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Comment by sghiassy | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder what type of moat systems / business like these have

edit: referring to Anthropic and the like

Subsidized plans that are only for their Agent (Claude Code). Fine tuning their models to work best with their agent. But it's not much of a moat once every leading model is great at tool calling.

Capital, both social and economic.

Also data, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637328

The only moat in all of this is capital.

Is it a moat if new start ups avoid competing in the space because there is inherently no moat?

Its open source. Where does it say he wants to monetise it?

None, basically.

I do think Claude Code as a tool gave Anthropic some advantages over others. They have plan mode, todolist, askUserQuestion tools, hooks, etc., which greatly extend Opus's capabilities. Agree that others (Codex, Cursor) also quickly copy these features, but this is the nature of the race, and Anthropic has to keep innovating to maintain its edge over others

The biggest advantage by far is the data they collect along the way. Data that can be bucketed to real devs and signals extracted from this can be top tier. All that data + signals + whatever else they cook can be re-added in the training corpus and the models re-trained / version++ on the new set. Rinse and repeat.

(this is also why all the labs, including some chinese ones, are subsidising / metoo-ing coding agents)

(I work at Cursor) We have all these! Plan mode with a GUI + ability to edit plans inline. Todos. A tool for asking the user questions, which will be automatically called or you can manually ask for it. Hooks. And you can use Opus or any other models with these.

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