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Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

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

#51

Post by Terretta »

jrsj wrote: post #30
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

As a user of Claude Code via API (the expensive way), Anthrophic's "huge mistake" is capping monthly spend (billed in advance and pay as you go some $500 - $1500 at a time, by credit card) at just $5,000 a month.

It's a supposedly professional tool with a value proposition that requires being in your work flow. Are you going to keep using a power drill on your construction site that bricks itself the last week or two of every month?

An error message says contact support. They then point you to an enterprise plan for 150 seats when you have only a couple dozen devs. Note that 5000 / 25 = 200 ... coincidence? Yeah, you are forbidden to give them more than Max-like $200/dev/month for the usage-based API that's "so expensive".

They are literally "please don't give us money any more this month, thanks".

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

#52

Post by nerdjon »

Palmik wrote: post #46
nerdjon wrote: post #29

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 cont…

To me it's very easy to understand why people would be upset and post about it online. 1. The company did something the customers did not like. 2. The company's reputation has value. 3. Therefore highlighting the unpopular move online, and throwing shade at the company so to speak, is (alongside with "speaking with your wallet") one of the few levers customers have to push companies to do what they want them to do.

Sure, it is perfectly valid to complain all you want. But it is also important to remember the context here.

I could write an article and complain about Taco Bell not selling burgers and that is perfectly within my right but that is something they are clearly not interested in doing. So me saying I am not going to give them money until they start selling burgers is a meaningless too them.

Everything I have seen about how they have marketed Claude Code makes it clear that what you are paying for is a tool that is a combination of a client-side app made by them and the server component.

Considering the need to tell the agent that the tool you are using is something it isn't, it is clear that this ever working was not the intention.

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

#53

Post by Philpax »

jrsj wrote: post #50
Philpax wrote: post #13

I'll be honest; I'm pretty sure this "mistake" will be completely forgotten by the next month. Their enforcing that their subscription only works with their product should not really come as a surprise to anyone, and the alt-agent users are a small enough minority that they'll get over it.

I’m starting to think you’re right but only because software engineers don’t seem to actually value or care about open source anymore. Apparently we have collectively forgotten how bad it can be to let your tools own you instead of the other way around. Maybe another symptom of Silicon Valley hustle culture — nobody cares about the long term consequences if you can make a quick buck.

There's nothing stopping you from using OpenCode with any other provider, including Anthropic: you just can't get the subsidised pricing while doing so. This is irritating, yes - it certainly disincentivises me from trying out OpenCode - but it's also, like, not unexpected?

In any case, the long-term solution for true openness is to be able to run open-weight models locally or through third-party inference providers.

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

#54

Post by bpt3 »

jrsj wrote: post #50
Philpax wrote: post #13

I'll be honest; I'm pretty sure this "mistake" will be completely forgotten by the next month. Their enforcing that their subscription only works with their product should not really come as a surprise to anyone, and the alt-agent users are a small enough minority that they'll get over it.

I’m starting to think you’re right but only because software engineers don’t seem to actually value or care about open source anymore. Apparently we have collectively forgotten how bad it can be to let your tools own you instead of the other way around. Maybe another symptom of Silicon Valley hustle culture — nobody cares about the long term consequences if you can make a quick buck.

> Apparently we have collectively forgotten how bad it can be to let your tools own you instead of the other way around.

We've collectively forgotten because a large enough number of professional developers have never experienced anything other than a thriving open source ecosystem.

As with everything else (finance and politics come to mind in particular), humans will have to learn the same lessons the hard way over and over. Unfortunately, I think we're at the beginning of that lesson and hope the experience doesn't negatively impact me too much.

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

#55

Post by F7F7F7 »

Palmik wrote: post #47
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…

I am pretty sure most people get Anthropic's move. I also think "getting it" is perfectly compatible with being unhappy about it and voicing that opinion online.

OP is responding to an article that largely frames Anthropic as clueless.

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

#56

Post by fathermarz »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #48
fathermarz wrote: post #44

After reading this opinion ten times today. Can someone explain to me why OpenCode is a “better harness”? Or is it just because it’s open source that people support it?

All these harnesses are free and grateful for any use they get. It might be worthwhile to try it and see.

Good call. Will test it out today

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

#57

Post by Majromax »

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 is medium-term unsustainable.

“Training data” is a partial but not full explanation of the gap, since it’s not obviously clear to me how Anthropic can learn from Claude Code sessions but not OpenCode sessions.

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

#58

Post by hakanderyal »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #23
kentonv wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Try plan mode if you haven't already. Stay in plan mode until it is to your satisfaction. With Opus 4.5, when you approve the plan it'll implement the exact spec without getting off track 95% of the time.

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

#59

Post by F7F7F7 »

msxT wrote: post #31

Anthropic doesn’t want you to use a tool that makes it easy to switch to a competitor’s model when you reach a cap. They want to nudge you toward upgrading - Pro -> Max -> Max 20× -> extra usage - rather than switching to Codex. They can afford to make moves like this as long as they stay on top. OpenAI isn’t the good guy here - it’s just an opportunity for them to bite off a bit more of the cake.

I’d say the vast majority of people on OpenCode aren’t using CC in combination with Codex.

It’s CC with Qwen and KLM and other OSS and/or local models.

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

#60

Post by F7F7F7 »

jsumrall wrote: post #43

Honestly very confused by the people happy or agreeing with Anthropic here. You can use their API on a pay-per-use basis, or (as I interpreted the agreement) you can prepay as a subscription and use their service with hourly & weekly session limits. 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…

This is like asking why you can use ChatGPT in the Claude desktop app. “They are both Electron apps. What’s the problem?”
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