Comment by pplante
5 hours ago
I feel like we are seeing agentic coding tools morph into walled gardens with these acquisitions. Anthropic has restricted claude code usage while OpenAI has sort of let Codex fill the void. I am curious to see how this continues to evolve.
This is the whole point and the reason for the lofty valuations. Get everyone to shift their work to be dependent on these tooling, to the point they can't imagine working in any other way, and then raise prices. Tale as old as enterprise software.
Tale as old as the word "startup" even. Uber/Lyft did it with taxis. DoorDash did it with food delivery. You run at a loss for years while destroying your legacy competition by just outlasting them, then once you have cornered the market you squeeze.
I understand the cynism but it’s not the case here. Stainless isn't a case of blitzscaling or running a loss for years to destroy the competition. The motto of the company is polished and robust and we invested a lot into generating what we think are the highest quality SDKs available. We could have shipped things way, way faster if the focus on design and quality wasn’t such an essential part of the development process
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Now Uber is profitable what stops a taxi from just competing again, forcing Uber to have to be unprofitable again?
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I'm reading "enshitification", and it describes this cycle of first losing money but acquiring customers, then switching focus to catering to businesses, then to themselves and at that point the tool is not what it was supposedly intended to be.
This is the same startup culture. The only innovation here is finding new way to swindle customers and businesses out of money.
and this is why i use pi.dev and hotswap models and have no reliance on a single provider
Actually that wasn’t the plan, no
The moment a group accepts VC money, this becomes the plan
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You forgot this: "trust me bro".
Claude is just a tool. My team members are each free to choose the text editor or IDE that they are happiest with. In the near future, I hope to be able to say the same for coding agents. I really like Claude, but I don't track Claude resources in our repos. If something better comes along, I'm betting it will be perfectly happy to parse the markdown of my existing memory files, and nothing in the repo itself will force anyone else to know that I switched.
It kind of blows my mind that the majority of Claude users have just accepted that CLAUDE.md is a tracked file that the whole team has to standardize on and share. Coding agents are the ultimate API. They conform to however you prefer to interact. Is anyone really expecting to enforce standard operating procedures with this non-deterministic black box of magic?
I can just rename the CLAUDE.md files to AGENTS.md when I would like to. They're all just sitting there on my system.
That was always going to be the end point.
The amount of money thrown at it means at some point the words Return on Investment were going to appear.
It’s the classic loss leader applied to trillion dollar (across the market) capital investments.
Frontier AI labs is pivoting to something that can justified their IPO. just like OpenAI shut down other services and pivot more into coding. They want to show profitability before their mega IPO.
I use claude code and pi.dev side by side most days and i'm mostly choosing pi for most work in last couple of weeks.
True. But this sounds: "I feel like Mondays are coming after Sundays...".
I think that's the normal path for new markets as they consolidate...
I don’t really see where the “walled garden” complaint is coming from. Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through trillions of tokens on their flat-rate subscription plan, but that’s a billing detail, and one that I honestly don’t share the outrage about. The technology part of CC is still totally open: skills, MCP, etc. are all open informal standards and there hasn’t been any movement to lock that down.
No, Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through those tokens with any binary other than their own.
Allowing users to take advantage of their monthly/weekly/daily token limits with the software of their choosing is a perfectly valid expectation.
Restricting it to their own underperforming, buggy TUI client is textbook walled garden.
Claude subscription is restricted to Claude Code harness
Really walled garden is the only direction that makes sense--models will slowly become commodities