Comment by moltar
2 days ago
To extend your all you can eat analogy. It’s similar to how all you can eat restaurants allow you to eat all you can within the bounds of the restaurant, but you aren’t allowed to bring the food out with you.
2 days ago
To extend your all you can eat analogy. It’s similar to how all you can eat restaurants allow you to eat all you can within the bounds of the restaurant, but you aren’t allowed to bring the food out with you.
Another analogy is that it’s a takeout but anthropic is insisting you only eat at home with the plastic utensils they’ve provided rather than the nice metal utensils you have at home.
Another analogy is that it’s a restaurant that offers delivery and they’re insisting you use their own in house delivery service instead of placing a pickup order and asking your friendly neighbor to pick it up for you on their way back from the office.
The all you can eat buffet analogy makes way more sense to me, because it speaks to the aspect of it where the customer can take a lot of something without restriction. That's the critical thing with the Anthropic subscription, and the takeout analogy or delivery service don't contain any element of it.
It's not really a fair analogy. Restaurants don't want you taking food away because they want to limit the amount you eat to a single meal, knowing that you'll stop when you get full. If you take food out you can eat more by waiting until the next meal when you're hungry again.
You don't "get full" and "get hungry again" by switching UIs. You can consume the same amount whether you switch or you don't switch.
Claude Code does a lot of work in optimizing context usage, how much output is included by tools and how that's done, and when to compact. This very well may make the cost of providing the subscription lower to Anthropic when Claude Code is used. It's well within the realm of possibility if not likelihood that other tools don't have the same incentive to optimize the buffet usage.
Not sure where that goes in the analogies here but maybe something about smaller plates.
> You don't "get full" and "get hungry again" by switching UIs. You can consume the same amount whether you switch or you don't switch.
This is actually a compelling argument for Claude Code getting the discount but not extending it to other cases. Claude Code, being subsidized by the company, is incentivized to minimize token usage. Third parties that piggyback on the same flat rate subscription, are not. i.e. Claude code wants you to eat less.
Of course, I don’t believe at all that this is why Anthropic has blocked this use case. But it is a reasonable argument.
The UI absolutely could influence the backend usage.
Think about a web browser that respects cache lifetimes vs one that downloads everything everytime. As an ISP I'd be more likely to offer you unlimited bandwidth if I knew you were using a caching browser.
Likewise Claude code can optimize how it uses tokens and potentially provide the same benefit with less usage.
Not really. At a buffet restaurant, if you could take the food out with you, you'd takeaway more food than you can eat at one sitting. OpenCode users and Claud Code™ CLI users use tokens at approximately the same rate.
This is more like an all-you-can-eat restaurant requiring you to eat with their flimsy plastic forks, forbidding you to bring your own utensils.
Claude Code does a lot regarding optimizing context usage, tool output, sub-agent interactions, context compaction, and stuff like that. I don't imagine OpenCode has the same financial incentive to decrease the token cost Anthropic takes on under the subscriptions.
yes with the whole goal to make the utensils better
Why is this being downvoted? This is the perfect analogy.
...no, that's more like "but you can't bring your own fork"
anthropic should not be criticizing the gluttony of others whilst licking its fingers surrounded by buckets full of fried chicken