[jhide]

A gated, premium-tier product differentiation strategy only works when you sell the differentiated product. They went to market with 4.7 nerfed at security work and aren’t letting even large, vetted corporations pay more for the Mythos model… sentiment is quite negative where I work right now. There’s a real possibility that open source will give them a hair cut in the interim. And if the SWEs start modifying their CLI flows to avoid lock in to `claude`, it’s probable that the hair just never grows back. Losing strategy.

[g96alqdm0x]

It's going to be quite a while until open source models catch up. And, as long as Anthropic maintains the perception that Opus is even slightly better than the best OSS models, they'll still be the preferred tool for professional developers.

Even if the best OSS model is only 1% worse than Claude, do you want to risk your codebase on it? When you're working through a tough bug in your code, and an OSS model just isn't grokking it, wouldn't it be only natural to want to cast it away and say "I should only be using the very best tools, dammit! My time is too valuable!"

That said, I agree with your point about SWEs modifying their workflows to avoid lock-in. That's a good idea, no matter what.