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

201–210 of 255 posts

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

#201

Post by theturtletalks »

Gander5739 wrote: post #200
theturtletalks wrote: post #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 A…

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

This is true, Twitter and Reddit clients were using official APIs that got their price increased. The point still stands though, don't build a service dependent on another service and especially if you're using an unofficial API. It works if you're under the radar but Opencode is not anymore.

Honestly, it seems like this played out in Opencode's favor. They are getting press for this and people who are used to Opencode now and can't use their Claude plan might use GLM 4.7 or Minimax M2, models they offer for free.

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

#202

Post by leokennis »

nikcub wrote: post #117
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…

> 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…

> They're after the enterprise market

I am curious how big of a chance they have. I could imagine many enterprises that are already (almost by default) Microsoft customers (Windows, Office, Entra etc.) will just default to Copilot (and maybe Azure) to keep everything neatly integrated.

So an enterprise would need to be very dedicated to use everything Microsoft, but then go through the trouble use Claude as their AI just because it is slightly better for coding.

I have a feeling I am missing something here though, I would be happy for anyone to educate me!

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

#203

Post by cowl »

Majromax wrote: post #57
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…

> Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain Why is that their “huge asset?” The genus of this complaint is that Opencode et al replace everything but the LLM, so it seems like the latter is the true “huge asset.” If Clause Code is being offered at or near operational breakeven, I don’t see the advantage of lock-in. If it’s being offered at a subsidy, then it’s a hint that Claude Code itself…

If developers are using Claude code with it's quirks, Anthropic controls the backend LLM. If developers are using OpenCode, it's easy for developers to try different LLMs and maybe substitute it (temporarily or permanently). In an enterprise market, once they choose a tool they tend to stay with that even if it is not the best, the cost and timeframe of changing is too high. if developers could swap LLMs freely on their own tool that is big missed opportunity for Anthropic. Not a User friendly move, but the norm in Enterprise.

Right now, most enterprises are experimenting with different LLMs and once they chose they will be locked for a long time. If they cant can't chose because their coding agent doesn't let them they be locked to that.

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

#204

Post by bambax »

vrosas wrote: post #19
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…

Well, yes. When competition is "pure and perfect" then profits eventually tend to be zero. That's a law of economics that is always true regardless of the industry.

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

#205

Post by kzahel »

nmfisher wrote: post #196
kzahel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

no, they banned use of the model without the CLI harness/SDK when using the subscription plans. Opencode was spoofing requests as if they were coming from claude code CLI, and controlling the agent loop / tool call totally internally. Anthropic wants subscription plans to use the CLI/SDK.

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

#206

Post by bambax »

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…

> The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing

Using openrouter myself I find the costs of APIs to be extremely low and affordable? I don't send the whole codebase to every question, I just ask about what I need, and everything is actually ridiculously cheap? $20 lasts about 3 months.

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

#207

Post by Rastonbury »

leokennis wrote: post #202
nikcub wrote: 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…

> They're after the enterprise market I am curious how big of a chance they have. I could imagine many enterprises that are already (almost by default) Microsoft customers (Windows, Office, Entra etc.) will just default to Copilot (and maybe Azure) to keep everything neatly integrated. So an enterprise would need to be very dedicated to use everything Microsoft, but then go through the trouble use Claude as their AI…

I think at the current price point the capability of office copilot (which I don't use, only read reviews) is that it's basically email writer/summarizer/meeting notes.

Can't light a candle to Opus 4.5 who can now create and modify financial models from PDFs and augmented with websearch and the Excel skill (gpt-5.2 can do this too). That said the market IS smaller

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

#208

Post by nake89 »

bambax wrote: post #206
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…

> The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing Using openrouter myself I find the costs of APIs to be extremely low and affordable? I don't send the whole codebase to every question, I just ask about what I need, and everything is actually ridiculously cheap? $20 lasts about 3 months.

I have not had the same experience. I pay 10 dollars a month for GitHub Copilot, where I get to use Claude Sonnet 4.5.

I tried the same with OpenRouter and I used up 2.5 dollars in a day using Sonnet 4.5. Similar use on copilot has could maybe make me use 10% of my quota (and that's being generous for OpenRouter).

I think GitHub Copilot is way more affordable than OpenRouter.

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

#209

Post by albert_e »

submeta wrote: post #197
bloppe wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :)

indeed!

is there a way to do this on windows?

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

#210

Post by lomase »

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…

[dead]
Post reply on HN