Comment by lemming
2 days ago
This will piss a lot of people off, and seems like a strange move. I get that this was always a hack and against the ToS. But I've been paying Anthropic money every month to do exactly what I would have done with Claude Code, but in another harness that I like better. All they've achieved here is that I am no longer giving them money. Their per-token pricing is really expensive compared to OpenAI, and I like the results from the OpenAI models better too, they're just very slow.
Here's a good benchmark from the brokk team showing the performance per dollar, GPT-5.1 is around half the price of Opus 4.5 for the same performance, it just takes twice as long.
https://brokk.ai/power-ranking?dataset=openround&models=flas...
So as of today, my money is going to OpenAI instead of Anthropic. They probably don't care though, I suspect that not many users are sufficiently keen on alternative harnesses to make a difference to their finances. But by the same token (ha ha), why enforce this? I don't understand why it's so important to them that I'm using Claude Code instead of something else.
Presumably Claude Code is a loss leader to try to lock you into their ecosystem or at least get you to exclusive associate “AI” with “Claude”. So if it’s not achieving those goals, they’d prefer if you use OpenAI instead.
That's my understanding and that's what I see happening at some places.
People got a CC sub, invest on the whole tooling around CC (skills and whatnot) and once they're a few weeks/months in, they'll need a lot of convincing to even try something else.
And given how often CC itself changes and they need to keep up with it, that's even worse. It's not just not wanting to get out of your confort zone, it's just trying to keep up with your current tools. Now if you also have to try a new tool every other day, the 10x productivity improvements claimed won't be enough to cover the lack of actual working hours you'll be left with in a week.
I think most if not all of my CC customizations (skills, MCP config, CLAUDE.md) are quite easily portable to another agent. They are just text files. I may need to adjust one or two Claude specific things like thinking level instruction verbiage, but otherwise I don't see that as very sticky.
> it just takes twice as long.
but time is also money. Personally if I could pay more money to get answers faster, I'd pay double.