Comment by ukuina

Congrats on the move to Google!

Please allow me to rant to someone who can actually do something about this.

Vertex AI has been a nightmare to simply sign up, link a credit card, and start using Claude Sonnet (now available on Vertex AI).

The sheer number of steps required for this (failed) user journey is dizzying:

* AI Studio, get API key

* AI Studio, link payment method: Auto-creates GCP property, which is nice

* Punts to GCP to actually create the payment method and link to GCP property

* Try to use API key in Claude Code; need to find model name

* Look around to find actual model name, discover it is only deployed on some regions, thankfully, the property was created on the correct region

* Specify the new endpoint and API key, Claude Code throws API permissions errors

* Search around Vertex and find two different places where the model must be provisioned for the account

* Need to fill out a form to get approval to use Claude models on GCP

* Try Claude Code again, fails with API quota errors

* Check Vertex to find out the default quota for Sonnet 4.5 is 0 TPM (why is this a reasonable default?)

* Apply for quota increase to 10k tokens/minute (seemingly requires manual review)

* Get rejection email with no reasoning

* Apply for quota increase to 1 token/minute

* Get rejection email with no reasoning

* Give up

Then I went to Anthropic's own site, here's what that user journey looks like:

* console.anthropic.com, get API key

* Link credit card

* Launch Claude Code, specify API key

* Success

I don't think this is even a preferential thing with Claude Code, since the API key is working happily in OpenCode as well.