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Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

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641–650 of 740 posts

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#641
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I agree with this. The constant state of "...will the rug be pulled?!?" does discourage relying on it as a model and building a workflow on it. Anthropic used to just be a reliable thing you could play with. Now it's this constant source of anxiety. It also didn't help that the government yanked it which adds another source of anxiety since OpenAI is on much better terms with the administration and the administ…

My wife's startup made the mistake of building her internal operations around Claude Team. Then she hired a VA in the Philippines. Anthropic promptly banned her account without warning once the VA connected to the account. It took her weeks to get her account reinstated, at which point she had already moved on to OpenAI.

This is why I re-did the AI operating system I originally placed in Claude. For my 2.0 version I pulled it into OpenClaw (then eventually migrated to Hermes). All our work can be preserved after we change the model, even at a moment's notice or temporarily.

Right now we're using OpenAI's models by default since (unlike Anthropic) will allow us to use our pro subscription rather than token metering, but I've already had the joy of being able to change it to Kimi K3 (via OpenRouter) for an hour to try it out, and there were zero hiccups.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#642
post #570

This isn't the reason I'm considering leaving Anthropic. I don't think I can tolerate its writing style anymore. Reading Claude output is starting to cause actual psychological harm. I have tried many ways to get it to stop writing in its stupid punchy linked-in marketing-team voice, and I can't. Is there a model out there that sounds sound this awful? It's like rubbing sand into the folds of my brain.

the writing style is so easy to fix, output styles is documented in claude code and you can change it still don’t think anthropic models are worth the money

Pray tell, what output style does the job?

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#643
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It drove me to setup Qwen 3.8 this weekend. I couldn't see the value in just giving them money for a higher tier plan instead. I've never run a local LLM model before. Certainly won't take as long to iterate on this.

Qwen 3.8 is excellent. With the right harness, it does about 95% of what Opus can do, in my case automation software development. Since 3.8 came out, I have significantly revised my expectations for a local model. Give it another year or two, and we'll be running fast and free local models for nearly everything that matters, and these costly subscriptions will be a thing of the past. I've always believed that AI shou…

What harness are you using for Qwen 3.8?

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#644
If I were an entrepreneur, I'd focus on getting a platform up that runs open Western models with good management and governance tools, and a decent coding agent front-end.

The whole "we're going to replace all of your workers with an agent while also making AGI happen" thing was a bad idea in the first place; one that could not have gotten anywhere outside of Silicon Valley. People just want tools that they can deploy at scale, not to be your beta testers for the singularity.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#645
post #492
post #113

Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable. They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling: "You can only use Fable for a week as a part of your plan" "Be ready! You have to start paying per token!" "Nevermind…

I'm surprised no one mentions about their recent privacy violation(s). The breaking point for me was the privacy violation. They've been fingerprinting every request and violating users' privacy hoping no one would notice. Too bad, someone found out and that was the day when I cancelled my subscription. https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography

How this entire watermarking thing plays out will also be interesting

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers. You message support, some real person reads and gets back to you within a day.

> I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers. What your your company do? Is it low ticket business or a high ticket business?

I work with music streaming, I don't really know how to judge what is low-ticket vs high-ticket. However it is a medium-to-high margin business.

Our free tier is time-limited but we still look at all tickets even from non-paying customers (in the hopes of converting them). A 1-hour intervention from a customer rep can result in a multi-year paying customer.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#647
Not only is it incredibly expensive for the intelligence provided, it's slow, overly verbose, and outright refuses its users all the time. The level of general hassle with Anthropic nowadays is not worth it...not to mention Claude's infuriating dialect.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claude -p thing was doubly stupid because they quietly allowed it again a couple of weeks later, so they pissed off developers for nothing

Wait, it's allowed again? Completely missed that. Been avoiding to use it and trying to find workarounds, not great.

Yes, they sent an email about it. You can also use the Claude SDK with an OAuth token ("claude setup-token" output) and it counts against the regular limit. Maybe they were afraid of losing users dependent on ACP (Zed editor and other compatible tools), since Claude Code does not have native ACP support and integrates only through the SDK?

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either my $200 sub was getting nerfed, or you're dead wrong about nothing being as good as Fable. The only thing I found it was better at was UI design. The rest, Sol was the clear winner. Refusals, failure to follow instructions, doing 1/10th of the work and then claiming it was "finished" was my experience with Fable. For everything else, there's K3.

I think it really depends on what people expect from the models and how they "code". Sol in my eyes is powerful, but it over engineers so much, that its actually a liability. Where as Opus 5 is slightly under develops but you then can give it a small push for what is missing. I rather have it under develop and i as the human in the loop, can correct/enhance it. Vs the models that adds so much, to the point that your…

Personally I'd rather it over-engineer than under-engineer and leave gaps in the implementation that I'm unaware of. Not only does it make life easier to work with the model this way, but over-engineering can be fixed later, as newer models are released, they will get better at cutting out the slop and refining the codebase. The only over-engineering I've really noticed is things like developing extra safeguards and extra tests, which is annoying but not a massive deal. Claude forgetting to implement edge cases I've specifically told it to cover is a big problem though.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#650
post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of it is scale. If you have a small number of clients/users it is possible to provide that support. If you have millions or billions of users then you can't scale the support to handle the support requests, so some form of automation becomes inevitable.

If you scale up customers, you scale up support. If you don't want to serve new customers, tell them to take their business elsewhere. But if you want to be a big boy, you need to play like you are one.

> you scale up support

you'd end up with a call center larger than most cities. It's not feasible.

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