Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

The client is closed source for a reason and they issued DMCA takedowns against people who published sourcemaps for a reason.

What's changed is that I thought I was subscribing to use their API services, claude code as a service. They are now pushing it more as using only their specific CLI tool.

As a user, I am surprised, because why should it matter to them whether I open my terminal and start up using `claude code`, `opencode`, `pi`, or any other local client I want to send bits to their server.

Now, having done some work with other clients, I can kind of see the point of this change (to play devils' advocate): their subscription limits likely assume aggregate usage among all users doing X amount of coding, which when used with their own cli tool for coding works especially well with client side and service caching and tool-calls log filtering— something 3rd party clients also do to varying effectivness.

So I can imagine a reason why they might make this change, but again, I thought I was subscribing to a prepaid account where I can use their service within certain session limits, and I see no reason why the cli tool on my laptop would matter then.

You can use the Anthropic API in any tool, but these users wanted to use the claude code subscription.

This is really the salient point for everything. The models are expensive to train but ultimately worthless if paying customers aren't captive and can switch at will. The issue it that a lot of the recent gains are in the prefill inference, and in the model's RAG, which aren't truly a most (except maybe for Google, if their RAG include Google scholar). That's where the bubble will pop.