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Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

archaeologist.dev

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

#191

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…

>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.

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

#192

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…

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

#193
post #156
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 copil…

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.

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.

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

#194
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, why is there a discount when I buy a bundle? This is clearly sign of nefarious behaviour.

It's not a bundle discount. A bundle discount lets you buy both and still use only one.

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

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 10…

>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…

Nemotron 3 is amazing. 60 tokens/s on my 128GB Nvidia GB10, and actually emits some pretty reasonable "smart" content" for its size.

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

#196
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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?

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

#197
post #105

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…

> 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,…

> symlink CLAUDE.md -> AGENTS.md and run `codex` instead of `claude`.

This is simple and beautiful. Thank you for sharing it :)

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

#198
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 10…

Good architecture (eg separation of concerns) means you won’t need to expose 1M loc to the llm all at once.

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

#199
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.

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

#200

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 A…

3rd party reddit clients used the official api. They changed it from free to paid.
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