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Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

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Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#461

Post by jacquesm »

JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #460

Lots of arguing about semantics of what the subscription is actually intended for. Claude Code, as a coding assistant, isn't even mediocre, it's kind of crap. The reason it's at all good is because of the model underneath - there's tons of free and open agent tools that are far better than Claude Code. Regardless of what they say you're paying the subscription for, the truth is the only thing of value to developers i…

For AI companies the access to the interaction is very valuable, that explains the price difference. It is data that the competition does not have access to. Of course they are storing that data for model training purposes, that's the whole reason this exists in the first place. They are subsidizing until they get their quality up to the point that the addiction is so strong you won't be able to get through your workday without it. And then surprise the per month access fee will start to rise.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#462

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

jbstack wrote: post #265
moltar wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To extend your all you can eat analogy. It’s similar to how all you can eat restaurants allow you to eat all you can within the bounds of the restaurant, but you aren’t allowed to bring the food out with you.

It's not really a fair analogy. Restaurants don't want you taking food away because they want to limit the amount you eat to a single meal, knowing that you'll stop when you get full. If you take food out you can eat more by waiting until the next meal when you're hungry again. You don't "get full" and "get hungry again" by switching UIs. You can consume the same amount whether you switch or you don't switch.

The UI absolutely could influence the backend usage.

Think about a web browser that respects cache lifetimes vs one that downloads everything everytime. As an ISP I'd be more likely to offer you unlimited bandwidth if I knew you were using a caching browser.

Likewise Claude code can optimize how it uses tokens and potentially provide the same benefit with less usage.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#463

Post by parliament32 »

dfabulich wrote: post #112

For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…

> let's sell a loss leader

> oh no, people are actually buying the loss leader

I'm looking forward to the upcoming reckoning when all these AI companies start actually charging users what the services cost.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#464

Post by ramoz »

JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #460

Lots of arguing about semantics of what the subscription is actually intended for. Claude Code, as a coding assistant, isn't even mediocre, it's kind of crap. The reason it's at all good is because of the model underneath - there's tons of free and open agent tools that are far better than Claude Code. Regardless of what they say you're paying the subscription for, the truth is the only thing of value to developers i…

The other harnesses would arguably give them even richer data and product insights.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#465

Post by heliumtera »

rovr138 wrote: post #420
heliumtera wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ They definitely want their absolutely proprietary software with sudo privilege on your machine. I wonder why they would want that geeez

it doesn't need sudo privileges...

Yeah, it is not necessary. Being able to run unprivileged commands on millions of machines is already a stupidly powerful thing

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#466

Post by dabernathy89 »

vidarh wrote: post #286
casparvitch wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess one issue is that you pay $200/month whether you use it or not. Potentially this could be better for Anthropic. What was not necessarily foreseeable (ok maybe it was) back when that started was that users have invented all kinds of ways to supervise their agents to be as efficient as possible. If they control the client, you can't do that.

I can easily get Claude Code to run for 8-10 hours unsupervised without stopping with sub-agents entirely within Claude Code. I think it is more likely that if you stick with Claude Code, then you are more likely to stick with Opus/Sonnet, whereas if you use a third party CLI you might be more likely to mix and match or switch away entirely. It's in their interest to get you invested in their tooling.

I've yet to come up with a workflow where I would want Claude to do this much work... unless I had an extremely detailed spec defined for it. How do you ensure it doesn't go off the rails?

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#467

Post by oblio »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #445
oblio wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the TUI agents are awful at scrolling. I'm on Ubuntu 24.04 and both Claude Code and Gemini CLI absolutely destroy scrolling. I've tested Claude Code in the VS Code and it's better there, but in the Gnome Terminal it's plain unusable. And a lot of people are reporting scrolling issues. As someone was saying, it's like they don't have access to the world's best coding LLM to debug these issues.

I use Claude Code every day and it works perfectly fine outside of a few bugs (they broke ESC interrupt in 2.1). I just don’t understand the misplaced anger at breaking TOS (even for a good reason) and getting slapped down. Like what did anyone think would happen? We all want these tools and companies to succeed. Anthropic needs to find profit in a few years. It’s in all of our best interests to augment that success,…

> We all want these tools and companies to succeed. Anthropic needs to find profit in a few years. It’s in all of our best interests to augment that success, not bitch because they’re not doing it your way.

Considering they're destroying a lot of fields of industry, I'm not sure I want them to succeed. Are we sure they're making the world a better place?

Or are they just concentrating wealth, like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, Doordash, Airbnb and all the other holy-tech grails in the last 20 years?

Our lives are more convenient than they were 20 years ago and probably poorer and more stressful.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#468

Post by AnotherGoodName »

dabernathy89 wrote: post #466
vidarh wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can easily get Claude Code to run for 8-10 hours unsupervised without stopping with sub-agents entirely within Claude Code. I think it is more likely that if you stick with Claude Code, then you are more likely to stick with Opus/Sonnet, whereas if you use a third party CLI you might be more likely to mix and match or switch away entirely. It's in their interest to get you invested in their tooling.

I've yet to come up with a workflow where I would want Claude to do this much work... unless I had an extremely detailed spec defined for it. How do you ensure it doesn't go off the rails?

You pretty much just said it. Define an extremely detailed spec. I have one that's five .md files to iteratively churn through. It had to be split into that many files since i don't want to break context length limits on the AI.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#469

Post by keeda »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #367
vovavili wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me an example of one such regulation.

Are you sure you're participating in good faith? I'll go ahead and indulge you for the benefit of the audience though. The generic term is predatory pricing and it's regulated to some extent in pretty much every country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#Legal_aspect... When carried out at the international level it's known as dumping. The WTO has provisions against it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dum…

As the Wikipedia page calls out, predatory pricing is generally in the context of a dominant firm throwing their weight around to dominate the market. You could make this case against large incumbents like Microsoft and Google, but Anthropic is actually the upstart here.

In any case, all this depends on how you define the "market", and the entire market for AI-assisted coding is very nascent and fast-moving to make any reliable calls about dominance at this point.

Re: Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

#470

Post by kristianp »

dboon wrote: post #15

This is an unusual L for Anthropic. The unfortunate truth is that the engineering in opencode is so far ahead of Claude Code. Obviously, CC is a great tool, but that's more about the magic of the model than the engineering of the CLI. The opencode team[^1][^2] built an entire custom TUI backend that supports a good subset of HTML/CSS and the TypeScript ecosystem (i.e. not tied to Opencode, a generic TUI renderer). Th…

Interesting that [1] is 30% zig as well as mostly typescript. That's a lot of native code for something that runs in a terminal (i.e. no graphical code required).
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