Comment by mrbungie
1 day ago
Well OpenCode already exists and you can connect it to multiple providers, so you could just say that the agentic CLI harness business model as a service/billable feature is no more. In hindsight I would say it never made sense in the first place.
When I compared OpenCode and Claude Code head to head a couple of months ago, Claude Code worked much better for me. I don't know if they closed the gap in the meantime, but for sure Claude Code has improved since then.
OpenCode launched a couple of months ago so that makes sense that it's worse. It's much better than Claude Code now. Somehow for the same model, opencode completes the same work faster than claude code and the ux is much better.
You win by adoption.
Here adoption is a combination on the tool and the model.
If people can’t pay the model to use the tool, they might not use the tool even if it’s better.
That’s what anthropic is doing.
It might be faster, but it’s more expensive.
1 reply →
Meant to say "it was worse" not "it's worse"
Branding and customer relationships matter as much or more than the "billable service" part of Claude Code.
It's not unheard of for companies that have strong customer mindshare to find themselves intermediated by competitors or other products to the point that they just became part of the infrastructure and eventually lose that mindshare.
I doubt Anthropic wants to become a swappable backend for the actual thing that developers reach for to do their work (the CLI tool).
Don't get me wrong, I think developers should 100% have the choice of tooling they want to use.
But from a business standpoint I think maintaining that direct or first-party connection to the developer is what Anthropic are trying to protect here.
Disagree, this is like terraform for Hashicorp. Give the cow away for free and no one will want to buy the milk. Claude code is a golden cow they should not give away.
The above does not prove that it is irrational for Anthropic to keep the Claude Code source code closed. There are many reasons I can see (and probably some I can’t) for why closed source is advantageous for A\. One such (mentioned in various places) is the value-add of certain kinds of analytics and or telemetry.
Aside: it is pretty easy to let our appreciation* of OSS turn into a kind of confirmation bias about its value to other people/orgs.
* I can understand why people promote OSS from various POVs: ethics, security, end user control, ecosystem innovation, sheer generosity, promotion of goodwill, expressions of creativity, helping others, the love of building things, and much more. I value all of these things. But I’m wary of reasoning and philosophies that offer merely binary judgments, especially ones that try to claim what is best for another party. That's really hard to know so we do well to be humble about our claims.**
**: Finally, being humble about what one knows does not mean being "timid" with your logic or reasoning. Just be sure to state it as clearly as you can by mentioning your premises and values.
Except that the cost is better with their harness and looks like people don’t want to fork 5x.
Adoption is how one wins. Look at all the crappy solutions out there that are still around.