Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

archaeologist.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 255 posts

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

#21

Post by kentonv »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #14
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…

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.

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

#23

Post by cmrdporcupine »

kentonv wrote: post #21
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

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

#25

Post by jrsj »

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.

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

#26

Post by tolerance »

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.

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

#28

Post by ojosilva »

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.

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

#29

Post by nerdjon »

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.

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

#30

Post by jrsj »

ojosilva wrote: post #28

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…

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

Post reply on HN