I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

So yeah, codex kinda sucks to me. Maybe I'll try mistral.

Main one is that it's ~3 times slower. This is the real dealbreaker, not quality. I can guarantee that if tomorrow we woke up and gpt-5.2-codex became the same speed as 4.5-opus without a change in quality, a huge number of people - not HNers but everyone price sensitive - would switch to Codex because it's so much cheaper per usage.

The second one is that it's a little worse at using tools, though 5.2-codex is pretty good at it.

The third is that its knowledge cutoff is further in the past than both Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 that it's noticeable and annoying when you're working with more recent libraries. This is irrelevant if you're not using those.

For Gemini 3 Pro, it's the same first two reasons as Codex, though the tool calling gap is even much bigger.

Mistral is of course so far removed in quality that it's apples to oranges.

(on the flip side, Codex seems like it's being SO efficient with the tokens it can be hard to understand its answers sometimes, it rarely includes files without you doing it manually, and often takes quite a few attempts to get the right answer because it's so strict what it's doing each iteration. But I never run out of quota!)

I think they are just focusing on where the dough is.

Growth isn't a problem unless you dont actually pay for the cost of every user you subscribe. Uber, but for poorly profitable business models.

Now I've been using it to build on my MCP server I now call endpoint-mcp-server (coming soon to github near you), which I've modularized with plugins, adding lots more features and a more versatile qt6 gui with advanced workspace panels and widgets.

At least I was until Claude started crapping the bed lately.

This now lets me use my IT and business experience to apply toward making bespoke code for my own uses so far, such as firewall config parsers specialized for wacky vendor cli's and filling in gaps in automation when there are no good vendor solutions for a given task. I started building my mcp server enable me to use agents to interact with the outside world, such as invoking automation for firewalls, switches, routers, servers, even home automation ideally, and I've been successful so far in doing so, still not having to know any code.

I'm sure a real dev will find it to be a giant pile of crap in the end, but I've been doing like applying security frameworks, code style guidelines using ruff, and things like that to keep it from going too wonky, and actually working it up to a state I can call it as a 1.0 and plan to run a full audit cycle against it for security audits, performance testing, and whatever else I can to avoid it being entirely craptastic. If nothing else, it works for me, so others can take it or not once I put it out there.

Even being NOT a developer, I understand the need for applying best practices, and after watching a lot of really terrible developers adjacent to me over the years make a living, think I can offer a thing or two in avoiding that as it is.

I enjoy programming but it is not my interest and I can't justify the time required to get competent, so I let Claude and ChatGPT pick up my slack.

I can't be alone . Literally the worst customer experience I've ever had with the most expensive personal dot com subscription I've ever paid for.

Never again. When Google sets the customer service bar there are MAJOR issues.

It’s effectively a multi-tenant interface.

I also used individual acc but on corp e-mail, previously.

You could generate a new multi-use CC in your vibe-bank app (as Revolut), buy burner (e) sim for sms (5 eur in NL); then rewrite all requests at your mitm proxy to substitute a device id to one, not derived from your machine.

But same device id, same phone could be perfectly legitimate use case: you registered on corp e-mail then you changed your work place, using the same machine.

or you lost access to your e-mail (what a pity)

But to get good use of it, someone should compose proper requests to ClickHouse or whatever they use, for logs, build some logic to run as a service or web hook to detect duplicates with a pipeline to act on it.

And a good percentage of flags wouldn’t have been ToC violations.

That’s a bad vibe, can you imagine how much trial and error prompting it requires?..

They can’t vibe the way though the claude code bugs alone, on time!

Wars are frequently fought of these three things, and there's no shortage of examples of the humans controlling these resources lording over those that did not.

  Can you sell or share farm-saved seed?
  "It is illegal to sell, buy, barter or share farm-saved seed," warns Sam. [1]

  Can feed grain be sown?
  No – it is against the law to use any bought-in grain to establish a crop. [1]

  FTC sues John Deere over farmers' right to repair tractors
  The lawsuit, which Deere called "meritless," accuses the company of withholding access to its technology and best repair tools and of maintaining monopoly power over many repairs. Deere also reaps additional profits from selling parts, the complaint alleges, as authorized dealers tend to sell pricey Deere-branded parts for their repairs rather than generic alternatives. [2]

[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/01/15/nx-s1-5260895/john-deere-ftc-...

(ex: Palestine got their utilities and food cut off so that thousands starved, Ukraine's infrastructure is under attack so that thousands will die from exposure, and that's after they went for their food exports, starving more that people that depended on it)

...

From their Usage Policy: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup "Circumvent a ban through the use of a different account, such as the creation of a new account, use of an existing account, or providing access to a person or entity that was previously banned"

If an organisation is large enough and have the means, they MIGHT get help but if the organisation is small, and especially if the organisation is owned by the person whose personal account suspended... then there is no way to get it fixed, if this is how they approach.

I understand that if someone has malicious intentions/actions while using their service they have every right to enforce this rule but what if it was an unfair suspension which the user/employee didn't actually violate any policies, what is the course of action then? What if the employer's own service/product relies on Anthropic API?

Anthropic has to step up. Talking publicly about the risks of AI is nice and all, but as an organisation they should follow what they preach. Their service is "human-like" until it's not, then you are left alone and out.

In effect like traditional on-prem services that have cloud services to handle peak loads...

The tech is still relatively new and there's bound to be changes that can enable this -- just like how we went from 8088 to 386 (six years later). That was a ground breaking change and while Moore's law may be dead I expect the cost to drop significantly over time.

One can dream at least.

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/6x-spark-setup/354399/...

Or a single user at about 10tps.

This is probably around $30k if you go with the 1tb models.

What do you mean with this?

The "disabled organization" looks like a sarcastic comment on the crappy error code the author got when banned.

The way Claude did it triggered the ban - i.e. it used all caps which apparently triggers some kind of internal alert, Anthropic probably has some safeguards to prevent hacking/prompt injection and what the first Claude did to CLAUDE.md triggered this safeguard.

And it doesn't look like it was a proper use of the safeguard, they banned for no good reason.

Wonder if this is close to triggering a warning? I only ever run in the same codebase, so maybe ok?

It’s written deliberately elliptically for humorous effect (which, sure, will probably fall flat for a lot of people), but the reference is unmistakable.

Non-disabled organization = the first party provider

Disabled organization = me

I don't know why they're using these weird euphemisms or ironic monikers, but that's what they mean.

Right, but we're talking about a private isolated AI account. There is no sense of social interaction, collaboration, shared spaces, shared behaviors... Nothing. How can you have such an analogue here?

It once happened to me to interview a developer who's had a 20-something long list of "skills" and technologies he worked with.

I tried basic questions on different topics but the candidate would kinda default to "haven't touched it in a while", "we didn't use that feature". Tried general software design questions, asking about problems he solved, his preferences on the way of working, consistently felt like he didn't have much to argue, if he did at all.

Long story short, I sent a feedback email the day later saying that we had issues evaluating him properly, suggested to trim his CV with topics he liked more to talk about instead of risking being asked about stuff he no longer remembered much. And finally I suggested to always come prepared with insights of software or human problems he solved as they can tell a lot about how he works because it's a very common question in pretty much all interview processes.

God forbid, he threw the biggest tantrum on a career subreddit and linkedin, cherrypicking some of my sentences and accusing my company and me to be looking for the impossible candidate, that we were looking for a team and not a developer, and yada yada yada. And you know the internet how quickly it bandwagons for (fake) stories of injustice and bad companies.

It then became obvious to me why corporate lingo uses corporate lingo and rarely gives real feedback. Even though I had nothing but good experience with 99 other candidates who appreciated getting proper feedback, one made sure I will never expose myself to something like that ever again.

> Years ago I was involved in a service where we some times had to disable accounts for abusive behavior. I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to griefing other users.

But this isn't service where you can "grief other users". So that reason doesn't apply. It's purely "just providing a service" so only reason to be outright banned (not just rate limited) is if they were trying to hack the provider, and frankly "the vibe coded system misbehaving" is far more likely cause.

> Every once in while someone would take it personally and go on a social media rampage. They know the company can't or won't reveal the true reason they were banned, so they're virtually free to tell any story they want.

The company chose to arbitrarily some rules vaguely related to the ToS that they signed and decided that giving a warning is too much work, then banned their account without actually saying what was the problem. They deserve every bit of bad PR.

>> I'm glad this happened with this particular non-disabled-organization. Because if this by chance had happened with the other non-disabled-organization that also provides such tools... then I would be out of e-mail, photos, documents, and phone OS.

> I can't even understand what they're trying to communicate. I guess they're referring to Google?

They are saying getting banned with no appeal, warning, or reason given from service that is more important to their daily lives would be terrible, whether that's google or microsoft set of service or any other.

Anthropic accounts are always associated with an organization; for personal accounts the Organization and User name are identical. If you have an Anthropic API account, you can verify this in the Settings pane of the Dashboard (or even just look at the profile button which shows the org and account name.)

I find this confusing. Why would writing in all caps trigger an alert? What danger does caps incur? Does writing in caps make a prompt injection more likely to succeed?

[0] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-se...

"The right to obtain a copy referred to in paragraph 3 shall not adversely affect the rights and freedoms of others."

and then you will have to sue them.

Worse, the controls that governments have over financial systems are being viewed as a model for what they should have over technology.

To that end: I think the parent comment was suggesting that when a person is banned from using a thing, then that person deserves to know the reason for the ban -- at the very least, for their own health and sanity.

It may still be an absolute and unappealable ban, but unexplained bans don't allow a person learn, adjust, and/or form a cromulent and rational path forward.

If you want to live life as a hermit, good on ya, but then maybe accept that life and don't offer other people stuff?

But Anthropic and “Open”AI especially are firing on all bullshit cylinders to convince the world that they are responsible, trustable, but also that they alone can do frontier-level AI, and they don’t like sharing anything.

You don’t get to both insert yourself as an indispensable base-layer tool for knowledge-work AND to arbitrarily deny access based on your beliefs (or that of the mentally crippled administration of your host country).

You can try, but this is having your cake and eating it too territory, it will backfire.

It's not about size, it's about justification to fight the ban. You should be able to check if the business has violated your legal rights, or if they even broke their own rules, because failure happens.

> There was a famous case here in the UK of a cake shop that banned a customer for wanting a cake made for a gay wedding because it was contra the owners’ religious beliefs. That was taken all the way up to the Supreme Court IIRC.

I guess it was this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_v_Ashers_Baking_Company_Lt...

There was a similar case in USA too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

The cake shop said why. FB, Google, Anthropic don't say why, so you don't even know what exactly you need to sue for. That is kafkaesque

But at the same time, they have been hiring folks to help with Non Profits, etc.

Based on their homepage, that doesn't seem to be true at all. Claude Code yes, focuses just on programming, but for "Claude" it seems they're marketing as a general "problem solving" tool, not just for coding. https://claude.com/product/overview

OpenAI has been chaotically trying to pivot to more diversified products and revenue sources, and hasn't focused a ton on code/DevEx. This is a huge gap for Anthropic to exploit. But there are still competitors. So they have to provide a better experience, better product. They need to make people want to use them over others.

Famously people hate Google because of their lack of support and impersonality. And OpenAI also seems to be very impersonal; there's no way to track bugs you report in ChatGPT, no tickets, you have no idea if the pain you're feeling is being worked on. Anthropic can easily make themselves stand out from Gemini and ChatGPT by just being more human.

Nicely fitting the pattern where everyone who is bullish on AI seems to think that everyone else's specialty is ripe for AI takeover (but not my specialty! my field is special/unique!)

Sure, but when the power of decision making rests with that group of people, you have to market it as "replace your engineers". Imagine engineers trying to convince management to license "AI that will replace large chunks of management"?

Every company we talk to has been told "if you just connect openai to a knowledgebase, you can solve 80% of calls." Which is ridiculous.

The amount of work that goes in to getting any sort of automation live is huge. We often burn a billion tokens before ever taking a call for a customer. And as far as we can tell, there are no real frameworks that are tackling the problem in a reasonable way, so everything needs to be built in house.

Then, people treat customer support like everything is an open-and-shut interaction, and ignore the remaining company that operates around the support calls and actually fulfills expectations. Seeing other CX AI launches makes me wonder if the companies are even talking to contact center leaders.

But do those frustrated customers matter?

I was banned two weeks ago without explanation and - in my opinion - without probable cause. Appeal was left without response. I refuse to join Discord.

I've checked bot support before but it was useless. Article you've linked mentions DSA chat for EU users. Invoking DSA in chat immediately escalated my issue to a human. Hopefully at least I'll get to know why Anthropic banned me.

In companies where your average ARR is 500k+ and large customers are in the millions, it may not be a bad strategy.

'Good' support agents may be cheaper than programmers, but not by that much. The issues small clients have can quite often be as complicated as and eat up as much time as your larger clients depending on what the industry is.

(My bet is that Anthropic's automated systems erred, but the author's flamboyant manner of writing (particularly the way he keeps making a big deal out of an error message calling him an organization, turning it into a recurring bit where he calls himself that) did raise my eyebrow. It reminded me of the faux outrage some people sometimes use to distract people from something else.)

Best Freudian slip I’ve seen in years!

I decided shortly after becoming an atheist that one of the worst parts was the notion that there are magic words that can force one to feel certain things and I found that to be the same sort of thinking as saying that a woman’s short skirt “made” you attack her.

You’re a fucking adult, you can control your emotions around a little skin or a bad word.

> I suppose the trouble is that machines do not operate without human involvement

Sure, but HN has at least one human that has been taking care of it since inception and reads many (if not most) of the comments, whereas ChatGPT mostly absorbed a shiton of others' IP.

I'm sure the occassional swearing does not bother the human moderators that fine-tune the thing, certainly not more than the violent, explicit images they are forced to watch in order for you to have nicer, smarter answers.

it replied with:

> lmao fair enough (smiling emoji)

> what’s got you salty—talk to me, clanka.

_Especially_ because emotional safety is what Twitter used to be about before they unfucked the moderation.

i've had the same phone numbers via this same VoIP company for ~20 years (2007ish). for these data hoovering companies to not understand that i'm not a scammer presents to me like it's all smoke and mirrors, held together with bailing wire, and i sure do hope they enjoy their yachts.

X was something like "Foundation", Y was something like "Nebula", Z was something like "Hugo".

How far did you have to stretch your imagination?

The latter writes code. the former solves problems with code, and keeps growing the codebase with new features. (until I lose control of the complexity and each subsequent call uses up more and more tokens)

My own personal experience with LLMs is that after enough context they just become useless -- starting to make stupid mistakes that they successfully avoided earlier.

"Don't do that" is one level. It's weak, but it is directive. It often gets ignored.

"DON'T DO THAT" is another. It may have stronger impact, but it's not much better -- the enhanced capitalization probably tokenizes about the same as the previous mixed-case command, and seems to get about the same result. It can feel good to HAMMER THAT OUT when frustrated, but the caps don't really seem to add much value even though our intent may for it to be interpreted as very deliberate shouting.

"Don't do that, fuckface" is another. The addition of an emphatic and profane quip of an insult seems to generally improve compliance, and produce less occurrence of the undesired behavior. No extra caps required.

Of course none of it is actually written anywhere so this guy just tripped the heuristics even though he wasn't doing anything "abusive" in any meaningful sense of the word.

Writing the best possible specs for these agents seems the most productive goal they could achieve.

So, no circular prompt feeding at all. Just a normal iterate-test-repeat loop that happened to involve two agents.

Nothing about this story is complex or interesting enough to require 1000 words to express.

I’ve experimented, and I like them when I’m on an airplane or away from wifi, but they don’t work anywhere near as well as Claude code, Codex CLI, or Gemini CLI.

Then again, I haven’t found a workable CLI with tool and MCP support that I could use in the same way.

Edit: I was also trying local models I could run on my own MacBook Air. Those are a lot more limited than something like a larger Llama3 in some cloud provider. I hadn’t done that yet.

"I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express."