For some reason a lot of people are unaware that Claude Code is proprietary.
How much will a synthetic mid-level dev (Opus 4.5) cost in 2028, after the VC subsidies are gone? I would imagine as much as possible? Dynamic pricing?
Will the SOTA model labs even sell API keys to anyone other than partners/whales? Why even that? They are the personalized app devs and hosts!
Man, this is the golden age of building. Not everyone can do it yet, and every project you can imagine is greatly subsidized. How long will that last?
- Models will get cheaper, maybe way cheaper
- Model harnesses will get more complex, maybe way more complex
- Local models may become competitive
- Capital-backed access to more tokens may become absurdly advantaged, or not
The only thing I think you can count on is that more money buys more tokens, so the more money you have, the more power you will have ... as always.
But whether some version of the current subsidy, which levels the playing field, will persist seems really hard to model.
All I can say is, the bad scenarios I can imagine are pretty bad indeed—much worse than that it's now cheaper for me to own a car, while it wasn't 10 years ago.
In my Uber comparison, it was physical hardware on location... taxis, but this is not the case with token delivery.
This is such a complex situation in that regard, however, once the market settles and monopolies are created, eventually the price will be what market can bear. Will that actually create an increase in gross planet product, or will the SOTA token providers just eat up the existing gross planet product, with no increase?
I suppose whoever has the cheapest electricity will win this race to the bottom? But... will that ever increase global product?
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Upon reflection, the comment above was likely influenced by this truly amazing quote from Satya Nadella's interview on the Dwarkesh podcast. This might be one of the most enlightened things that I have ever heard in regard to modern times:
> Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10%.
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/satya-nadella#:~:text=Us%20self%2...
[1]: https://developer-blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/0...
I have never seen a use case where a "lower" model was useful, for me, and especially my users.
I am about to get almost the exact MacBook that you have, but I still don't want to inflict non-SOTA models on my code, or my users.
This is not a judgement against you, or the downloadable weights, I just don't know when it would be appropriate to use those models.
BTW, I very much wish that I could run Opus 4.5 locally. The best that I can do for my users is the Azure agreement that they will not train on their data. I also have that setting set on my claude.ai sub, but I trust them far less.
Disclaimer: No model is even close to Opus 4.5 for agentic tasks. In my own apps, I process a lot of text/complex context and I use Azure GPT 4.1 for limited llm tasks... but for my "chat with the data" UX, Opus 4.5 all day long. It has tested so superior.
The one thing I wish for is that Azure Opus 4.5 had json structured output. Last I checked that was in "beta" and only allowed via direct Anthropic API. However, after many thousands of Opus 4.5 Azure API calls with the correct system and user prompts, not even one API call has returned invalid json.
I'm also sure your prefill is slow enough to make the model mostly unusable, even at smallish context windows, but entirely at mid to large context.
It's fair enough to decide you want to just stick with a single provider for both the tool and the models, but surely still better to have an easy change possible even if not expecting to use it.
THIS. I get so annoyed when there's a longstanding bug that I know how to fix, the fix would be easy for me, but I'm not given the access I need in order to fix it.
For example, I use Docker Desktop on Linux rather than native Docker, because other team members (on Windows) use it, and there were some quirks in how it handled file permissions that differed from Linux-native Docker; after one too many times trying to sort out the issues, my team lead said, "Just use Docker Desktop so you have the same setup as everyone else, I don't want to spend more time on permissions issues that only affect one dev on the team". So I switched.
But there's a bug in Docker Desktop that was bugging me for the longest time. If you quit Docker Desktop, all your terminals would go away. I eventually figured out that this only happened to gnome-terminal, because Docker Desktop was trying to kill the instance of gnome-terminal that it kicked off for its internal terminal functionality, and getting the logic wrong. Once I switched to Ghostty, I stopped having the issue. But the bug has persisted for over three years (https://github.com/docker/desktop-linux/issues/109 was reported on Dec 27, 2022) without ever being resolved, because 1) it's just not a huge priority for the Docker Desktop team (who aren't experiencing it), and 2) the people for whom it IS a huge priority (because it's bothering them a lot) aren't allowed to fix it.
Though what's worse is a project that is open-source, has open PRs fixing a bug, and lets those PRs go unaddressed, eventually posting a notice in their repo that they're no longer accepting PRs because their team is focusing on other things right now. (Cough, cough, githubactions...)
This exact frustration (in his case, with a printer driver) is responsible for provoking RMS to kick off the free software movement.
Especially if they want to get into enterprise VPCs and "build and manage organizational intelligence"
(1) a circular chain of duplicate reports, all closed: or
(2) a game of telephone where each issue is subtly different from the next, eventually reaching an issue that has nothing at all to do with yours.
At no point along the way will you encounter an actual human from Anthropic.
I'll post the whole thing in a Github repo too at some point, but it's taking a while to prettify the code, so it looks more natural :-)
What specific parts of the ToS does "sharing different code snippets" violate? Not that I don't believe you, just curious about the specifics as it seems like you've already dug through it.
Codeberg at least has some integrity around such things.
Sometimes prompt engineering is too ridiculous a term for me to believe there's anything to it, other times it does seem there is something to knowing how to ask the AI juuuust the right questions.
Unironically, the ToS of most of these AI companies should be, and hopefully is legally unenforceable.
If you want to make this your cause and incur the legal fees and lost productivity, be my guest.