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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

#71

Post by jrsj »

jrsj wrote: post #68
einsteinx2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But switching cost to a different CLI coding tool is close to zero… I truly don’t understand the argument that using Claude Code means betting your business on that particular tool. I use Claude Code daily, but if tomorrow they massively raised prices, made the tool worse, or whatever I’d just switch to a competitor and keep working like nothing happened. To be clear, I’ve seen this sentiment across various comments…

They wouldn’t require you to use their closed source client if they weren’t planning on using it to extract value from you later. It’s still early & a lot more capabilities are going to be coming to these tools in the coming months. Claude Code or an equivalent will be a full IDE replacement and a lot of the integration and automation mechanisms are going to be proprietary. Want to offload some of that to the cloud?…

As an example, this is the exact type of thing Anthropic doesn’t want you to be able to build with Claude & it’s why they want you on their proprietary tooling:

https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-a...

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

#72

Post by lemontheme »

Before this drama started, OpenCode was just another item on a long list of tools I've been meaning to test. I was 100% content with CC (still am, mostly). But it was nice to know that there were alternatives, and that I could try them, maybe even switch to them, without having to base my decision on token pricing. The idea of there being escape hatch made me less concerned about vendor lock-in and encouraged me to a) get my entire team onto CC and b) invest time into building CC's flavor of agents, skills, commands, hooks, etc., as well as setting up a marketplace to distribute them internally.

While Anthropic was within their right to enforce their ToS, the move has changed my perspective. In the language of moats and lock-ins, it all makes sense, sure, but as a potential sign of the shape of things to come, it has hurt my trust in CC as something I want to build on top of.

Yesterday, I finally installed OpenCode and tried it. It feels genuinely more polished, and the results were satisfactory.

So while this is all very anecdotal, here's what Anthropic accomplished:

1) I no longer feel like evangelizing for their tool 2) I installed a competitor and validated it's as good as others are claiming.

Perhaps I'm overly dramatic, but I can't imagine I'm the only one who has responded this way.

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

#73

Post by ojosilva »

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

Their target is the Enterprise anyway. So they are apparently willing to enrage their non-CC user base over vendor-locking.

But this is not the equivalent of Oracle over Postgres, as these are different technology stacks that implement an independent relational database. Here were talking about Opencode which depends on Claude models to work "as a better Claude" (according to the enraged users in the webs). Of course, one can still use OC with a bazillion other models, but Anthropic is saying that if you want the Claude Code experience, you gotta use the CC agent period.

Now put yourself in the Anthropic support person shoes, and suppose you have to answer an issue of a Claude Max user who is mad that OC is throwing errors when calling a tool during a vibe session, probably because the multi-million dollar Sonnet model is telling OC to do something it can't because its not the claude agent. Claude models are fine-tuned for their agent! If the support person replies "OC is an unsupported agent for Claude Code Max" you get an enraged customer anyway, so you might as well cut the crap all together by the root.

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

#74

Post by dchftcs »

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…

Anthropic and OpenAI are essentially betting that a somewhat small difference in accuracy translates to a huge advantage, and continuing to be the one that's slightly but consistently better than others is the only way they can justify investments in them at all. It's natural to then consider that an agent trained to use a specific tool will be better at using that tool. If Claude continues to be slightly better than other models at coding, and Claude Code continues to be slightly better than OpenCode, combined it can be difficult to beat them even at a cheaper price. Right now, even though Kimi K2 and the likes are cheaper with OpenCode and perform decently, I spend more than 10x the amount on Claude Code.

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

#75

Post by eddyg »

zzzeek wrote: post #2

"renowned vibe-coder Peter Steinberger" what? that's a thing ? why would a vibe coder be "renowned"? I use Claude every day but this is just too much.

He vibe-coded Clawdbot and lots of people are spinning up their own.

https://clawd.bot/ https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot

He's also the guy behind https://github.com/steipete/oracle/

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

#76

Post by joelthelion »

nwienert wrote: post #9

A good example of an extremely small but extremely vocal minority doing their best to punish a company for not catering to their explicitly disallowed use case for no reason other than they want it. I'd bet this has 0 negative impact on their business.

650,000 monthly active users is not "extremely small". I wonder how many total users Claude Code has?

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

#77

Post by TylerJewell »

Note - we primarily make use of Gemini CLI, which is very promising, but have made pretty extensive trials as Claude Code.

Anthropic hasn't changed their licensing, just enforcing what the licensing always required by closing a loophole.

Business models aside - what is interesting is whether the agent :: model relationship requires a proprietary context and language such that without that mutual interaction, will the coding accuracy and safety be somehow degraded? Or, will it be possible for agentic frameworks to plug and play with models that will generate similar outcomes.

So far, we tend to see the former is needed --- that there are improvements that can be had when the agentic framework and model language understanding are optimized to their unique properties. Not sure how long this distinction will matter, though.

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by irthomasthomas »

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…

They’re betting that the stickiness of today’s regular users is more valuable than the market research and training data they were receiving from those nerdy, rule-breaking users.
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