Comment by kelnos
2 days ago
The competitor is not "doing X better"; it's more complicated than that.
CC isn't just the TUI tool. It's also the LLM behind it. OC may have built a better TUI tool, but it's useless without an LLM behind it. Anthropic is certainly within their rights to tell people they can only integrate their models certain ways.
And as for why this isn't embarrassing, consider that OC can focus 100% of their efforts on their coding tool. Anthropic has a lot of other balls in the air, and must do so to remain relevant and competitive. They're just not comparable businesses.
> CC isn't just the TUI tool. It's also the LLM behind it.
No, Claude Code is literally the TUI tool. The LLMs behind are the models. You can use different models within the same TUI tool, even CC allows that, regardless of the restriction of only using their models (because they chose to do that).
> consider that OC can focus 100% of their efforts on their coding tool.
And they have billions of dollars to hire full teams of developers to focus on it. Yet they don't.
They want to give Claude Code an advantage because they don't want to invest as much in it and still "win", while they're in a position to do so. This is very similar to Apple forcing developers to use their apps because they can, not because it's better. With the caveat that Anthropic doesn't have a consolidated monopoly like Apple.
Can they do that? Yes.
Should they do that? It's a matter of opinion. I think it's a bad move.
Is it embarrassing? Yes. It shows they're admitting their solution is worse and changing the rules of the game to tilt it in their favor while offering an inferior product. They essentially don't want to compete, they want to force people to use their solution due to pricing, not the quality of their product.
Claude Code is more than the TUI, it's the prompts, the agentic loop, and tools, all made to cooperate well with the LLM powering it. If you use Claude Code over a longer period of time you'll notice Anthropic changing the tooling and prompts underneath it to make it work better. By now, the model is tuned to their prompts, tools etc.