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Comment by jbstack | Hacker News Reader

It's not really a fair analogy. Restaurants don't want you taking food away because they want to limit the amount you eat to a single meal, knowing that you'll stop when you get full. If you take food out you can eat more by waiting until the next meal when you're hungry again.

You don't "get full" and "get hungry again" by switching UIs. You can consume the same amount whether you switch or you don't switch.

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> You don't "get full" and "get hungry again" by switching UIs. You can consume the same amount whether you switch or you don't switch.

This is actually a compelling argument for Claude Code getting the discount but not extending it to other cases. Claude Code, being subsidized by the company, is incentivized to minimize token usage. Third parties that piggyback on the same flat rate subscription, are not. i.e. Claude code wants you to eat less.

Of course, I don’t believe at all that this is why Anthropic has blocked this use case. But it is a reasonable argument.

Claude Code does a lot of work in optimizing context usage, how much output is included by tools and how that's done, and when to compact. This very well may make the cost of providing the subscription lower to Anthropic when Claude Code is used. It's well within the realm of possibility if not likelihood that other tools don't have the same incentive to optimize the buffet usage.

Not sure where that goes in the analogies here but maybe something about smaller plates.

The UI absolutely could influence the backend usage.

Think about a web browser that respects cache lifetimes vs one that downloads everything everytime. As an ISP I'd be more likely to offer you unlimited bandwidth if I knew you were using a caching browser.

Likewise Claude code can optimize how it uses tokens and potentially provide the same benefit with less usage.

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