"renowned vibe-coder Peter Steinberger"

what? that's a thing ? why would a vibe coder be "renowned"? I use Claude every day but this is just too much.

Isnt claude code more popular than codex?

Yeah I think Anthropic has the "right" to do this. That's fine.

But they also have shown a weakness by failing to understand why people might want to do this (use their Max membership with OpenCode etc instead).

People aren't using opencode or crush with their Claude Code memberships because they're trying to exploit or overuse tokens or something. That isn't possible.

They do it because Claude Code the tool itself is full of bugs and has performance issues, and OpenCode is of higher quality, has more open (surprise) development, is more responsive to bug fixes, and gives them far more knobs and dials to control how it works.

I use Claude Code quite a bit and there isn't a session that goes by where I don't bump into a sharp edge of some kind. Notorious terminal rendering issues, slow memory leaks, or compaction related bugs that took them 3 months to fix...

Failure to deal with quality issues and listen to customers is hardly a good sign of company culture, leading up to IPO... If they're trying to build a moat... this isn't a strong way to do it.

If you want to own the market and have complete control at the tooling level, you're simply going to have to make a better product. With their mountain of cash and army of engineers at their disposal ... they absolutely could. But they're not.

> "For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted."

The best pressure on companies comes from viable alternatives, not from boycotts that leave you without tools altogether.

> For me personally, I have decided I will never be an Anthropic customer, because I refuse to do business with a company that takes its customers for granted.

Archaeologist.dev Made a Big Mistake

If guided by this morality column, Archaeologist should immediately stop using pretty-much anything they are using in their life. There's no company today that doesn't have their hands dirty. The life is a dance between choosing the least bad option, not radically cutting off any sight of "bad".

[delayed]

I mean... I don't like it either but this is pretty standard stuff and it's obvious why they're doing it.

Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok are all more or less on par with each other, or a couple months behind at most. Chinese open models are also not far behind.

There's nothing inherent to these products to make them "sticky". If your tooling is designed for it, you can trivially switch models at any time. Mid-conversation, even. And it just works.

When you have basically equivalent products with no switching cost, you have perfect competition. They are all commodities. And that means: none of them can make a profit. It's a basic law of economics.

If they can't make a profit, no matter how revolutionary the tech is, their valuation is not justified, and they will be in big trouble when people figure this out.

So they need to make the product sticky somehow. So they:

1. Add a subscription payment model. Once you are paying a subscription fee, then the calculus on switching changes: if you only maintain one subscription, you have a strong reason to stick with it for everything.

2. Force you to use their client app, which only talks to their model, so you can't even try other models without changing your whole workflow, which most people won't bother to do.

These are bog standard tactics across the tech industry and beyond for limiting competitive pressure.

Everyone is mad about #2 but honestly I'm more mad about #1. The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing, which makes switching easy. But right now the subscription prices offer an enormous discount over API pricing, which just shows how much they are really desperate to create some sort of stickiness. The subscriptions don't even provide the "peace of mind" benefit that Spotify-like subscription models provide, where you don't have to worry about usage, because they still have enforced usage limits that people regularly hit. It's just purely a discount offered for locking yourself in.

But again I can't really be that mad because of course they are doing this, not doing it would be terrible business strategy.

> they really, really want to own the entire value chain rather than being relegated to becoming just another "model provider"

I remember the story used to be the other way around - "just a wrapper", "wrapper AI startups" were everywhere, nobody trusted they can make it.

Maybe being "just a model provider" or "just a LLM wrapper" matter less than the context of work. What I mean is that benefits collect not at the model provider, nor at the wrapper provider, but where the usage takes place, who sets the prompts and uses the code gets the lion share of benefits from AI.

Just checked https://opencode.ai/.

It looks like they need to update their FAQ:

Q: Do I need extra AI subscriptions to use OpenCode? A: Not necessarily, OpenCode comes with a set of free models that you can use without creating an account. Aside from these, you can use any of the popular coding models by creating a Zen account. While we encourage users to use Zen, OpenCode also works with all popular providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI etc. You can even connect your local models.

I'll be honest; I'm pretty sure this "mistake" will be completely forgotten by the next month. Their enforcing that their subscription only works with their product should not really come as a surprise to anyone, and the alt-agent users are a small enough minority that they'll get over it.