You can use OpenCode programmatically, thus turning that $200/mo Claude Code account into a very cheap Opus 4.6 API service.
I don't think there's anything really to it past that.
I don't think there's anything really to it past that.
> Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead.
Though there was that tweet [0] a while back by someone from Anthropic that just muddied the water. It's frustrating because I feel like the line between the Agent SDK and `claude -p` is not that large but one can use the subscription and one can't... or we don't know, the docs seem unambiguous but the tweet confuses things and you can find many people online saying you can, or you can't.
I'd love to play around with the Agent SDK and try out some automations but it seems I can only do that if I'm willing to pay for tokens, even though I could use Claude Code to write the code "for" the Agent SDK, but not "run" the Agent SDK.
Where is the line? Agent SDK is not allowed with subscription, but if I write a harness around passing data to and parsing the JSON response from `claude -p '<Your Prompt>' --output-format json` would that be allowed? If I run it on a cron locally? I literally have no idea and, not wanting my account to be banned, I'm not interested in finding out. I wish they would clarify it.
[0]
Twitter: https://x.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389
XCancel: https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2024212378402095389
Text:
> Apologies, this was a docs clean up we rolled out that’s caused some confusion.
> Nothing is changing about how you can use the Agent SDK and MAX subscriptions!
> We want to encourage local development and experimentation with the Agent SDK and claude -p.
> If you’re building a business on top of the Agent SDK, you should use an API key instead. We’ll make sure that’s clearer in our docs.
If they only want people using claude code inside their harness, they could... just remove -p?
> Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products
So you can't offer a product based on the subscription. I replied to a comment proposing to use the CLI with --prompt:
> you can also use Claude Code programmatically with the `prompt` parameter in the cli.
And I just informed that Agent SDK is a much nicer way to do that. For internal use or whatever the ToS allows.
One of the economic tuning features of an LLM is to nudge the LLM into reaching conclusions and spending the tokens you want it to spend for the question.
presumably everyone running a form of ralph loop against every single workload is a doomsday situation for LLM providers.
insane that people apologize for this at all. we went from FOSS software being standard to a proprietary cli/tui using proprietary models behind a subscription. how quickly we give our freedom away.
There's nothing in TOS that prevents you from running agentic loops.
It feels like the only safe thing to do is use Claude Code, which, thankfully, I find tolerable, but unfortunate.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
If you know anything about subscription models, you know that ALL of them are built on the fact that most of the users don't use the full capacity available all the time.
https://opencode.ai/docs/sdk/#structured-output
You can stand up an OpenAI compatible API layer in front of it and just feed the requests back and forth. Adds a little delay, but not much.