see this. If you
| want guaranteed message delivery it's best to email
| [email protected])
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Anyone that sees the value in Claude Code will never leave.
|
| This will be completely forgotten in like a week.
|
| And if you leave because of this, more support for those that
| abide by the TOS and stay.
|
| This is akin to someone selling/operating a cloud platform named
| Blazure and it's just a front for Azure.
|
| My view to everyone is to stop trying to control the ecosystem
| and just build shit. Fast.
| MaintenanceMode wrote:
| While I respect the author's opinion (and it's interesting that
| Vibe Coding, the term is less than a year old), I am more than
| happy to be an Anthropic customer, and actually happy that
| they've opened more capacity for their paying customers. What I'm
| achieving with Claude is spectacular and for now, it's the best
| system I've found to meet my goals.
| skybrian wrote:
| Technically, isn't the API they want third-party software to use
| better anyway? This is really about pricing. The price difference
| between the regular API and the Oauth API is too large.
| pizlonator wrote:
| It seems that Anthropic's thesis is that vertical integration
| wins.
|
| It's too soon to tell if that's true or not.
|
| One of the features of vertical integration is that there will be
| folks complaining about it. Like the way folks would complain
| that it's impossible or hard to install macOS on anything other
| than a Mac, and impossible or hard to install anything other than
| macOS on a Mac. Yet, despite those complains, the Mac and macOS
| are successful. So: the fact that folks are complaining about
| Anthropic's vertical integration play does not mean that it won't
| be successful for them. It also doesn't mean that they are
| clueless
| bloppe wrote:
| I, personally, will churn once my CC pro subscription is up.
| They're harshing my vibe.
|
| They're probably losing money on each pro subscription so they
| probably won't miss me!
| pizlonator wrote:
| > They're probably losing money on each pro subscription so
| they probably won't miss me!
|
| looool
|
| Maybe the LLM thing will be profitable some day?
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Interestingly, another front page article today is about Apple
| choosing to use Gemini for Siri.
|
| A lot of the comments revolve around how much they will be
| locked in and how much the base models are commoditized.
|
| Google is pretty clearly ok with being an
| infrastructure/service provider for all comers. Same is true
| for Open AI (especially via Azure?) I guess Anthropic does not
| want to compete like that.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| Anthropic offer their API, including for tools like Opencode.
| It's more expensive than Claude Code, but I don't think it's
| priced significantly differently to competitors. Obviously
| Apple aren't paying API prices, and Google have a lot more to
| offer them, but I don't think Anthropic would turn down that
| deal if they could have it. They have their models in AWS
| Bedrock too, and that is an option to auth with Claude Code.
|
| I think they do see vertical integration opportunities on
| product, but they definitely want to compete to power
| everything else too.
| verdverm wrote:
| I want to like Anthropic, they have such a great knowledge
| sharing culture and their content is bar none, but then they keep
| pulling stuff like this... I just can't bring myself to trust
| their leadership's values or ethics.
|
| that and they "stole" my money
| buppermint wrote:
| I would disagree on the knowledge sharing. They're the only
| major AI company that's released zero open weight models. Nor
| do they share any research regarding safety training, even
| though that's supposedly the whole reason for their existence.
| verdverm wrote:
| I agree with you on your examples, but would point out there
| are some places they have contributed excellent content.
|
| In building my custom replacement for Copilot in VS Code,
| Anthropic's knowledge sharing on what they are doing to make
| Claude Code better has been invaluable
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| Anthropic has been doing this from the start and they are
| justified in it (the plan has different pricing rates than API).
| People have been making workarounds and they are justified in
| that as well - those people understand their workarounds are
| fragile when they made them.
| ProofHouse wrote:
| Huge mistake. That's what they specialize in though
| cat-whisperer wrote:
| I don't think I agree with this claim. Also, they didn't cut-off
| anyone. You can still use their API as you wish. It's out there
| for anyone who wants it.
|
| They simply stopped people from abusing a accessibility feature
| that they created for their own product.
| gpm wrote:
| I'm not seeing how "subsidized pricing for their own product"
| is accessibility related.
| taytus wrote:
| >they didn't cut-off anyone
|
| They did banned a lot people. Later, they "unbanned" them, but
| your comment isn't truthful.
| mooktakim wrote:
| Anthropic should find a way to work with third parties. They
| still get all the data. There wouldn't be a difference.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| I _want_ them to cut off these electron wrappers. If there 's no
| tokens going to these third parties, the more they can keep
| subsidizing my claude code usage.
| bloppe wrote:
| But more revenue growth will help them raise more billions to
| keep subsidizing us longer!
| PeterStuer wrote:
| "they utterly failed to consider the second-order effects of this
| business decision"
|
| Or maybe they did consider but were capital/ inference capacity
| constrained to keep serving at this pricepoint. Pretty sure
| without any constraints they would eagerly go for 100% market
| share.
|
| CC users give them the reigns to the agentic process. Non CC
| users take (mostly indirect) control themselves. So if you are
| forced to slow growth, where do you push the break (by charging
| defacto more per (api) token)?
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think they're smart enough to know that they're not making a
| mistake here. I'm fine with it. The API costs are not outrageous.
| I don't mind paying per token prices and I don't mind getting a
| discounted all-inclusive plan.
| rCube22 wrote:
| You are just taking advantage of their CC subscription business
| model, which they are subsidizing because you are using CC. Why
| should they do this when you don't use their product?
|
| Also You can still use OpenCode with API access...so no they
| didn't lock anything down. Basically the people just don't want
| to pay what is fair and is whining about it.
| arjie wrote:
| As a Claude Code user (on the Max $200 plan), I think this is
| fine. Already I frequently receive: API Error:
| 529 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"overloaded_error","message":
| "Overloade d"},"request_id":"req_011CX42ZX2u
|
| If they want to prioritize direct Anthropic users like me, that's
| fine. Availability is a feature to me.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I use Claude Code quite a bit and have never seen this
| a-dub wrote:
| my guess is that they are probably drowning in traffic since
| claude code really took off over the break and are now doing
| everything they can to reduce traffic and keep things up.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > they really, really want to own the entire value chain
|
| That is it. That is the problem. Everyone wants vertical
| integration and to corner the market, from Standard Oil on down.
| And everyone who wants that should be smacked down.
| gausswho wrote:
| When the only winning move is corner-the-market, the only way for
| the customer to win is not to play the game. I'll take my token-
| money elsewhere.
|
| That said, the author is deluding themselves if they think OpenAI
| is supporting OpenCode in earnest. Unlike Anthropic, they don't
| have explicit usage limits. It's a 'we'll let you use our service
| as long as we want' kind of subscription.
|
| I got a paid plan with GPT 5.2 and after a day of usage was just
| told 'try again in a week'. Then in a week I hit it again and
| didn't even get a time estimate. I wasn't even doing anything
| heavy or high reasoning. It's not a dependable service.
| AstroBen wrote:
| The way to vote against this is to test the alternatives. They're
| really good!
| charcircuit wrote:
| >go to war with their paying customers over a trivial ToS
| violation
|
| It's a trivial violation until it isn't. Competitors need to be
| fought off early else they become much harder to fight in the
| future.
| Havoc wrote:
| I would think the mistake here is offering the same two tokens at
| wildly different price points & hoping a flimsy ToS clause will
| make that stick.
| dpark wrote:
| Have any of these sorts of proclamations ever actually come true?
| I recall when Reddit effectively cut off all the clients from
| their API, there were similar loud proclamations that they had
| ruined their business and everyone would defect. I remember
| something similar with Twitter. These businesses both have their
| problems, but blocking third-party apps doesn't seem to be one of
| them.
|
| I think Anthropic took a look at the market, realized they had a
| strong position with Claude Code, and decided to capitalize on
| that rather than joining the race to the bottom and becoming just
| another option for OpenCode. OpenAI looked at the market and
| decided the opposite, because they don't have strong market share
| with Codex and they would rather undercut Claude, which is a
| legitimate strategy. Don't know who wins.
|
| I feel like Anthropic is probably making the right choice here.
| What do they have to gain by helping competitors undercut them? I
| don't think Anthropic wants to be just another model that you
| could use. They want to be the ecosystem you use to code.
| Probably better to try to win a profitable market than to try to
| compete to be the cheapest commodity model.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Anthropic thinking they're Reddit ~2023 feels pretty arrogant.
|
| And if they've made a business decision to do this, rolling it
| out without announcement is even worse.
|
| Did they think no one would notice?
| dpark wrote:
| Anthropic has like 4x Reddit's revenue and 8x the valuation.
| I don't understand the arrogance.
|
| Plus I'm the one who compared them to Reddit. They certainly
| didn't issue a statement that said "well it worked for
| Reddit".
| 8note wrote:
| this feels anti-trust-y to me.
|
| when i signed up for a subscription it was with the understanding
| that id be able to use those tokens on which ever agent i wanted
| to play with, and that as i got to something i want to have
| persistently running, id switch that to be an api client. i
| quickly figured out that claude code was the current best coding
| agent for the model, but seeing other folks calling opus now im
| not actually sure thats true, in which case that subsidized token
| might be more expensive to both me and anthropic, because its not
| the most token efficient route over their model.
|
| i dislike that now i wont be able to feed them training data
| using many different starting points and paths, which i think
| over time will have a bad impact on their models making them
| worse over time
| Animats wrote:
| Not unexpected.
|
| - Google cutting off using search from other than their home page
| code. (At one time there was an official SOAP API for Google
| Search.)
|
| - Apple cutting off non-Apple hardware in the Power PC era. ("We
| lost our license for speeding", from a third party seller of
| faster hardware.)
|
| - Twitter cutting off external clients. (The end of TweetDeck.)
| mfkp wrote:
| - Reddit cutting off API access for third party clients
| gaigalas wrote:
| Both Claude Code and OpenCode users are too loud. It makes sense
| for them to fight. These are boutique tools, and there can be
| only one boutique tool.
|
| I have a gut feeling that the real top dog harness
| (profitability, sticky users, growth) is VSCode + Copilot.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| Credit to the early AI coding startups. They masterfully forked
| Microsoft VS Code and integrated frontier LLMs into a familiar
| IDE. Instant audience.
|
| But it was only a matter of time before: a) Microsoft reclaimed
| its IDE b) Frontier model providers reclaimed their models
|
| Sage advice: don't fill potholes in another company's roadmap.
| daveguy wrote:
| Re: a) how can Microsoft "reclaim" their IDE when it was forked
| from a fork-able open source license?
|
| Re: b) "frontier" models can reclaim all they want; bring it.
| that's not a moat.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| could it also be a short term thing to lessen the server load
| since now we see they just released a new set of tools for non-
| code work?
| projektfu wrote:
| Dec 7, 2025 (A day that will live in infamy?) Linked from TFA:
|
| > > > one word: repositories view
|
| > > what do you mean?
|
| > It's possible, and the solution is so silly that I laughed when
| I finally figured it out. I'm not sure if I should just post it
| plainly here since Anthropic might block it which would affect
| opencode as well, but here's a hint. After you exhaust every
| option and you're sure the requests you're sending are identical
| to CC's, check the one thing that probably still isn't identical
| yet (hint: it comes AFTER the headers).
|
| I guess Anthropic noticed.
| squidster wrote:
| I'm paying for the $200 a month plan. If blocking out alternative
| harnesses reduces server load and bugs and makes the claude code
| experience better then I'm pro-anthropic on this one.
| lacoolj wrote:
| Does/will this include blocking Github Copilot from using their
| models?
| smoyer wrote:
| I agree that this probably isn't in their own interests but
| "because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its
| customers for granted" should be heavily qualified. My power
| company is taking advantage of me but so far I haven't had the
| nerve to fire them.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Anthropic is not cutting off third-party clients.
|
| It is blocking the usage of subsidized subscriptions that are
| intended to be used with Claude Code, with third party tools.
| Those thirdy party tools can still use claude's api, but paying
| API rates, which are not subsidized or at least are a lot less
| subsidized.
| ickelbawd wrote:
| Why embed links in your article to your own tweets which say the
| same things your article already says?
| milkey_mouse wrote:
| Live by the sword, die by the sword
| theturtletalks wrote:
| I don't get the outrage, this is same as when Twitter and Reddit
| cut off 3rd party clients to push people to use their official
| client. The lesson is that don't build a product that depends on
| unofficial APIs. Opencode got huge adoption because they baked in
| being able to use Claude's max plan so people could switch with
| no switching costs. Why would you think Anthropic would be ok
| with this? On top of that, I read Anthropic cache's the system
| prompt for Claude code for every user and this helps their costs.
|
| The truth is Opencode didn't have to bake this in. People who can
| will proxy Claude's API anyways through other means.
| Gander5739 wrote:
| 3rd party reddit clients used the official api. They changed it
| from free to paid.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| This is true, Twitter and Reddit clients were using official
| APIs that got their price increased. The point still stands
| though, don't build a service dependent on another service
| and especially if you're using an unofficial API. It works if
| you're under the radar but Opencode is not anymore.
|
| Honestly, it seems like this played out in Opencode's favor.
| They are getting press for this and people who are used to
| Opencode now and can't use their Claude plan might use GLM
| 4.7 or Minimax M2, models they offer for free.
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