[pplante]

I feel like we are seeing agentic coding tools morph into walled gardens with these acquisitions. Anthropic has restricted claude code usage while OpenAI has sort of let Codex fill the void. I am curious to see how this continues to evolve.

[asdff]

This is the whole point and the reason for the lofty valuations. Get everyone to shift their work to be dependent on these tooling, to the point they can't imagine working in any other way, and then raise prices. Tale as old as enterprise software.

[deaton]

Tale as old as the word "startup" even. Uber/Lyft did it with taxis. DoorDash did it with food delivery. You run at a loss for years while destroying your legacy competition by just outlasting them, then once you have cornered the market you squeeze.

[dgellow]

I understand the cynism but it’s not the case here. Stainless isn't a case of blitzscaling or running a loss for years to destroy the competition. The motto of the company is polished and robust and we invested a lot into generating what we think are the highest quality SDKs available. We could have shipped things way, way faster if the focus on design and quality wasn’t such an essential part of the development process

[deaton]

No but Anthropic and OpenAI are very much trying to use their positions to destroy everyone's ability to do things without their product, make AI essential, and then jack prices. Thats the only way this becomes profitable.

[bornfreddy]

It's not about Stainless, it's about Anthropic.

[shimman]

Don't you feel unqualified to make such statements since you have a obvious bias and extreme financial $tak€ here?

Did we all lose are critical thinking during COVID or something?

[shaneos]

This comment reminds me of the general malaise affecting the public discourse in the US these days. "Don't listen to the experts, all the context and knowledge they have makes them biased!!"

Of course Sam is "qualified" to speak to the ethos of Stainless, he was there longer than anyone except the founder.

[dgellow]

Obviously not, I do feel more than qualified given that I actively contributed to developing the company. None of what I wrote in the comment you responded to is a secret or is based on my personal judgement, we’ve been open about our values

[abigail95]

Now Uber is profitable what stops a taxi from just competing again, forcing Uber to have to be unprofitable again?

[fragmede]

Skill issue. Taxi companies aren't able to innovate and adapt and improve, despite the competition from Uber, preferring instead to use lobbying and regulations too survive in a post-Uber world.

[asdff]

Actually, it is a marketing issue. Taxis did innovate and did improve and imo are a better product than uber today. They have an app that is no different than what you expect with rideshare apps. Actually it is better, I can schedule a ride and get a flat rate with tip already baked in to places like the airport. No need to fret about surge prices at all, what I see when I schedule it today is what I pay when it comes tomorrow or next week or next month, whenever I've scheduled it.

But, no one uses it, because uber and lyft have become kleenex or coca cola: the brand name associated with the basic phenomenon, such that consumers cannot even think about the phenomenon without thinking first of the brand and probably resorting to the brand.

[dwaltrip]

I’ve tried taxis like 4 times in the past 5 years or so. I regretted it 3 out 4 of those times.

Maybe I’ll try again in a few years.

[fragmede]

Last time I was in Vegas (in 2026), there was a $40/$60 surcharge to my destination because the taxicab commission was able to enact regulations that says taxis can charge that, while Lyft/Ubers to the same location did not have to pay it. I was waiting at a smaller hotel for 20 minutes for a taxi to arrive to the taxi stand. There was a line of people an no taxis in sight. The time before that, I got hit with the ole "credit card machine doesn't work" bit.

If they wannted to innovate, every taxi stand would have a QR code to download their app, you set your destination while you're waiting in the line (if there is one), you get in the cab, the driver scans the QR code from your phone, payment happens via CC in the app, no surprises either. The phone app would show you the route, and then give an estimated price, and if there's an overage due to traffic/other problem, give me a notification on my phone. It would also let me set preferences for conversation/temperature.

[JJOKOCHAA]

You know very well uber is not doing the transportation industry a good service

[avgDev]

I'm reading "enshitification", and it describes this cycle of first losing money but acquiring customers, then switching focus to catering to businesses, then to themselves and at that point the tool is not what it was supposedly intended to be.

This is the same startup culture. The only innovation here is finding new way to swindle customers and businesses out of money.

[zackify]

and this is why i use pi.dev and hotswap models and have no reliance on a single provider

[dgellow]

Actually that wasn’t the plan, no

[pitched]

The moment a group accepts VC money, this becomes the plan

[999900000999]

Exactly. The goal of any VC by definition is to return a positive return on investment. I guess you might have a handful of exceptions, funds that are environmentally conscious, but profit remains paramount.

[dgellow]

I was at stainless since the very beginning, I can tell you it wasn’t the plan

[vincnetas]

Yeah, but they now have new owner who might be having different plan.

[mmcclure]

The new owner's plan is...to sunset the paid product immediately and give customers access to tooling to be able to continue generating SDKs on their own. From Stainless's post:

    As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available.

    If you’re a Stainless customer, visit app.stainless.com/transition for help transitioning from Stainless-managed products to other options. As always, you own the SDKs you’ve generated to date, and have full rights to modify and extend them however you wish. 

As a customer, all-in-all, we were pretty pleased with the outcome. Stainless was a great partner to us, even in "the end," and I'm really happy for the team.

[cdata]

With respect, you were manipulated (either by founders or by investors). Startups leverage employees' pro-social leanings to make them feel good about a fundamentally anti-social enterprise.

[solenoid0937]

HN cracks me up sometimes. Anthropic is anti-social? Stainless devs don't want their pre IPO equity to do well? Okay.

I very much doubt you would apply your expectation of altruism to yourself!

[kuboble]

But I think that doesn't matter.

If you intend to sell it to the highest bidder eventually then what difference does it make what was your plan?

If a business had real values then they would never sell out (see lichess).

[rockinghigh]

Why wouldn't getting more customers the plan? Anthropic doesn't acquire companies to have a lower market share. There is clearly a consolidation and a rush to get as much of the developer market as possible.

[renegade-otter]

The plan can change with the right amount of money. Just ask OpenAI.

[throawayonthe]

the plan isn't really up to the recipient of VC money lol

[iamkrazy]

You forgot this: "trust me bro".

[dgellow]

As opposed to what? Wild speculation people are making without any insider knowledge?

[allknowingfrog]

Claude is just a tool. My team members are each free to choose the text editor or IDE that they are happiest with. In the near future, I hope to be able to say the same for coding agents. I really like Claude, but I don't track Claude resources in our repos. If something better comes along, I'm betting it will be perfectly happy to parse the markdown of my existing memory files, and nothing in the repo itself will force anyone else to know that I switched.

It kind of blows my mind that the majority of Claude users have just accepted that CLAUDE.md is a tracked file that the whole team has to standardize on and share. Coding agents are the ultimate API. They conform to however you prefer to interact. Is anyone really expecting to enforce standard operating procedures with this non-deterministic black box of magic?

[Computer0]

I can just rename the CLAUDE.md files to AGENTS.md when I would like to. They're all just sitting there on my system.

[noir_lord]

That was always going to be the end point.

The amount of money thrown at it means at some point the words Return on Investment were going to appear.

It’s the classic loss leader applied to trillion dollar (across the market) capital investments.

[MangoCoffee]

Frontier AI labs is pivoting to something that can justified their IPO. just like OpenAI shut down other services and pivot more into coding. They want to show profitability before their mega IPO.

[scottcha]

I use claude code and pi.dev side by side most days and i'm mostly choosing pi for most work in last couple of weeks.

[geodel]

True. But this sounds: "I feel like Mondays are coming after Sundays...".

[nielsbot]

I think that's the normal path for new markets as they consolidate...

[Analemma_]

I don’t really see where the “walled garden” complaint is coming from. Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through trillions of tokens on their flat-rate subscription plan, but that’s a billing detail, and one that I honestly don’t share the outrage about. The technology part of CC is still totally open: skills, MCP, etc. are all open informal standards and there hasn’t been any movement to lock that down.

[airstrike]

No, Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through those tokens with any binary other than their own.

Allowing users to take advantage of their monthly/weekly/daily token limits with the software of their choosing is a perfectly valid expectation.

Restricting it to their own underperforming, buggy TUI client is textbook walled garden.

[solenoid0937]

> Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through those tokens with any binary other than their own.

Because that's what the API is for.

This isn't hard to understand. The cost you pay for subsidized tokens is lock-in. If you don't want lock-in, there's the API.

This isn't egregious or wrong or anything. It's exactly what you'd expect out of a heavily subsidized product option.

[airstrike]

This is missing the forest for the trees and it comes across as adulation for a corporation, when in fact, customers come first. Why are you trying to police people's opinion about a product?

I never said I didn't _understand_ why Anthropic is doing this. What I'm saying is nobody wants Claude Code, the product. They want access to the model. Feeling strapped to a harness you don't enjoy working with and which may limit your productivity is not a good experience for users. Voicing that dissatisfaction is perfectly valid. No, it's not "egregious" or "wrong", but it's also _something_ rather than "not anything".

Do you know what also give users access to the model without forcing lock-in? A better product. Building it is a choice Anthropic decided not to make.

[solenoid0937]

Probably 99.9% of people subscribe to Max for Claude Code. I'd bet the amount of devs going for a custom harness is vanishingly small, and, well, the API exists for those use cases.

[airstrike]

None of that refutes my argument? Devs don't go for a custom harness because said harnesses aren't allowed to compete in equal standing with Claude Code.

Why are you on the side of making the lives of developers worse by giving them fewer choices?

[nijave]

Claude subscription is restricted to Claude Code harness

Really walled garden is the only direction that makes sense--models will slowly become commodities