Comment by cedws

> Anthropic will let you use their API with any coding tools you want

No, in 2026, even with their API plan the create key is disabled for most orgs, you basically have to ask your admin to give you a key to use something other than Claude Code. You can imagine how that would be a problem.

The anticompetitive part is setting a much lower price for typical usage of Claude Code vs. typical usage of another CLI dev tool.

Yes, exactly. The discourse has been so far off the rails now.

from what i remember, i couldnt actually use claude code with the subscription when i subscribed. i could only use it with third party tools.

eventually they added subscription support and that worked better than cline or kilo, but im still not clear what anthropic tools the subscription was actually useful for

The question I pose is this: if they're willing to start building walls this early in the game while they've still got plenty of viable competitors, and are at most 6 months ahead, how will they treat us if they achieve market dominance?

Some people think LLMs are the final frontier. If we just give in and let Anthropic dictate the terms to us we're going to experience unprecedented enshittification. The software freedom fight is more important than ever. My machine is sovereign; Anthropic provides the API, everything I do on my machine is my concern.

I don't get why so much mental gymnastics is done to avoid the fact that locking their lower prices to effectively subsidize their shitty product is the anti competitive behavior.

They simply don't want to compete, they want to force the majority of people that can't spend a lot on tokens to use their inferior product.

Why build a better product if you control the cost?

Society is lacking people that stand up for something. My efforts to consume less is seen as being cheap by my family, which I find so sad. I much prefer donating my money than exchanging superfluous gifts on Christmas.

As I get older I more and more view convenience as the enemy of good. Luckily (or unluckily for some) a lot of the tradeoffs we are asked to make in the name of convenience are increasingly absurd. I have an easier and easier time going without these Faustian bargains.

I'd encourage you to try the -codex family with the highest reasoning.

I can't comment on Opus in CC because I've never bit the bullet and paid the subscription, but I have worked my way up to the $200/month Cursor subscription and the 5.2 codex models blow Opus out of the water in my experience (obviously very subjective).

I arrived at making plans with Opus and then implementing with the OpenAI model. The speed of Opus is much better for planning.

I'm willing to believe that CC/Opus is truly the overall best; I'm only commenting because you mentioned Cursor, where I'm fairly confident it's not. I'm basing my judgement on "how frequently does it do what I want the first time".

> Claude Opus 4.5 by far is the most capable development model.

At the moment I have a personal Claude Max subscription and ChatGPT Enterprise for Codex at work. Using both, I feel pretty definitively that gpt-5.2-codex is strictly superior to Opus 4.5. When I use Opus 4.5 I’m still constantly dealing with it cutting corners, misinterpreting my intentions and stopping when it isn’t actually done. When I switched to Codex for work a few months ago all of those problems went away.

I got the personal subscription this month to try out Gas Town and see how Opus 4.5 does on various tasks, and there are definitely features of CC that I miss with Codex CLI (I can’t believe they still don’t have hooks), but I’ve cancelled the subscription and won’t renew it at the end of this month unless they drop a model that really brings them up to where gpt-5.2-codex is at.

It feels very close to a trade-off point.

I agree with all posts in the chain: Opus is good, Anthropic have burned good will, I would like to use other models...but Opus is too good.

What I find most frustrating is that I am not sure if it is even actual model quality that is the blocker with other models. Gemini just goes off the rails sometimes with strange bugs like writing random text continuously and burning output tokens, Grok seems to have system prompts that result in odd behaviour...no bugs just doing weird things, Gemini Flash models seem to output massive quantities of text for no reason...it is often feels like very stupid things.

Also, there are huge issues with adopting some of these open models in terms of IP. Third parties are running these models and you are just sending them all your code...with a code of conduct promise from OpenRouter?

I also don't think there needs to be a huge improvement in models. Opus feels somewhat close to the reasonable limit: useful, still outputs nonsense, misses things sometimes...there are open models that can reach the same 95th percentile but the median is just the model outputting complete nonsense and trying to wipe your file system.

The day for open models will come but it still feels so close and so far.

I buy the theory that Claude Code is engineered to use things like token caching efficiently, and their Claude Max plans were designed with those optimizations in mind.

If people start using the Claude Max plans with other agent harnesses that don't use the same kinds of optimizations the economics may no longer have worked out.

(But I also buy that they're going for horizontal control of the stack here and banning other agent harnesses was a competitive move to support that.)

Nah, their "moat" is CC, they are afraid that as other folks build effective coding agent, they are are going lose market share.

In what way would it be abused? The usage limits apply all the same, they aren't client side, and hitting that limit is within the terms of the agreement with Anthropic.

Taking umbrage as if it matters how I use the compute I'm paying for via the harness they want me to use it within as long as I'm just doing personal tasks I want to do for myself, not trying to power an apps API with it seems such a waste of their time to be focusing on and only causes brand perception damage with their customers.

Could have just turned a blind eye.

The loss of access shows the kind of power they'll have in the future. It's just a taste of what's to come.

If a company is going to automate our jobs, we shouldn't be giving them money and data to do so. They're using us to put ourselves out of work, and they're not giving us the keys.

I'm fine with non-local, open weights models. Not everything has to run on a local GPU, but it has to be something we can own.

I'd like a large, non-local Qwen3-Coder that I can launch in a RunPod or similar instance. I think on-demand non-local cloud compute can serve as a middle ground.

How do I "abuse" a token? I pass it to their API, the request executes, a response is returned, I get billed for it. That should be the end of the conversation.

(Edit due to rate-limiting: I see, thanks -- I wasn't aware there was more than one token type.)

I control it with ssh and sometimes tmux (but termux+wireguard lead to a surprisingly generally stable connection). Why did you need more than that?

How did this work? The ban, I mean. Did you just wake up to find out an email and that your creds no longer worked? Were you doing things to sub-process out to the Claude Code CLI or something else?

There is weaponized malaise employed by these frontier model providers and I feel like that dark-pattern, what you pointed out, and others are employed to rate-limit certain subscriptions.

They did ship that feature, it's called "&" / teleport from web. They also have an iOS app.

Likewise curious to hear how it goes! 80B seems too big for a 5090, I'd be surprised if it runs well un-quantized.

Interested to hear how this goes!

OpenCode

They had a public spat with Opencode

Cause they make the best coding model.

It's that simple. Everyone else is trying to compete in other ways and Anthropic are pushing for dominate the market.

They'll eventually lose their performance edge and suddenly they will back to being cute and fluffy

I've cancelled a clause sub, but still have one.

Probably because the alternatives are OpenAI, Google, Meta. Not throwing shade at those companies but it's not hard to win the hearts of developers when that's your competition.

Anthropic is astroturfing most of the programming forums including this one.

Thanks, I’ll try out Codex to bridge until local models get to the level I need.

Because OpenAI is on the back foot at the moment, they need the retention

On the other hand I feel like 5.2 gets progressively dumbed down. It used to work well, but now initial few prompts go in right direction and then it goes off the rails reminding me more of a GPT-3.5.

I wonder what they are up to.

The enemy of done is perfect, etc. what is the point of comments like this?

That's great, yes. We all draw the line somewhere, subjectively. We all pretend we follow logic and reason and lets all be more honest and truthfully share how we as humans are emotionally driven not logically driven.

It's like this old adage "Our brains are poor masters and great slaves". We are basically just wanting to survive and we've trained ourselves to follow the orders of our old corporate slave masters who are now failing us, and we are unfortunately out of fear paying and supporting anticompetitive behavior and our internal dissonance is stopping us from changing it (along with fear of survival and missing out and so forth).

The global marketing by the slave master class isn't helping. We can draw a line however arbitrary we'd like though and its still better and more helpful than complaining "you drew a line arbitrarily" and not actually doing any of the hard courageous work of drawing lines of any kind in the first place.