It makes me wonder what Anthropic's true margins are. I could believe they are overcharging via the API, Sonnet is $3/$15/Mtok and Opus at an ABSURD $15/$75/Mtok. But to break even for me, that would mean that they're overcharging by a factor 5x-10x, which doesn't seem possible. Is the music going to stop for Claude Code the same way it did for Cursor? I have to imagine every incentive in the world is pushing them to lower inference cost rather than introduce stricter limits, and unlike Cursor they can actually can reach into their stack and do this. But I'm not sure they're capable of miracles.
Regardless, I'm bullish Anthropic. Sonnet and Opus don't benchmark as well as O3/Grok4 at pure coding, and aren't as cheap as Kimi K2 for theoretically similar perf, but as any user knows they are top tier at instruction following, highly reliable and predictable, and have a certain intangible theory of mind that is unique to Anthropic.
Do any of the others have a "claude code" local agent? Seems like a big gap IMO. Though, it should be pretty easy for them to close that gap.
I don't usually take too many moral stances but I feel like I can't use Grok. It's bad enough Musk did his Nazi salute but his AI product itself is a Nazi too? It might be good at coding but I really can't stomach using it.
Also, Google does have Gemini CLI, OpenAI does have Codex CLI, and then there is Aider which can support any model. I think the big difference is that Anthropic's models are the best for this use-case right now, and Anthropic has the Max plan which makes a massive difference to the cost of using Claude Code compared to competitors (although the Gemini CLI has insane free tiers).
I'm not sure how this will play out in the future, because it seems to me that Claude Code does not have much of a moat beyond Anthropic having the best coding models right now, and them offering model usage at heavily discounted prices.
There are agentic models and oracle models. It can be modelled on a four-way quadrant of agent vs oracle and high safety vs low safety.
Grok is oracle and low safety.
For code it falls down past simple scripts and utilities.
This is spot on. Reliability is really the #1 priority for me when it comes to coding agents, and Sonnet, and especially Opus, really deliver on it. It makes such a huge difference when it comes to agents. Anthropic really nailed it on this.
My process has become: get Opus to generate a plan, use o3 to help me review the plan, and then get Opus to implement the plan. This works extremely well for me, and is the first time where I've felt AI being actually useful for coding anything more than small prototypes.
cant help but think that you guys yelling about it so loudly from the rooftops is really really not helping your case lol
For what it's worth, everything seems fixed today.
So what happens is inevitable:
- Wild promises of unlimited usage and consumers feeling tricked when the impossible is impossible to deliver (Cursor pricing changes).
- Quasi-unlimited usage with rate-caps, but the models get quantised to all hell? [search Twitter for folks reporting Claude feels dumber around/near outages].
- Engineers sharing tools and techniques on how to squeeze pounds out of a flat-rate plan (original post), which results in more power users doing that, which puts more pressure on margins.
In goose meme format, "What are the margins?"
How quickly we forget Moore's law, or at least what has replaced Moore's law.
[1] https://ghuntley.com/overton
I’m not such an “any user” as in my experience they are exceptionally terrible at following my instructions and cutting edges whenever they like, I have to iteratively get more and more specific at what they should not do, all the time trying to predict their misbehavior. To then see a certain point or a threshold at which they throw my instructions out the window to match and reproduce the very things or patterns I wanted to avoid and likewise with the things and patterns I explicitly instructed them to use or apply.
Very unreliable.
> have a certain intangible theory of mind that is unique to Anthropic.
That’s quite poetic.
thebestmoshe•6mo ago
But does anyone have thoughts on the security aspect. Getting people used to just running code like this that has full access to the system is slightly concerning.
On the other hand it’s no different than installing npm packages
simonw•6mo ago
Deno has mechanisms for allow-listing the exact files the process can access - in this case you would want to give it read-only access to the log files in the ~/.claude directory and nothing else.
ghuntley•6mo ago
Yes, you need to run these agents in a sandboxed environment when running full AFK [1] yolo. That could be a Docker container or it could be remote developer environment.
[1] https://ghuntley.com/ralph
pjm331•6mo ago
ghuntley•6mo ago