[kaycey2022]

I don't think it's any of that. It's plain as day to see that as the owners of the API they can see every request, collect every metric they need. The routing can easily be done in the API gateway layer and doesn't depend on the harness at all. Good harnesses are not performing acrobatics around user behaviour to improve anything. They just understand the provider API very well and translate tool calls really well. Then they get out of the way to let the magic happen.

This is about controlling user behaviour, resisting standardisation efforts, to keep subscribers hooked to their models. If they keep their users on claude code, they don't have to adapt to evolving harness standards when shown increased usage across different harnesses. They will try to keep everything on their terms, on their poor quality of engineering, and the users accustomed to claude behaviour will be left with no quick way to switch to other models.

This strategy will keep working as long as they own a top tier frontier model with enough marketing hype behind it to blind unsophisticated users.