Hacker News Reader

Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

> If I'm paying for usage

You are not paying for usage. You are paying for usage via their application.

If their business plan is based on how quickly a human can enter requests and react to the results, and Claude Code is optimized for that, why should you be allowed to use an alternative client that e.g. always tries to saturate the token limits?

View on HN

Btw API is not for coding, it's designed for pipelines, automation, products. They just kill competition making better software like opencode.

Is that your belief to what their API should be used for?

But a) I'm not doing that and b) they can just ban that, like they have rate limits. Why ban OpenCode?

The speculative reasoning I've seen is that they have optimizations in their CC client that reduces their costs. If that's true, I think it's fair that they can limit subscription usage to their client. If you don't want those optimizations and prefer more freedom, use the API.

They rather have yolo permissions to run arbitrary code on your machine and phone home all the time, then opencode having it and phoning home all the time.

They have rate limits, but they also want to control the nozzle, and not all their users use all their allocation all the time.

In reality, heavy subscription users are subsidized by light subscription users. The rate limits aren't everything.

If agent harnesses other than Claude Code consume more tokens than average, or rather, if users of agent harnesses other than CC consume more tokens than average, well, Anthropic wouldn't be unhappy if those consumers had to pay more for their tokens.

> If agent harnesses other than Claude Code consume more tokens than average, or rather, if users of agent harnesses other than CC consume more tokens than average

Do they, though?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com