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

raheeljunaid.com

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

#101

Post by mrtksn »

internet2000 wrote: post #42

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

The issue with this kind of subsidy is that it is designed to lock you in and not as a loss leader.

In other words, it is not like giving free nuts at bar to make you drink more beer but more like Nestle giving baby formula so that the babies get use to that instead of mothers milk

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

#102

Post by shermantanktop »

Comparisons to Microsoft’s monopoly power are pretty lame when Anthropic’s hold on the market is so tenuous.

How many businesses are actually dependent on Claude? As in - Anthropic’s pricing or licensing changes can kill their business?

How many developers are “Claude developers” and can’t be effective with other tools?

This discussion is full of people saying they won’t use Claude anymore, and presumably some of them will actually do that. That’s good, there are alternatives.

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

#103

Post by vanviegen »

rarisma wrote: post #81

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

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

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

#104

Post by seabrookmx »

trollbridge wrote: post #88
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were the only issue, I’d say Anthropic were fine. Dario took the tremendous goodwill his row with Hegseth gave him and blew it. The major problems are Anthropic’s back-end instability and front-end kludginess (Electron!) revealing the gap between Anthropic’s capability and marketing, and Dario bizarrely copying Altman’s 2023 fire-and-brimstone playbook that had already massively backfired.

Using Electron in this day and age shows a particular lack of effort, considering how easy it is to use an agent harness to build native versions of apps. I mean, we're a tiny little business and we somehow find the bandwidth to do it.

I don't understand why people care about Electron? Evaluate the quality of the software based on its own merits IMO. VS Code, Slack, Postman, Obsidian.. I use this software every day and my only complaint is Slack's RAM usage (which honestly has no negative effect on my machine, but just seems silly for a messaging app).

Claude is a buggy mess because it's slop, not because it's electron. Heck, it runs a full Linux VM under the covers without asking.. it's insane.

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

#105

Post by wgd »

lelanthran wrote: post #58
elzbardico wrote: post #22

Complaining about external providers not supporting the subsidized prices Claude charge to its subscribers makes no sense. Of course, Claude Code subscription is a loss leader, it is an offering built to create a market for a new product in a very competitive environment in the hopes of capturing a dominant market position with a fully validated product with a healthy demand from business. Of course they won't give y…

> Of course, Claude Code subscription is a loss leader, it is an offering built to create a market for a new product in a very competitive environment in the hopes of capturing a dominant market position with a fully validated product with a healthy demand from business. I agree that this is their goal. The reason that people don't understand why Anthropic wont let the subscription be used with other harnesses is bec…

> The reason that people don't understand why Anthropic wont let the subscription be used with other harnesses

Even more specifically, the very fact that people would prefer, if they had the option, to use other harnesses with roughly equivalent feature sets strongly implies that the harness is not bringing them any value they couldn't get from a bunch of other places, including open-source equivalents.

Anthropic might want you to use their harness for their own reasons (control over caching, logging your interactions for training data, et cetera), but the idea that the Claude Code harness itself is bringing significant value which would help to lock users into the Anthropic ecosystem more than the Claude models alone do is kind of laughable. So _of course_ it seems like a baffling and arbitrary restriction to many users.

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

#106

Post by aetherson »

rvz wrote: post #84
internet2000 wrote: post #42

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

> They're subsidizing their tokens as long as you use their software. That's a fair exchange, I never understood why people took issue with it. Except they themselves cannot afford it and as the article also mentioned, their level of service and uptime is atrocious for the price they are offering. Their unpredictable pricing model is designed to make it easy for you to lose more money without you knowing. Unannounced…

Okay, if it's bad for the price they're offering, use the more expensive API. If they themselves can't afford it I don't know what you want here.

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

#107

Post by dcrazy »

cyberax wrote: post #67
internet2000 wrote: post #42

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

This method of bundling should be illegal in general, as it stiffles competition.

Do you also think all you can eat buffets should be illegal? What about early bird specials? Free soda with a large fry? Happy hour wings? Where does the “bundling” end?

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

#108

Post by hbn »

Feels weird to be complaining about this stuff when all of these AI companies are still haemorrhaging money to offer these services.

You can say it's inconvenient but it's hard to argue they're being greedy when they do these things to merely lose a little bit less money on every subscription they sell.

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

#109

Post by rho4 »

Zababa wrote: post #20

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

Haha thanks for that article (I microwave most of my meals). I wonder if this statement from the article will apply to AI:

> Second, microwave cooking fell victim to the same curse that threatens every new easy-to-use technology: it became low-status tech.

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