Why were third party harnesses banned? Surely they'd want sticking power over the ecosystem.
Maybe there’s some truth to that, but then why haven’t OpenAI made the same move? I believe the main reason is platform control. Anthropic can’t survive as a pipeline for tokens, they need to build and control a platform, which means aggressively locking out everybody else building a platform.
OpenAI has never shyed away from burning mountains of cash to try and capture a little more market share. They paid a billion dollars for a vibe coded mess just for the opportunity to associate themselves with the hype.
No, I'm paying $200 a month for a premium product that I expect premium service for. It's the single most expensive IT expense I have. Taking advantage my foot.
You are more than able to pay for API rates.
If you are going to come and complain about a $200 subscription that gives you $400 worth of API tokens there is only so much room to complain. Only so many lemons can be squeezed. Hope that was a helpful for you.
$200 is premium.
Don't confused price with "premium service". It was not that long ago that folks would be spending $100-200 on their cable service bundle. You are buying a subsidized product when using the plan and the more you spend the more tokens you get, has nothing to do with being a premium service.
The cheap plans are usually semi-unlimited the same way but not as powerful. This isn't simply a matter of buying more tokens.
> It was not that long ago that folks would be spending $100-200 on their cable service bundle.
Compared to OTA that's premium, but more relevantly if most cable buyers are getting a hypothetical $10 bundle then the $100 one is a premium bundle.
The original comment was they are paying for a premium service. No they are paying for more tokens. You lot going on and on arguing over some small hill.
Claude was the topic at hand and higher tiers buy you more tokens. I know some like Gemini bundle a ton of junk alongside the tokens but you really are still buying yourself more tokens. There is nothing premium in a $200 Claude account. You are buying more tokens, $100 is the same as $200 except token count. Hope that helps. ;)
But I was making an argument about the $10 plans, not the $100 plans.
Claude doesn't even go that low. Except the free plan which has a very reduced feature list.
Claude's $20 and $100 are pretty similar except tokens, that part is true. So they're a bit higher priced and more of the "it's just tokens" model. But the market as a whole is mostly selling a limited feature set down at lower price points. On average, getting up to the point where you have full access and are paying per-token is itself a premium jump.
It is not a premium service that deserves special care which was what the original commenter stated. It is a $200 account that buys you $400+ on tokens.
Hope that helps recenter this weird path we are following. :)
What? What I just said was my one and only point from the very beginning. The price is so much higher than the median that that makes it premium and deserving of some special care.
I understand your point of view here, and it's fine if you disagree with mine but it's weird if you don't at least understand my point by now. You saying my last comment is a tangent suggests you don't understand me. But it's a simple point and I'm not sure how to make it clearer.
Does that help recenter?
It’s not unreasonable for people to expect the most expensive subscription plan to be “premium”. That’s how it works everywhere else. They typically have better margins on the premium plans, and the monthly payment gives them reliable cash flow at that higher margin.
You’re right that that’s not true at Anthropic (or really most AI providers). You’re not even really buying tokens because you get billed whether you use it or not, the tokens don’t carry over like buying API tokens, and they get to dictate what an acceptable way to use those tokens is. They are cheaper though, assuming you actually use them. Which Anthropic et al would really prefer you didn’t.
Lol no they didn't. It wasn't even an acquihire. They just hired Peter.
Maybe they are paying him incredibly well, but not a billion dollars well.
Third-party harnesses are the exact opposite of stickiness!
Ditching Claude Code for a third party harness while using the Claude Code subscription means it's trivial to switch to a different model when you {run out of credits | find a cheaper token provider | find a better model}.
If you're paying normal API prices they'll happily let you use whatever harness you want.
Claude code uses a bunch if best practices to maximize cache hit rate. Third party harnesses are hit or miss, so often use a lot more tokens for the same task.
https://x.com/steipete/status/2040811558427648357
"Anthropic now blocks first-party harness use too
claude -p --append-system-prompt 'A personal assistant running inside OpenClaw.' 'is clawd here?'
→ 400 Third-party apps now draw from your extra usage, not your plan limits.
So yeah: bring your own coin "
> This is not intentional, likely an overactive abuse classifier. Looking, and working on clarifying the policy going forward.
most of the users of those third party harnesses care just as much about hitting cache and getting more usage.
He demonstrates in the code that OpenCode aggressively trims context, by compacting on every turn, and pruning all tool calls from the context that occurred more than 40,000 tokens ago. Seems like it could be a good strategy to squeeze more out of the context window - but by editing the oldest context, it breaks the prompt cache for the entire conversation. There is effectively no caching happening at all.
Another thing is branding: Their CLI might be the best right now, but tech debt says it won’t continue to be for very long.
By enforcing the CLI you enforce the brand value — you’re not just buying the engine.
1. openclaw like - using the LLM endpoint on subscription billing, different prompts than claude code
2. using claude cli with -p, in headless mode
The second runs through their code and prompts, just calls claude in non-interactive mode for subtasks. I feel especially put off by restricting the second kind. I need it to run judge agents to review plans and code.