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by airstrike 32 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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.

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.

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.
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?