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Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

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Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#11

Post by visarga »

> 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.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#12

Post by alvsilvao »

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.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#13

Post by Philpax »

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.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#14

Post by cmrdporcupine »

kentonv wrote: post #10

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-conv…

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.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#15

Post by Philpax »

alvsilvao wrote: post #12

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…

That's not inaccurate. You can still use all of those providers: you just need to pay API costs, instead of reusing your subscription.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#16

Post by estearum »

visarga wrote: post #11

> 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 mo…

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.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#17

Post by kzahel »

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

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#18

Post by macinjosh »

kzahel wrote: post #17

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

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.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#19

Post by vrosas »

kentonv wrote: post #10

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-conv…

> 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.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#20

Post by [deleted] »

alvsilvao wrote: post #12

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…

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