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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

Anthropic's model deployments for Claude Code are likely optimized for Claude Code. I wouldn't be surprised if they had optimizations like sharing of system prompt KV-cache across users, or a speculative execution model specifically fine-tuned for the way Claude Code does tool calls.

When setting your token limits, their economics calculations likely assume that those optimizations are going to work. If you're using a different agent, you're basically underpaying for your tokens.

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- OR - it's about lock-in.

Build the single pane of glass everyone uses. Offer it under cost. Salt the earth and kill everything else that moves.

Nobody can afford to run alternative interfaces, so they die. This game is as old as time. Remember Reddit apps? Alternative Twitter clients?

In a few years, CC will be the only survivor and viable option.

It also kneecaps attempts to distill Opus.

It’s probably a mixture of things including direct control over how the api is called and used as pointed out above and giving a discount for using their ecosystem. They are in fact a business so it should not surprise anyone they act as one.

It might well be a mixture, but 95% of that mixture is vendor lock in. Same reason they don't support AGENTS.md, they want to add friction in switching.

They can try add as much as friction they want. A simple rename in the files and directories like .claude makes the thing work to move out of CC.

It’s not like moving from android to iOS.

You'd be surprised how effective small bits of friction are.

If it was lock in they wouldn't make it absolutely trivial to change inference providers in Claude Code.

The goal is to use Anthropic subscriptions outside of Claude Code!! That is the lock in.

It's very straightforward to instrument CC under tmux with send-keys and capturep. You could easily use that for distillation, IMO. There are also detailed I/O logs.

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