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Comment by vincent_s | Hacker News Reader

I'd say it's a mixed bag. Yes, price increases are/were expected. But blocking 3rd party harnesses from their subscription and also moving SDK/claude-p access out of the subscription is blocking innovation and therefore future use of Claude models. What I mean is, while Claude models are SOTA, Claude Code is not. It's full of bugs and shortcomings and new innovative harnesses might make better use of the model, but this won't happen now as they are blocked. Same for all the people building their own scripts/workflows around claude -p or the SDK, they will now stop inventing new stuff on top of Claude.

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I think it also doesn’t help that they’re all different flavors of the same tool and it’s very easy to jump between them. None of them actually made a particularly distinct product, and they want us to use their tool to make/justify the nebulous billion dollar product.

As for subscription/token costs, even with increases they’re not even remotely covering costs. If people actually paid what it cost for these companies to even break even, nobody would be using these tools. They simply aren’t that consistently useful despite all the grand claims. They can be useful and in some areas they are very useful, but nobody is going to spend thousands of dollars a month to have something rewrite their emails regularly. And it’s not like these companies are trying to target one industry. They want to target everyone.

Yeah I'm worried about that too. Current SOTA models might just be too expensive for most use cases if we had to pay the real costs.

I wonder if there's a bit of a standoff situation here where every company feels like they have to burn enormous amounts of cash training/iterating on their models because if they stop, they'll get leapfrogged too quickly. So unless they all agree to just settle where they are more or less and focus on building out functionality and tooling, they all have to keep spending at an unsustainable rate.

If you do not block 3rd party harness, people will discover that a good harness is more important than a good model.

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