Comment by nozzlegear
12 hours ago
Regarding moats: it's been said by everyone else, but it doesn't seem like Anthropic has a moat. Everyone can easily switch from Claude to Codex, OpenCode, Pi, or any of the other zillions of harnesses. They can even have Claude do the migration for them if they want and it will oblige – that's what I did when I canceled my Claude subscription.
The idea that hardware and compute is their moat is interesting, but open/local models become more capable each week. As I write this, I have 3 instances of some no-name model working on 3 separate worktrees on my M1 Mac Studio. It was viable for me ages ago, and I'm not an AI enthusiast (I just happened to have bought a Mac several years ago that can run these models). I haven't paid Anthropic or OpenAI a cent since the early part of 2026.
I'm also local-only in my current development process, and have a couple local agents running right now. The problem with local right now is the price has gone through the roof. Even 3-6 months ago I would have said it's viable for a lot of people, but even getting the RAM for a local inference machine is a big investment for a lot of people trying to dip their toes into the space these days.
But if you’re statisfied with just that throughput and model capability that a M1 can provide, than I don’t think you are a well monetizable client anyway? I agree with the no moat as I use a wide variety of models but to only use my M5 128 would definitely not statisfy my needs, so on top of that I pay.
I'm satisfied with it for the most part, which isn't to say that local models can't be slow or don't do dumb shit that show their comparative lack of intelligence sometimes. But when I need speed or intelligence, I just press ctrl+p in my harness and spend a buck on OpenRouter.
It's my belief that we will (or probably have) hit a point where the majority of us receive diminishing returns from the sota models for the work we do. I don't need Astra or Mythos just to write some crud apps or refactor react to svelte, for example.