Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again
docs.openclaw.ai
docs.openclaw.ai
Boris from Claude Code said publicly on Twitter that CLI-style usage is allowed. We took that seriously and invested time building around that guidance. I even changed the defaults, so when using the cli we're automatially disabling features that use excessive tokens like the heartbeat feature. But in practice, Anthropic still blocks parts of our system prompt, so the actual behavior today does not match what was communicated publicly.
https://x.com/bcherny/status/2041035127430754686
They since seemed to changed their classifier as people hack around it, as it is trivial to do so with a few renames. I'm not playing that game so it's in a weird limbo where it should work in theory but doesn't in practice.
You can argue that this is unfair and they should provide clearer guidance. Well - as soon as they do people find ways to skirt the letter of the rules to once again take advantage of the economics of the subscription model. So should they just scrap the entire plan? Ruin it for people who are using it as it was intended (coding agent, light experimentation/headless use outside of that)? That doesn't seem right either.
There will be a time for OpenClaw, but in the current world with limited compute, that time is not now.
This kind of thing is the exception. Subsidized subscriptions work to distort the power of the market. The more successful they are (in destroying competition), the worse it leaves consumers.
While i get the individual steps that leads them to this "difficult position", I think i'll just keep telling everybody to cancel their sub and make sure to not get locked in.
This is somehow doubly wrong. Not only are most economic goods NOT commodities, there are plenty of economic analogs to AI subscriptions (streaming, telecom, gyms, buffets) and none of them operate as "unlimited with no restrictions on re-use". Really just terribly misinformed way of thinking here.
But i think you misunderstood the scope of my claim. We can argue whether its 30% or 70% of an average paycheck is spend on fungible things and per line item how much of it is fungible and not - but I was also including all the B2B sales.
Companies that let themselves become entirely dependent on specific suppliers do worse.
It seems with the new "--bare" flag they are introducing, a huge rug pull is coming as they plan to deprecate -p for unlimited users.
The docs now read:
> "Bare mode skips OAuth and keychain reads. Anthropic authentication must come from ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or an apiKeyHelper in the JSON passed to --settings. Bedrock, Vertex, and Foundry use their usual provider credentials. --bare is the recommended mode for scripted and SDK calls, and will become the default for -p in a future release."
Hope I am reading this wrong or this is clarified.
There is one simple policy: Subscriptions are for use on human scale of comprehension. API Keys are for everything else.
Anthropic can have a machine/bot get rate limited and people can build workflows using `claude -p` or something even better (like an SDK) , all the while using their OAuth tokens for max/pro.
Anthropic staff have had contradictive statements in Twitter and have corrected each other. Their intent for clarifications lead to confusion.
> OpenClaw treats Claude CLI reuse and claude -p usage as sanctioned for this integration unless Anthropic publishes a new policy.
Oh cool, so everything is back to business now, until they all or sudden update their policy tomorrow that retracts everything.
Anthropic have proved themselves to be be unreliable when it comes to CC. Switching to other providers is the best way to go, if you want to keep your insanity.
At least the only action I was still able to perform was to refund the user, or paypal would have just kept the money.
I pulled our company portal away from PayPal when they refused to restore my account.
Five years later, I tried to re-activate and the human I finally got to effectively told me to fuck off; so I will spend the rest of my life bashing that trash company at every chance.
What's not allowed is grabbing the oauth tokens and using these for your own custom agent, which is what was (and still is) banned.
Nothing has changed, this appears to just be a giant misunderstanding (and probably a poor choice of words from Openclaw).
It's just OpenClaw people claiming "Anthropic told us it's fine".
Oh no. They won't update the policy. Boris or Thariq will casually mention in a random off-hand commebt on Twitter that this is banned now, and then will gaslight everyone that this has always been the case.
Best and most applicable typo ever ʕ ´ • ᴥ •̥ ` ʔ
I don't see anything on this page that claims something different from that, or that addresses that claim at all.
I remember when I’d periodically rage quit from Uber One to Lyft Pink and back again every time I had a terrible customer-service experience. In the end, I realized picking a demon and getting familiar with its quirks was the better way to go.
I’m currently sticking with Claude, in part because I’m not exposed to this nonsense due to OpenClaw, in larger part because of the Hegseth-Altman DoD nonsense. More broadly, however, I’m not sure if any of Google, Anthropic or OpenAI are coming across as stars in AI communication and customer service.
There hasnt been near the confusion and drama surrounding things like codex and gemini-cli. I don't think they're all on the same pedestal right now
It’s so easy to switch between all of them. I can open the Uber and Lyft apps and compare in a minute. I can run Claude and ChatGPT in parallel and see which one gets a better handle on the question. I can switch LLM providers with a few minutes of signing up for one and cancelling the other.
They all try to encourage brand lock in but it’s easy to pick up and move if you’re using them for their main service.
I've complained, extensively, about this before but Anthropic really needs to make it clear what is and is not supported with or without a subscription. Until then, it's hard to know where you stand with using their products.
I say all of this as someone who doesn't use OpenClaw or any Claw-like product currently. I just want to know what I can and can't do and currently it's impossible to know.
How can I buy into an ecosystem that might disallow one of my main workflows? I currently use several hook scripts to route specific work to different models. Will they disallow that at some point? We don't know because they can't get their story straight.
Anthropic is destroying goodwill that is hard-won in this space. At the end of the day, people just need to do their work in a way that makes sense for them. In my case (someone who has been building ML/AI tools for 25 years @ MS & Apple), I have much better results using my bespoke harness. If I'm paying $200/month for compute, I should be able to use it in a way that works for me. Given the push back, I'm not alone.
How, exactly, is that not saying something about the announcement?
I used the word hearsay to imply that flip-flopping should only be a judgement on the comms of the entity accused of flip-flopping, not information living on some third party source.
Of course, you're simply being pedantic. Everyone knows why they are making this change (which is more important than your silly take on what constitutes flip-flopping).
The point: Anthropic is losing subscribers because it has no idea what it actually wants to be.
There's no poor communication. The communication is excellently crafted to deceive users and facilitate flipflopping.
I do agree, though, that the parts of this that were actually using the Claude system to generate OAuth keys themselves are a little sus.
That makes sense to say “must use Claude harness to login before calling Claude cli or using Claude code sdk”
And that's why don't get one.
its abstracted so it doesnt look like a claude code harness per se but it works like one.
docs/recipies.md shows the ralph loop
A company built groundup on rule-breaking? Ain't gonna happen.
This is why it's so inconsistent and confusing. They simply can't come up with a rule that only affects OpenClaw/pi/etc and not 'allowed' automations. You either permit automation, or you don't. Right now, they want to have it both ways.
It seems like a tall order to set lasting rules in this space at this point, where nobody really understands what is going to happen in a few weeks.
All this fuzzyness from Anthropic reads more like an incredibly fast growing company working in a brand new space full of uncharted waters. In other words, they are making shit up not because they suck but because that is literally all one can do.
I can’t tell you how relieved I am that there are many capable open weight models in the wild to keep a ceiling on bad behavior.
Working As Designed, clearly.
[0]: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/d378a504ac17eab2...
1. Take the oauth credentials and roll your own agent -- this is NOT allowed
2. Run your agentic application directly in Claude Code -- this IS allowed
When OpenClaw says "Open-Claw style CLI usage", it means literally running OpenClaw in an official Claude Code session. Anthropic has no problems with this, this is compliant with their ToS.
When you use Claude Code's oauth credentials outside of the claude code cli Anthropic will charge you extra usage (API pricing) within your existing subscription.
I agree with GP that this is hard to take seriously.
They don't ban Openclaw prompts, each custom LLM application provides a client application id (this is how e.g. Openrouter can tell you how popular Openclaw is, and which models are used the most).
Anthropic just checks for that.
> This is slightly different from what OpenCode was banned from doing; they were a separate harness grabbing a user’s Claude Code session and pretending to be Claude Code.
> OpenClaw was still using Claude Code as the harness (via claude -p)[0]. I understand why Anthropic is doing this (and they’ve made it clear that building products around claude -p is disallowed) but I fear Conductor will be next.
From what I understand, they still had the Claude Code harness available, but were mostly fully integrated on the pi agent framework, using Claude Code's oauth credentials directly,
They also absolutely blocked OpenClaw system prompts from this path in the prior weeks, based purely on keyword detection. Seems they’ve undone that now.
This was widely reported, and happened to me. You probably can’t reproduce it or see it in docs because they seem to have changed the policy.
But then the Claude Code product manager said:
> This is not intentional, likely an overactive abuse classifier. Looking, and working on clarifying the policy going forward.
The fault here is not with Anthropic. It lies with cowboy coders creating a system that violates a providers terms of service and creating an adverse relationship.
One day you're experimenting just fine. The next, everything breaks.
And I'd gladly use their web containerized agents instead (it would pretty much be the same thing), but we happen to do Apple stuff. So unless we want to dive into relying on ever-changing unreliable toolchains that break every time Apple farts, we're stuck with macOS.
Antropic has the info on their website, emailed all users for each step, and I've seen it on X- I'm sure it's in other places as well.
Though, I don't think that justifies spreading FUD in the opposite direction. I also don't think the comment the GP was replying to contains FUD.
Anthropic was, even to me, “one of the better ones” until recently. They have made many questionable/poor decisions the last 6-8 weeks and people are right to call them out for it, especially when they want our money.
I still VERY occasionally use it (as I'm friggin able to anyway) but it's definitely nowhere near my usage previously. And I refuse to give them money, and besideswhich have no goddamn notion of whether it would even be worth it on the lowest paid tier.
Ah well. The free ride was fun but I knew it had a shelf life.
I will say that Codex high/x-high has consistently performed the best for me, but YMMV
Funny thing (or I just imagined that), when I used ChatGPT for studying, it was quite generous about over usage. When I was just messing around, testing where the guardraila are or trying to get it to generate sexual prose about my siblings to send it to them for laughs, the limits were held much more strictly.
I remember when it went up from 25/3h to 50/3h. And I was like meh, because I've already used it over that limit multiple times.
“You’re biased” in these contexts is often just a weak argument bordering on a personal attack. You’re attacking my credibility with no basis for it rather than arguing in favor of anthropic.
The most recent Anthropic announcement was not that people would be banned for using subscriptions with OpenClaw, but that it would be charged as extra usage. I think the reason this was changed three days after that announcement is that being charged for extra usage meant people would not be banned for using their subscription OAuth tokens directly against the Anthropic API with a third party harness, as they had been before. But rather both that usage, and the more recent claude -p usage both be charged as extra usage.
Release notes and announcements are a well-known agentic anti-pattern.
If you're doing them, you're doing agentic wrong. /s-ish-also-cry
Google when they merged YouTube and Google+, Reddit multiple times, Facebook after countless scandals. Microsoft destroying windows and pushing ads.
At the end of the day a solid product and company can withstand online controversy.
A product with a massive moat. Switching from Claude to another competitor is insanely easy and without much loss of quality. Until they’ve built their moat, burning goodwill is foolish.
What’s different is it’s probably required due to the cash that’s being burnt to operate. They can’t afford to keep offering so much for so little revenue.
Not that they don't bring value, I'm just not convinced they'll be able to sell their products in a sticky enough way to make up the prices they'll have to extract to make up for the absurd costs.
Unless you compare with the reported cash burn or projected losses.
> they’ll raise effective prices some more while Claude diffuses into the economy, sounds like a money printer
But the problem is, they have no moat. Even if Claude diffuses into the economy (still to be seen how much it can effectively penetrate sectors other than engineering, spam, marketing/communications), there is no moat, all providers are interchangeable. If Antrhopic raise the prices too much, switch out to the OpenAI equivalent products.
I disagree very strongly with this, both anecdotally and in the data - subscriptions are growing in all frontier providers; anecdata is right here in HN when you look around almost everyone is talking about CC, codex is a distant second, and completely anecdotally I personally strictly prefer GPT 5.3+ models for backend work and Opus for frontend; Gemini reviews everything that touches concurrency or SQL and finds issues the other models miss.
My general opinion is that models cannot be replaceable, because a model which can replace every other provider must excel at everything all specialist models excel at and that is impossible to serve at scale economically. IOW everyone will have at least two subscriptions to different frontier labs and more likely three.
If tomorrow Kimi release a model better at something, you'd switch to it.
I postulate in practice this won't matter since the space of use cases is so large if Kimi released the absolutely best model at everything they wouldn't be able to serve it (c.f. Mythos).
Sure you can go local, but lets be real, that would be <1% of users.
I'd agree with you, except I've heard this argument before. Amazon, Google, Facebook all burned lots of cash, and folks were convinced they would fail.
On the other hand plenty burned cash and did fail. So could go either way.
I expect, once the market consolidates to 2 big engines, they'll make bonkers money. There will be winners and losers. But I can't tell you which is which yet.
hn is not a monolith. People here routinely disagree with each other, and that's what makes it great
I understand why they have to charge more, but not many are gonna be able to afford even $100 a month, and that doesn't seem to be sufficient.
It has to come with some combination of better algorithms or better hardware.
Who’s wrong?
They have a metric called Model-Harness Index:
MHI = 0.50 × ToolCalling + 0.30 × HumanEval + 0.20 × MMLU (scale 0-100)
Edit: I’d also consider waiting for WWDC, they are supposed to be launching the new Mac Studio, an even if you don’t get it, you might be able to snag older models for cheaper
100% agree. I’m just looking forward to setting something up in my electronic closet that I can remote to instead of having everything tracked.
I'm currently making an effort to switch to local for stuff that can be local - initially stand alone tasks, longer term a nice harness for mixing. One example would be OCR/image description - I have hooks from dired to throw an image to local translategemma 27b which extracts the text, translates it to english, as necessary, adds a picture description, and - if it feels like - extra context. Works perfectly fine on my macbook.
Another example would be generating documentation - local qwen3 coder with a 256k context window does a great job at going through a codebase to check what is and isn't documented, and prepare a draft. I still replace pretty much all of the text - but it's good at collecting the technical details.
> Smart Cloud Routing > > Large-context requests auto-route to a cloud LLM (GPT-5, Claude, etc.) when local prefill would be slow. Routing based on new tokens after cache hit. --cloud-model openai/gpt-5 --cloud-threshold 20000
Half the articles are paywalled but the free ones outline the financial situation of the SOTA providers and he has receipts
But
> If you want LLMs to continue to be offered we have to get to a point where the providers are taking in more money than they are spending hosting them
Suggests you just mean in general, as a category, every provider is taking a loss. That seems implausible. Every provider on OpenRouter is giving away inference at a loss? For what purpose?
Somewhat suspicious that if I do this without an official Anthropic notice I'll lose my precious Max $200/mo account so I'll sit tight perhaps for a while.
I used to use GLM mostly and had a Claude Pro subscription for occasional review and clean up.
Now I just use GLM.
I do think Claude Max is value for money. But it's more value than I personally need and I like Anthropic less and less.
The other criticism I see is "ask it what happened in 1989" but as a my use case isn't writing a high school history essay I simply don't care. Or believe one should seek those kind of answers from any AI. (If you're curious it simply cuts off the reply).
I fully appreciate that YMMV and what sits right for others will not align with what's acceptable to me. Anthropic and OpenAI both are in my badbooks as much as Z.ai. pick your poison as they say.
I had an idea on a whim to vibe-engineer an irccloud replacement for myself.
Started with claude web + Opus 4.7 and continued with Claude Code. Ate up two full cycles of my quota in maybe 6-10 prompts.
Then I iterated on that with pi.dev+codex for HOURS, managed to use 50% of my Codex Pro subscription.
With Claude it's a constant battle of typing /usage after every iteration and trying to guess if it's enough for the next task or not =)
I am specifically talking about switching because of the harness, not model quality. Anyone else match my experience?
I wonder how many other people recently did the same. It would be prudent of Anthropic to let people use Pro/Max OAuth tokens with other harnesses I think. Even though I get why they want to own the eyeballs.
I still have their subscription, but am using pi now, mainly because something happened that made my opencode sessions unusable (cannot continue them, just blanks out, I assume something in the sqlite is fucked), and I cannot be bothered to debug it.
For what I use the agents, the Chinese models are enough
Plus I like being able to switch a model.
For a while there I had both Opus 4.6 and Codex access and I frequently pitted them against each other, I never once saw Opus come out ahead. Opus was good as a reviewer though, but as an implementer it just felt lazy compared to 5.4 xhigh.
One feature that I haven’t seen discussed that much is how codex has auto-review on tool runs. No longer are you a slave to all or nothing confirmations or endless bugging, it’s such a bad pattern.
Even in a week of heavy duty work and personal use I still haven’t been able to exhaust the usage on the $200 plan.
I’ll probably change my mind when (not IF) OpenAI rug pull, but for spring ‘26, codex is definitely the better deal.
Codex is abysmal for UI design imo.
But if you go information architecture first and have that codified in some way (espescially if you already have the templates), then you can nudge any agent to go straight into CSS and it will produce something reasonable.
The models and tools levelling out is great for users because the cost of switching is basically nil. I'm reading people ITT saying they signed up for a year - big mistake. A year is a decade right now.
Now with Opus 4.7 of course the “burden” of adjusting reasoning effort has been taken away from you even at the API level.
In my experience people don’t change the thinking level at all.
All these models and agents are shortcuts for all of us to be lazy and play games and watch YouTube or Netflix because we use them to work-less, well the party will be over soon.
Anthropic models write much better code, they are easy to follow, reasonable and very close to what I would done if I had the time... OpenAI's on the other hand generate extremely complex solutions to the simplest problems.
I was so disappointed by non-Anthropic models, that for a couple of weeks I only used Anthropic models, but based on this thread, I'll go back and give it another try. It's good to go back and try things again every couple of weeks.
Of course, I was annoyed that they lobotomized 4.6, the difference was day and night, and Anthropic is certainly not a company I trust. In my opinion, it shows their willingness to rugpull, so I'm looking at other approaches. Since 4.7, things went back to normal, things you'd expect to work just work.
Had to stop because they don't like us proxying requests anymore.
Some negative signal for better overall view on things: I'm still with Anthropic and will probably stay with them for the foreseeable future.
I think after DoD/DoW shenanigans (which in of itself felt like a reasonable take on the part of Anthrpic) they got a bunch of visibility and new users, so them hitting some scaling limits is pretty much inevitable - so some service disruption is inevitable. Couple this with the tokenizer changes and seeming decrease in model performance (adaptive thinking etc.), and lots of people will be rightfully pissed off, alongside increased downtime (doesn't matter that much for me, definitely does matter for anything time-sensitive).
At the same time, in practice I've only seen it do stupid things across 8 million tokens about 5 times (confusing user/assistant roles, not reading files that should be obvious for a given use case, and picking trivially wrong/stupid solutions when planning things), alongside another 4 times that tests/my ProjectLint tool caught that I would have missed. The error rate is still arguably lower than mine, though I work in a very well known and represented domain (webdev with a bunch of DevOps and also some ML stuff, and integration with various APIs etc.).
At the same time, the 85 EUR they gave to me for free has been enough to weather the instability in regards to pricing changes and peak usage. They've fixed most of the issues I had with Claude Code (notably performance), and the sub-agent support is great and it's way better than OpenCode in my experience. They also keep shipping new features that are pretty nice, like Dispatch and Routines and Design, those features also seem nice and not like something completely misdirected, so that's nice. The Opus 4.7 model quality with high reasoning is actually pretty nice as well and works better than most of the other models I've tried (OpenAI ones are good, I just prefer Claude phrasing/language/approaches/the overall vibe, not even sure what I'd call it exactly, all the stuff in addition to the technical capabilities).
At the same time, if they mess too much with the 100 USD tier, I bet I could go to OpenAI or try out the GLM 5.1 subscription without too many issues. For now they're replacing all the other providers for me. Oh also I find the subscription vs API token-based payment approach annoying, but I guess that's how they make their money.
pi has been the better harness out of all the ones i tried, first and third party.
Ever since the Anthropic block i've just canceled all my claude subs. Used to be codex was a bit worse, now they're practically equal. Claude is slightly better at directing other agents but the difference is too minor and not worth the money.
Claude usage limits / costs are absurd.
Any 'principles' people praise anthropic for are not that relevant to me anyways because i'm not a US citizen.
I racked up about $28 worth of usage and then it just stopped consuming anymore, so I don't know if there was some other issue, but it was persistent.
I got sick of it and used a migration script to move my assistant's history and personality to a claude code config. With the new remote exec stuff, I've got the old functionality back without needing to worry about how bleeding-edge and prone to failure OpenClaw is.
I feel like this is what their plan was all along -- put enough strain and friction on the hobbyist space that people are incentivized to move over to their proprietary solution. It's probably a safer choice anyway -- though I'm sure both are equally vibe-coded.
No memory, no cron/heartbeat, context mgmt is just "new chat", but enough to get you started.
Note: no sandboxing etc, I run this as unprivileged linux user. So it can blow up its homedir, but not mine. Ideally, I'd run it on a separate machine. (My hottest take here is "give it root on a $3 VPS, reset if it blows up" ;)
https://github.com/a-n-d-a-i/ULTRON
You may also enjoy CLIProxyAPI, which does the same thing (claude -p / codex exec) but shoves a OpenAI compatible API around it. Note: this probably violates every AI company's ToS (since it turns the precious subsidized subscription tokens into a generic API). OpenAI seems to tolerate such violations, for now, because they care about good. Anthropic and Google do not.
(Though Anthropic may auto-detect and bill it as extra usage; see elsewhere in this thread. Situation is very confusing right now.)
I don't have an especially heavyweight implementation, because I only use mine to review things I've written in my Apple Notes (journaling of various kinds, mostly) and give insights.
(Well, 3rd party stuff was already illegal, and I believe remains so (sorta-kinda tolerated now? with the extra usage[0]) but enforcement seemed to be based on excessive usage of subs.)
Doing the same thing but with 50K of irrelevant, proprietary system prompt, doesn't seem to improve the situation!
i.e. my question here is: if you replicate OpenClaw with `claude -p prooompt` and cron, is Anthropic happy? (Or perhaps their hope is that the people able and willing to do that represent a rounding error, which is probably true.)
Which I would not even try and test though if Anthropic did not ban my account. The shadiest thing I did was to use it with opencode for a while I think. Never installed claw or used CC tokens somewhere else.
This is a weird company doing weird shit.
Still early days, but code is available, sort of works if you squint, and welcomes PRs: https://github.com/rcarmo/vibes/tree/go
Last year I was excited about the constant forward progress on models but since February or so its just been a mess and I want off this ride.
Either way I’m going to wait for “official” word from Anthropic, which I guess at this point will probably be a “Tell HN” or Reddit text post or a Xitter from some random employee’s personal account, because apparently that’s the state of corporate communication now.
You can also do convoluted things like run Claude Code within tmux and send input to it and read the output.
MCP Channels are interesting too for bidirectional communication between your app and a running Claude Code instance, with an MCP server sitting in between. It's slow, but allows for some interesting use cases when you want to step out of an existing CLI session to do work that is easier in a graphical interface, have Claude Code respond and do work, then when you're done, go back to the CLI session and continue, never losing context.
I'm doing this today in https://github.com/Cidan/ask -- works great.
This URL: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview
Says this: "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."
Again, it seems Anthropic prefers to bill API token rates (long run), not subscriber effective token rates.
If I'm paying for compute, why should it matter whether I use Anthropic's harness (e.g., Claude Code) or a 3rd-party harness?
With Claude Code they can predict what the traffic would look like with third party harness they cannot.
Anthropic is constantly destroying goodwill and now seems to be in panic mode.
Well, enough people complained that Anthropic reversed their stance. Additionally, their primary competitor doesn't have any compute restrictions, which should help clarify why this decision was made.
As someone who has been building ML/AI tools (@ MS & Apple) for almost 25 years, I can say that much of the value of the underlying model comes from the harness. Why shouldn't I be able to use the exact same compute with my own bespoke harness when the compute cost is the same?
The Claude Code team continues to push out half-baked features that literally hamper my ability to use their tools.
If I'm paying $200/month for compute, I should be able to use it however I like.
If I pay $200/month for a Max subscription, I can access ALL of Anthropic's tools (CC, Design, Cowork, etc.).
If I pay $200/month for API access, then the only thing I can use is the API.
You don't see how ridiculous that is? No other SOTA model company has these restrictions, which is why Anthropic keeps losing subscribers.
You cannot use a ChatGPT subscription with a CLI tool, if you want to build your own harness you have to go through the API. I'm unsure about Gemini. Claude Code seems to be a special case because it is itself a CLI tool and so it becomes much easier to build a custom harness around, but its not surprising or unusual that it would have restrictions.
Subscription products normally have terms of use that limit how you use it that are shaped by the infrastructure they rely on. A harness is often tuned to usage that fits with the constraints of the service, the backend that supports the tool is engineered for that usage. A custom harness could easily bypass that tuning and become unsustainable.
On top of that, the API tends to be a much more flexible product to use directly. I can understand why you'd have more expectations paying for the max product, but this doesn't sound unusual or unreasonable to me.
Okay, I'm done here. You obviously have no idea how this works (I have a ChatGPT subscription that I use with Codex).
I know you're new to HN, but when someone says: I've literally built subscription tools at both Microsoft and Apple for over 25 years, you might want to stop and reconsider if you might be missing something. You are.
/blocked
I'm confused by the comments being full of people swearing off Claude, feels like real HN bubble stuff.
My main goal is to maximize my subscription token usage while trying to comply with the rules, but its not clear where the line is for automation so I feel like I need to be clever.
- regular development (most token use): all interactive claude mode, standard use case
- automated background development: experimenting with claude routines (first-class feature, on subscription)
- personal non-nanoclaw claude automations (claude -p): uses subscription token, but only called as needed (generally just fix something if something in my homelab infra goes does down, its set up to not fire on an exact cron time)
- other LLM based automations: usually openrouter API key, cheap models as needed
- nanoclaw: all API key based, but since its expensive I keep usage mostly minimal and try to defer anything heavyweight to one of the other automation strategies (nanoclaw mainly just connects my homelab infra with telegram)
Anyway, what I am looking for and am curious about is if there is a solution that I am overlooking that will work the same, or almost the same or better, but at a cheaper price.
I read about people being happy about pi.dev and OpenCode. I tried OpenCode with Mimo V2 pro and it is pretty good. I previously used Qwen CLI before they stopped the free usage, and Gemini CLI. I also used Z.ai with OpenCode.
I read about people using Opus for planning and then for non-important stuff moving the agent to use a further cheaper model. I am not into usage-based pricing unless it will be cheaper nonetheless (I doubt it though).
Do you have some cool setups to share? I usually do Python for backend and TypeScript frontend. Host on Hetzner, use mostly Docker but also k3s if required.
Question to the sages: should that submission get flagged because of that?
It'd be a lot cleaner if they just published explicit rate limits for each subscription tier instead of these vague policy statements.
Since the subscription is hard linked to an OAuth token this should be easy to track too. What am i missing?
Contrast that to what GitHub did which was to pause new customers to ensure quality remained and things were stable.
In the Claude site they added the option to buy extra usage at 30% off if you buy $1,000 or more at a time, so it's still somewhat cheaper to use OpenClaw with a claude account compared to an API key.
(Incidentally the 30% off might mean that choosing a Pro plan + extra usage versus Max plan might make sense for more people)
The actual rules now are pretty confusing though. De jure illegal, de facto tolerated -- they'll just auto-detect and bill you for it.
The claude -p situation, though, confuses me. This one's technically legal but against the spirit of the law. (I think made illegal a few weeks ago since it was being used as a workaround for the OpenClaw ban, and seems to have been re-legalized now?)
But they can only extra-bill you for it if they can somehow detect it as invoked by OpenClaw, etc., right? If it's your own harness, it slips thru the cracks? ._.
The agent model breaks the power-user/casual-user proportion that makes the existing saas-like pricing work.
They always reveal their cards in the most clumsy ways possible. Their enterprise API numbers must be godlike for the way they are treating B2C customers.
"Failed to sign in. Message: This service has been disabled in this account for violation of Terms of Service. Please submit an appeal to continue using this product."
Use something else.
That erosion pushed me to try Codex. I signed up for their most expensive pro plan. Now I'm about to experiment with Kimi. I'm not saying they're better (well, sometimes they are). But here's the thing - what Anthropic did is they made me look. They made a loyal customer start shopping around. And I think that's the worst thing you can do.
Having said that - as an LLM provider for my product, we're staying with Claude. I still trust in their ethics. Please don't prove me wrong.
I have had some ideas for a custom harness (like embedding some tools OOTB and replacing slow tooling) but these policies throw me off. Instead I use local models.
Problem is API costs are insane. I have toyed with the idea of running a local model that works with Claude Sonnet or even Haiku, and I know this has been done by others.