Because then they lose vertical integration and the extra ability it grants to tune settings to reduce costs / token use / response time for subscription users.
Or improve performance and efficiency, if we’re generous and give them the benefit of the doubt.
It makes sense, in a way. It means the subscription deal is something along the lines of fixed / predictable price in exchange for Anthropic controlling usage patterns, scheduling, throttling (quotas consumptions), defaults, and effective workload shape (system prompt, caching) in whatever way best optimises the system for them (or us if, again, we’re feeling generous) / makes the deal sustainable for them.
It may be (but I wouldn’t know) that some of other changes not covered here reduced costs on their side without impacting users, improving the viability of their subscription model. Or maybe even improved things for users.
I’d really appreciate more transparency on this, and not just when things fail.
But I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve been weening off Claude for a few weeks, cancelled my subscription three weeks ago, let it expire yesterday, and moved to both another provider and a third-party open source harness.
Nothing you wrote makes sense. The limits are so Anthropic isn't on a loss. If they can customize Claude using Code, I see no reason why they couldn't do so with other wrappers. Other wrappers can also make use of cache.
If you worry about "degraded" experience, then let people choose. People won't be using other wrappers if they turn out to be bad. People ain't stupid.
By imposing the use of their harness, they control the system prompt:
> On April 16, we added a system prompt instruction to reduce verbosity. In combination with other prompt changes, it hurt coding quality, and was reverted on April 20. This impacted Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, and Opus 4.7
They can pick the default reasoning effort:
> On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium to reduce the very long latency—enough to make the UI appear frozen—some users were seeing in high mode
They can decide what to keep and what to throw out (beyond simple token caching):
> On March 26, we shipped a change to clear Claude's older thinking from sessions that had been idle for over an hour, to reduce latency when users resumed those sessions. A bug caused this to keep happening every turn for the rest of the session instead of just once, which made Claude seem forgetful and repetitive. We fixed it on April 10. This affected Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6
It literally is all in the post.
I don't worry about anything though. It's not my product. I don't work for Anthropic, so I really couldn't care less about anyone else's degraded (or not) experience.
Evidently, all these things you just dismissed matter, else all the changes I quoted from the original post wouldn’t have affected anyone, or half as many people, or half as much. Anthropic wouldn’t have had any complaints to investigate, the article promoting this entire thread wouldn’t exist, and we wouldn’t be having this very conversation.
Defaults matter. A large share of people never change them (status quo bias, psychological inertia). Having control over them (and usage quotas) means Anthropic can control and fine-tune what this fixed subscription costs them.
And evidently (re, the original article), they tried to do so.
> Defaults matter. A large share of people never change them (status quo bias, psychological inertia). Having control over them (and usage quotas) means Anthropic can control and fine-tune what this fixed subscription costs them.
Allowing third party wrappers doesn't mean Claude Code would cease to exist. The opposite actually, Claude Code would be the default.
People dissatisfied with Code would simply use other wrappers. I call it a win-win. Don't see how Anthropic would be on a lose here, they would still retain the ability to control the defaults.
Except one of the major other wrappers was pi, through OpenClaw. With countless hundreds of thousands of instances running every hour on that heartbeat.
I have no idea what the share of OpenClaw instances running on pi was, or third-party wrappers in general, but it was obviously large enough that Anthropic decided they had to put an end to it.
Conversely, from the latest developments, it would seem they are perfectly fine with people running OpenClaw with Claude models through Claude Code’s programmatic interface using subscriptions.
But in the end, this, my take, your take, is all conjecture. We are both on the outside looking in.
Now we know why Anthropic banned the use of subscriptions with other agent harnesses: they partially rely on the Claude Code cli to control token usage through various settings.
And it also tells us why we shouldn’t use their harness anyway: they constantly fiddle with it in ways that can seriously impact outcomes without even a warning.
Yes, it’s not there yet. But nothing unsolvable. First thing that comes to mind would be generating smaller portion at the same resolution, then expand through tiling (although one might need to use another service & model for this), like we used to do with Stable Diffusion years ago.
Another option would be generating these large images, splitting them into grids, and using inpainting on each "tile" to improve the details. Basically the reverse of the first one.
Both significantly increase costs, but for the second one having what Images 2.0 can produce as an input could help significantly improve the overall coherence.
And yet running the Claude Code cli with `-p` in ephemeral VMs gets me the "Third-party apps now draw from extra usage, not plan limits. We've added a credit to your organization to get you started. Ask your workspace admin to claim it and keep going." error.
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.
I wouldn’t agree. Even at national scale, these projects cost resources. And the resources of all agents (org, countries) are constrained.
While we could reason in "performance / watt" and "performance / people", "performance / whatever other resource involved", and "performance / opportunity cost of allocating these resources to this use case and not another", "performance / whatever unit of stable-ish currency" is a convenient and often "good enough" approximation that somewhat encapsulates them all.
A simplification, like any model, but still useful.
> because size of the software industry is not that huge
I onboarded marketing on a premium team Claude seat yesterday. And one of our sales vibecoded an internal tool in the last three weeks using Claude Code that they now use every day. I wouldn’t have imagined it a month ago. We still had to take care of deployment for him, but things are moving fast.
It’s the tool that calls the model, give it access to the local file system, calls the actual tools and commands for the model, etc, and provide the initial system prompt.
Basically a clever wrapper around the Anthropic / OpenAI / whatever provider api or local inference calls.
Or improve performance and efficiency, if we’re generous and give them the benefit of the doubt.
It makes sense, in a way. It means the subscription deal is something along the lines of fixed / predictable price in exchange for Anthropic controlling usage patterns, scheduling, throttling (quotas consumptions), defaults, and effective workload shape (system prompt, caching) in whatever way best optimises the system for them (or us if, again, we’re feeling generous) / makes the deal sustainable for them.
It’s a trade-off
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