Setting up your agent. This part doesn't deserve a name; there is no programming or engineering or really much thinking involved.

Nobody likes infra. PMs don't know wtf a crontab is.

Not really any different to GitHub Actions

Already very possible and super easy if you do a little vibecoding. Although it will hit the api. Have a stack polling my email every five minutes, classifying email, taking action based on the types. 30 minute coding session.

Yes but much less efficiently. Having LLMs handle automation is like using a steam engine to heat your bath water. It will work most of the time but it's super inefficient and not really designed for that use and it can go horribly wrong from time to time.

Does ‘vibe coding’ work?

Sounds more like openclawing.

It's "promptramming".

No

Let it "build power plant" and we are on track with "Paperclip maximizer" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...

This echoes my thoughts exactly. I've tried to stay model-agnostic but the nudges and shoves from Anthropic continue to make that a challenge. No way I'm going that deep into their "cloud" services, unless it's a portable standard. I did MCP and skills because those were transferrable.

I also clearly see the lock-in/moat strategy playing out here, and I don't like it. It's classic SV tactics. I've been burned too many times to let it happen again if I can help it.

So management can cancel all of last week’s projects when they told us all we had to be using skills because the CEO read about them in the in flight magazine. Routines are the future, baby. DevOps already made a big announcement that they’re centralizing the Routines Hub. If you can’t keep up, we’ll get someone who says they can.

7 days is long enough for work to leave the context window, hence…

Just wait until they get into the phase where they're big enough that they're eating all the baby startups and have to pick winners and losers amongst the myriad of overlapping features while also having the previous baby startups they acquired crank out new features.

We're watching a speed run of growthism, folks.

> In the Desktop app, click New task and choose New remote task; choosing New local task instead creates a local Desktop scheduled task, which runs on your machine and is not a routine.

Oh uh... ok then.

Yeah in the span of a month or so we had:

- SDK that allows you to use OAuth authentication!

- Docs updated to say DO NOT USE OAUTH authentication unless authorized! [0]

- Anthropic employee Tweeting "That's not what we meant! It's fine for personal use!" [1]

- An email sent out to everyone saying it's NOT fine do NOT use it [2]

Sigh.

[0] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview#get-start...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1r8et0d/update_fr...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633396

+1 for that, having that said, because GH agentic workflows require a bit more handholding and testing to work, (and have way more guardrails, which is great, but limiting), and lack some basic connectors (for example - last time I tried it, it had no easy slack connector, I had to do it on my own). This is why I'm moving some of the less critical gh-aw (all the read only ones) to Claude Routines.

It's remarkable how often it refuses to introspect but a SCREENSHOT of itself and suddenly "yeah this works fine".

This happens in all their UIs, including, say, Claude in Excel, as well.

Why not https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code-action?

My team was doing this until recently but I think in February, Anthropic made team accounts available for subscription instead of API billing. Assuming that is the cost you mentioned.

They did not.

You can still use OpenClaw on their API pricing tier as much as you want. What they did is not allow subscriptions to be used to power automated third-party workloads, including OpenClaw.

Now, is their messaging around this confusing? Absolutely. The whole thing has been handled shambolically. Everyone knows that they lack the compute to keep up, and likely have lower margins on subscriptions than API; but they cannot just say that because investors may be skittish.

How is Anthropic a monopoly? The market is barely even fully developed and has multiple large and small competitors

It's not blocked, you just can't use the Claude-only subscription endpoint with unauthorized 3rd party software. (You can use it via the regular API (7x more expensive) and pay per token just fine.)

...Except now you sorta-kinda can: now they auto-detect 3rd party stuff and bill you per-token for it?

If I'm reading it right:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633568

gramming

> - No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the feature

To the contrary, they've proven again and again and again they'll absolutely do that the first chance they get.

This is a similar sentiment I heard early on in the cloud adoption fever, many companies hedged by being “multi cloud” which ended up mostly being abandoned due to hostile patterns by cloud providers, and a lot of cost. Ultimately it didn’t really end up mattering and the most dire predictions of vendor lock in abuse didn’t really happen as feared (I know people will disagree with this, but specifically speaking about aws, the predictions vs what actually happened is a massive gap. note I have never and will never use azure, so I could be wrong on that particular one).

I see people making similar conclusions about various LLM providers. I suspect in the end it’ll shake out about the same way, the providers will become practically inoperable with each other either due to inconvenience, cost, or whatever. So I’ve not wasted much of my time thinking about it.

In this regard, the release of open-weight Gemma models that can run on reasonable local hardware, and are not drastically worse than Anthropic flagships, is quite a punch. An M2 Mac Mini with 32GB is about 10 months worth of Claude Max subscription.

And or things I’ve spent a bunch of time building already. And naming them the same. I should have trademarked “dispatch”!

Anthropic deserves to have this as the top comment on every HN post. It's absurd that they don't clarify this better and so many people are running around online saying the exact opposite from what their, confusing, docs say.

The Chilling Effect of this is real and it gets more and more frustrating that they can't or won't clarify.

The ambiguity is intentional. Like Microsoft not banning volume licenses. They want to scare you, so you don't max out your subscription – which they sell at a loss.

Another comparison would be "unlimited storage", where "unlimited" means some people will abuse it and the company will soon limit the "unlimited."

Wait we can't use claude -p around other tools? What is the point of the JSON SDK then? Anthropic is confusing here, ugh.

edit: And specifically i'm making an IDE, and trying to get ClaudeCode into it. I frankly have no clue when Claude usage is simply part of an IDE and "okay" and when it becomes a third party harness..

Why have I not heard of this? Was looking for a way to integrate LLM CLI's to do automated feature development + PR submission triggered by Github issues, seems like this would solve it.

Correct. But the llm can also program you the exact automation you want! Much more efficiently than gui madness with N8N. And if you want observability just program that too!

I always hated SEO because it was not an exact science - like programming was.

Too bad we've now managed to turn programming into the same annoying guesswork.

I think at this point the aim is less about moat, and more about getting an advantage that self-sustains: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4444-1.html

I have heard it said that tokens will become commodities. I like being able to switch between Open AI and Anthropics models, but I feel I'd manage if one of them disappeared. I'd probably even get by with Gemini. I don't want to lock in to any one provider any more than I want to lock in to my energy provider. I might pay 2x for a better model, but no more, and I can see that not being the case for much longer.

> I'm not going to build my business or my development flows on things I can't replicate myself.

but you can replicate these yourself! i'm happy that ant/oai are experimenting to find pmf for "llm for dev-tools". After they figure out the proper stickyness, (or if they go away or nerf or raise prices, etc) you can always take the off-ramp and implement your own llm/agent using the existing open-source models. The cost of building dev-tools is near zero. it is not like codegen where you need the frontier performance.

> Not sure how this works out in the long term when switching costs are virtually zero.

All these not really helpful, but vendor specific, "bonuses" sounds like a way to try to lock people in, to try to raise the switching cost.

I'm using, on purpose, a simple process so that at any time I can switch AI provider.

What are some of the best use cases you've found? I have some gh actions set up to call claude code, but those have already been possible.

Codex with 5.4 xhigh. It's a bad communicator but does the job.

Their source code leak showed how badly vibe coded Claude Code is, despite it being one of the best AI assistants.

But yea there's some annoying overlap here with Cowork which also has scheduled tasks, in Cowork the tasks can use your desktop, browser and accounts which is pretty useful - a big difference from these Claude Code Routines.

>Feature delivery rate by Anthropic is basically a fast takeoff in miniature.

I like to just check the release notes from time to time:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/releases

and the equally frenetic openclaw:

https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/releases

GPT-4.1 was released a year ago today. Sonnet 4 is ~11 months old. The claude-code cli was released last Feb. Gas Town is 3 months old.

This is a chart that simply counts the bullet points in the release notes of claude code since inception:

https://imgur.com/a/tky9Pkz

This is as bad and as slow as it's going to be.

Do you mean a 3 months moat? Moltbot started going viral in January. That seems to be about a quarter to deliver to me : )

The velocity of shipping is wild. Though I cannot recall a novel feature they shipped first. Can you?

And yet none of them work properly and are unstable.

It's not alleged: https://www.ghacks.net/2026/03/27/anthropic-reduces-claude-s...

What’s massive about cron jobs and webhooks? I feel like I’m missing something. This is useful functionality but also seems very straightforward.

Max accounts get 15 daily runs included, any runs above that will get billed as extra usage.

It's how they can lock more users into their eco-system.

I've had an AI assistant send me email digests with local news, and another watching a cron job, analyzing the logs and sending me reports if there's any problem.

I'd say that counts as yes.

(For clarity: neither are powered by Claude Code Routines. Rather, Claude Code coded them and they're simple cron jobs themselves.)

TIL email is what I'm missing in my personal development (swiss army) tool

> I want to pick up and move to another harness and/or model with minimal fuss. Buying in to things like this would make that much harder.

Yes, I expect that is very much the point here. A bunch of product guys got on a whiteboard and said, okay the thing is in wide use but the main moat is that our competitors are even more distrusted in the market than we are; other than that it's completely undifferentiated and can be swapped out in a heartbeat for multiple other offerings. How do we do we persuade our investors we have a locked in customer base that won't just up-stakes in favour of other options or just running open source models themselves?

I think it behooves us to be selective right now. Frontier labs maybe great at developing models, but we shouldn't assume they know what they are doing from a product perspective. They constantly throw several ideas on the wall and see what sticks (see Sora). They don't know how these things will play out long term. There is no reason to believe Co-work/Routines/Skills will survive 5 years from now. So it might just be better to not invest too much in ecosystem upfront.

> - No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the feature

I actually trust that they will.

I'm the first to be tired of everyone, for every model, that says "uuuh became dumber" because I didn't believe them

... until this week! Opus is struggling worse than Sonnet those last two weeks.

Hard to wanna go all-in on the Anthropic ecosystem with how inconsistent model output from their top-tier has been recently. I pay $$$ for api-level opus 4.6 to avoid any low-tier binning or throttling or subversive "its peak rn so we're gonna serve up sonnet in place of opus for the next few hours" but I still find that the quality has been really hit or miss lately.

The bell curve up and then back down has been so jarring that I am pivoting to fully diversifying my use of all models to ensure that no one org has me by the horns.

Anthropic is trying to be AI version of AWS.

You're delusional if you think these features would take competent programmers quarters to deliver.

I've been talking to friends about this extensively, and read all sorts of different social media posts on X where people deep dove things (I'm at work so I don't have any links handy - though I did submit one on HN, grain of salt, unsure how valid it is but it was interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47752049 ).

I think the real issue stems from the 1 Million token context window change. They did not anticipate the amount of load it would give you. That first few days after they released the new token window, I was making amazing things in one single session from nothing, to something (a new .NET based programming language inspired by Python, and a Virtual Actor framework in Rust). I think since then they've been trying too many things to tweak things, whilst irritating their users.

They even added a new "Max" thinking mode, and made "High" the old medium, which is ridiculous because you think you're using "High" but really you're not. There's a hidden config file to change their terrible defaults to let Claude be smarter still, and apparently you can toggle off the 1M tokens.

I think the real fix, and I'm surprised nobody there has done this yet, is to let the user trim down their context window.

Think about it, you used to have what? 350k tokens or so? Now Claude will keep sending your prompt from 30 minutes ago that's completely irrelevant to the back-end, whereas 3 months ago it would have been compacted by now.

Others have noted that similar prompting for some ungodly reason adds tens of thousands of extra garbage tokens (not sure why).

Edit looks like someone figured out that if you downgrade your version of Claude Code and change one single setting it unruins Claude:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769879

AI race to the bottom is a debt game now. Once the party is over somebody will have to pay the bill.

You seem to be vouched for now, no longer dead for me.

They are more worried about building a moat than anything else. They want people building integrations that are difficult to undo so that they lock into the platform.

I would imagine that this sort of scheduling allows them to have more predictable loads, and they may be hoping that people will schedule some of their tasks in “off hours” to reduce daytime load.

I don't think "usage" is exactly the metric they're going for, more like "usage in line with our developmental strategy." Transcripts of people using Claude to write code are probably far more valuable to them than transcripts of OpenClaw trying to set up a calendar invite.

Ah! Totally... We have:

airgramming plusgramming programming maxgramming studiogramming

and recently the brand new way of working: Neogramming !

Personally I stick for now with the "Programming " tier. Maybe will upgrade to "Maxgramming" later this year...

You can lessen your dependence on the specific details of how /loop, code routines, etc. work by asking the LLM to do simpler tasks, and instead, having a proper workflow engine be in charge of the workflow aspects.

For example, this demo (https://github.com/barnum-circus/barnum/tree/master/demos/co...) converts a folder of files from JS to TS. It's something an LLM could (probably) do a decent job of, but 1. not necessarily reliably, and 2. you can write a much more complicated workflow (e.g. retry logic, timeout logic, adding additional checks like "don't use as casts", etc), 3. you can be much more token efficient, and 4. you can be LLM agnostic.

So, IMO, in the presence of tools like that, you shouldn't bother using /loop, code routines, etc.

Let's see how it shakes out after Athropic and OpenAI fully stop subsidizing their plans, that may alter the calculus.

There are different level of who gets locked in. Almost every health care system in the USA is locked in to either an Epic/Oracle barrel or a Cerner barrel. I hope AI breaks this duopoly open soon.

you're telling me dispatchagents.ai :) (open to new names if anyone has cool ones, didn't expect anthropic to start using dispatch with their agents, naming is way too hard)

But it is pretty clear in their documentation. You just don't want to see it because it isn't the answer you want. The documentation clearly says that you cannot use 'claude -p' as part of a pipeline to call other tools. All tool calls have to be made by Claude Code itself. If the output of the Telegram bot is used as a proxy to call other tools, then no, it is not allowed.

Literally yeah, the ambiguity is just so they can boycott anytime they want, people underestimate Anthropic too much, obviously they have insane amount of scrappers, bots... no comments online is made without their awareness and analyzed by a bunch of agents that then do prediction and for sure so much more. They know exactly what they are doing.

I was pretty sure that claude -p would always be fine, but I looked at the TOS and it is a bit unclear.

It says in the prohibited use section:

> Except when you are accessing our Services via an Anthropic API Key or where we otherwise explicitly permit it, to access the Services through automated or non-human means, whether through a bot, script, or otherwise.

So it seems like using a harness or your own tools to call claude -p is fine, AS LONG AS A HUMAN TRIGGERS IT. They don’t want you using the subscription to automate things calling claude -p… unless you do it through their automation tools I guess? But what if you use their automation tool to call your harness that calls claude -p? I don’t actually know. Does it matter if your tool loops to call claude -p? Or if your automation just makes repeated calls to a routine that uses your harness to make one claude -p call?

It is not nearly as clear as I thought 10 minutes ago.

Edit: Well, I was just checking my usage page and noticed the new 'Daily included routine runs' section, where it says you get 15 free routine runs with your subscription (at least with my max one), and then it switches to extra usage after that. So I guess that answers some of the questions... by using their routine functionality they are able to limit your automation potential (at least somewhat) in terms of maxing out your subscription usage.

Built in Co-Pilot I believe can do this better than gh-aw (or a click away).

Cursor has that too by the way (issue -> remote coding session -> PR -> update slack)

I credit containerization, k8s, and terraform for preventing vendor lock in. Compute like EC2 or GCE are effectively interoperable. Ditto for managed services for k8s or Postgres. The new products Anthropic is shipping is more like Lambda. Vendor kool-aid lots of people will buy into.

What grinds my gears is how Anthropic is actively avoiding standards. Like being the only harness that doesn't read AGENTS.md. I work on AI infra and use different models all the time, Opus is really good, but the competition is very close. There's just enough friction to testing those out though, and that's the point.

> specifically speaking about aws, the predictions vs what actually happened is a massive gap

I guess I'm one of the people who disagree, specifically about AWS. I think a lot of companies just watch their bill go up because they don't have the appetite to unwind their previous decision to go all-in on AWS.

Ignoring egress fees, migrating storage and compute isn't hard, it's all the auxiliary stuff that's locked in, the IAM, Cognito, CloudFormation, EventBridge, etc... Good luck digging out of that hole. That's not to say that AWS doesn't work well, but unless you have a light footprint and avoided most of their extra services, the lock-in feels pretty real.

That's what it feels like Anthropic is doing here. You could have a cron job under your control, or you could outsource that to a Claude Routine. At some point the outsourced provider has so many hooks into your operations that it's too painful to extract yourself, so you just keep the status quo, even if there's pain.

In coding they are worse.

Chinese models (GLM, MiniMax) are better.

Wouldn't ACP be better for an IDE? https://agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/introduction

It’s also absurd that they’re doing their communication on a bunch of separate platforms like HN, Reddit, and Github with no coherent strategy or consistency as far as I can tell. Can’t I just get policy clarifications in my email like a normal business?

I downgraded my $200/mo sub to $20 this past week and I’m going to try out Codex’s Pro plans. Between the cache TTL (does it even affect me? No idea), changes in the rate limit, 429 rate limit HTTP status code during business hours, adaptive thinking (literally the worst decision they’ve ever made, as far as my line of work is concerned), dumb agent behavior silently creating batshit insane fallthroughs, clearly vibe coded harness/infrastructure, and their total lack of transparency, I think I’m done. It was fun while it lasted but I’m tired of paying for their mistakes in capacity planning and I feel like the big rug pull (from all three SOTA providers) is coming like a freight train.

They’re shooting themselves in the foot with these dumb restrictions.

We live in strange times!

I think they really knee capped themselves when they released Claude for Github integrations, which allows anyone to use their Claude subscription to run Claude Code in Github actions for code reviews and arbitrary prompts. Now they’re trying to back track that with a cloud solution.

Forget the agent itself being dumber: right now I'm getting an "API error: usage limit exceeded" message whenever I try anything despite my usage showing as 26% for the session limit and 8% for the week (with 0/5 routines, which I guess is what this thread is about). This is with the default model and effort, and Claude Code is saying I need to turn on extra usage for it to work. Forget that, I just canceled my subscription instead.

There's utility in LLMs for coding, but having literally the entire platform vibe-coded is too much for me. At this point, I might genuinely believe they're not intentionally watering anything down, because it's incredibly believable that they just have no clue how any of it works anymore.

This is exactly why my preferred method at the moment is simple markdown files with instructions. At worst, a human could do it.

My favourite was, Opus 4.6 last night (to be fair peak IST time, late afternoon my time), the first prompt with a small context: jams a copy-pasted function in between a bunch of import statements, doesn't even wire up it's own function and calls it done. Wild, I've not seen failure states like that since old Sonnet 4

In my experience Opus and Claude have declined significantly over the past few weeks. It actually feels like dealing with an employee that has become bored and intentionally cuts corners.

Is it? Or is it the task you're trying to do? Opus 4.6 has been staggeringly good for me this last week, both inside Claude Code and through Antigravity until I used up my quota.

Likewise, I foolishly assumed everybody else was just doing it wrong.

But this week I've lost count of the times I've had to say something along the lines of: "Can you check our plan/instructions, I'm pretty sure I said we need to do [this thing] but you've done [that thing]..."

And get hit with a "You're absolutely right...", which virtually never happened for me. I think maybe once since Opus 4-6.

That is a really tough business if you can't match AWS' efficiency & reliability at scale. Presumably AWS also wants to be the AI version of AWS.

(Amazon + Anthropic does seem like a much more compelling enterprise collaboration / acquisition than Microsoft + OpenAI ever did.)

> They want people building integrations that are difficult to undo so that they lock into the platform.

Ironically, they are now playing against their own models that can relatively easily build wrappers around any API shape into any other API shape.

So basically what happened:

1. Anthropic realized their models weren't enough of a moat.

2. They built tools so they could expand their moat.

3. People don't want to use their tools, they want their models, and use other, better tools.

4. Anthropic bans the use of better tools, taking advantage of their model superiority to try to lock people into subpar tools.

"I don't have enough of a moat so I'll use my little moat and pretend it's a big one" doesn't sound like a great strategy. All they're doing with this anticonsumer behaviour is making sure that I'll leave the moment another model works for me as well as Claude does.

Also you can schedule it a bit off. Every hour? Delay it a few seconds. Can’t do that with a chat message. Also, batch up a bunch of them, maybe save some compute that way? Latency is not an issue.

I mean, they don’t train on your data unless you have the setting enabled. Do you really think they are reading your prompts at all? Free inference providers sure, but Anthropic?

I thought about that but I'm pretty sure that if the backlog is automatically clean and I don't need to run my skill for that when I start up in the morning that just means I can do the next task I would have done which will probably use Claude Code.

Your own, personal, Jevons.

Yea, I've realized that if I stay under 200k tokens I basically don't have usage issues any more.

A bit annoying, but not the end of the world.

I think there is lock-in, despite those things - for containerization, you're still a lot of the times beholden to the particular runtime that provider prefers, and whatever weird quirks exist there. Migrating can have some surprises. K8s, usually you will go managed there, and while they provide the same functionality, AKS != EKS != GKE at all, at least in terms of managing them and how they plug into everything else. In terraform, migrating from AWS provider to GCP provider will hold a lot of surprises for you for what looks like it should be the exact same thing.

My point was, I don't think it mattered much, and it feels like an ok comparison - cloud offerings are mostly the exact same things, at least at their core, but the ecosystem around them is the moat, and how expensive it is to migrate off of them. I would not be surprised at all if frontier AI model providers go much the same way. I'm pretty much there already with how much I prefer claude code CLI, even if half the time I'm using it as a harness for OpenAI calls.

the AWS things you mentioned you don’t need to mess with at all, with the exception of IAM, which doesn’t cost anything at all.

your experience just hasn’t been my experience I guess. The more managed the service you use, the more costs you are going to pay - for a very long time I’ve got by with paying for compute, network, and storage on the barebones services. If you want to pay for convenience you will pay for it.

One area that was a little shitty that has changed a lot is egress costs, but we mostly have shifted to engineering around it. I’ve never minded all that much, and AWS support is so good at enterprise tiers that they’ll literally help you do it.

There's a tiny amount of friction. Enough that I'll be honest and say that I spend the majority of my time with one vendor's system, but compared the to the fiction of moving from one cloud to another, eg AWS to GCP, the friction between opening Claude code vs codex is basically zero. Have an active subscription and have Claude.md say "read Agents.md".

Claude Code routines sounds useful, but at the same time, under AI-codepocalypse, my guess is it would take an afternoon to have codex reimplement it using some existing freemium SaaS Cron platform, assuming I didn't want to roll my own (because of the maintenance overhead vs paying someone else to deal with that).

I believe the current game everybody plays is:

* make sure the model maxes out all benchmarks

* release it

* after some time, nerf it

* repeat the same with the next model

However, the net sum is positive: in general, models from 2026 are better than those from 2024.

Yeah, I build my workflows with two things in mind:

1) that AI will be more advanced in the future

2) that the AI I am using will be worse in the future

Pretty reassuring to hear that. I was skeptical too, there's a lot of variables like some crap added to memory specific skill or custom instructions interfering with the workflow and what not. But now it was like a toddler that consumes money when talking.

yeah i mean nobody uses Claude anymore, the utilization is too high

He said "enterprises" not "competent programmers".

Maybe they were accounting for huge layers of red tape in large orgs. God knows those are far slower than "competent programmers" lol

Yeah, I have been seeing lots of comments, tweets, etc, but given everything I have learned about these models - i do not think the change to 1M was innocuous. I'm not sure what they've claimed publicly, but I'm fairly certain they must be doing additional quantization, or at minimum additional quantization of the KV cache. Plus, sequence length can change things even when not fully utilized. I had to manually re-enable the "clear context and continue" feature as well.

Hmm, I can't edit the original comment to retract that edit either. Either my account is flagged for something or HN is being weird.

It also beats OC's heartbeat where it auto-runs every 30 minutes and runs a bunch of prompts to see if it actually needed to run or not.

It’s going to be crazy with the explanation they come up with why the us public has to pay to bail out AI for national security.

In a way, it’s true if china has superior AI then it’s dominance over US will materialize. But it’s not hard to see how this scenario is being used to essential lie and scam into trillions of debt.

Its interesting how the cutthroat space of big tech has manifested into an incidious hyper capitalist system where disrupting a system is it’s primary function. The system in this case is world order and western governments

Possibly, though at first i was entirely focusing (and still am) on Claude Code usage. Given that CC had an API, i figured its own SDK would update faster/better/etc to new Claude features that Anthropic introduces. I'm sure ACP is a flexible protocol, but nonetheless i was just aiming for direct Claude integration.. and you know, it's an official SDK, seemed quite logical to me.

It would be absurd to me if the same application is somehow allowed via ACP but not via official SDK. Though perhaps the official SDK offers data/features that they don't want you to use for certain scenarios? If that were they case though it would be nice if they actually published a per-SDK-API restrictions list.

That we're having to guess at this feels painful.

edit: Hah, hilariously you're still using the SDK even if you use ACP, since Claude doesn't have ACP support i believe? https://github.com/agentclientprotocol/claude-agent-acp

Anyway, there are a few model that are freely distributable, and that can reasonably run on consumer-grade local hardware.

It changes a number of things. Not all tasks require very high intelligence, but a lot of data may be sensitive enough to avoid sharing it with a third party.

same. I use pi - and anthropic pricing change have made it usuable with Max. Codex works pretty much the same, not need to change development practice... apart from no 429s (so far).

They are not dumb restrictions. They just don't have the compute. That is the dumb part. Dario did not secure the compute they need so now they are obviously struggling.

I was "Claude only" for well over a year. Kinda crazy how they seem to be gaining a LOT of public attention the last few months, yet i see this type of sentiment from other devs/myself. for me it started with their opencode drama, and openai's decision to embrace opencode in response.

I didn't even know what opencode was prior to that drama, yet now here i am using opencode and a ton of crafted openai agents in my projects. Would love to have some claude agents in that mix, but i guess im stuck in Claude Code if i wanna even touch their models... I'd love to go back to just claude as i "trust" them more in a sorta less evil vibe manner, but if they are gonna prevent subscription usage to something people use to allow themselves more freedom, they gotta then close that gap with their own tools rather than pumping out stuff like this which scares me off given the past couple months.

I totally understand why they are cutting off 3pa access to stuff like openclaw, where the avg user is just a power user in comparison to avg claude user or whatever. I haven't kept up a ton with their opencode issues, but I just know i can't get behind a company actively trying to make my potential usage of tokens less optimized to keep me locked into their ecosystem.

Really just kinda hoping local models kill it all for devs after a few years, I'm not interested in perma relying on data centers for my workflow.

Same! I actually have some comments in my codebase now like this one:

    # Note:  This is inefficient, but deterministic and predictable.  Previous
             attempts at improvements led to hard-to-predict bugs and were
             scrapped.  TODO improve this function when AI gets better

I don't love it or even like it, but it is realistic.

I guess there's a pretty clear incentive to nerf the current model right before the next model is about to come out.

yup, after the token-increase from CC from two weeks ago, I'm now consistently filling the 1M context window that never went above 30-40% a few days ago. Did they turn it off? I used to see the Co-Authored by Opus 4.6 (1M Context Window) in git commits, now the advert line is gone. I never turned it on or off, maybe the defaults changed but /model doesn't show two different context sizes for Opus 4.6

I never asked for a 1M context window, then I got it and it was nice, now it's as if it was gone again .. no biggie but if they had advertised it as a free-trial (which it feels like) I wouldn't have opted in.

Anyways, seems I'm just ranting, I still like Claude, yes but nonetheless it still feels like the game you described above.

Is Anthropic not an enterprise?

It’s quite an interesting business model actually that the worse it performs to a degree the more money it makes you because of the token churn

That red tape doesn't disappear when you start vibe coding tho.

I used the heck out of it when it was announced, and it felt like I was using one of the best models I've ever used, but then so were all of their other customers, I don't think they accounted for such heavy load, or maybe follow up changes goofed something up, not sure. Like I said, the 1M token, for the first few days allowed me to bust out some interesting projects in one session from nothing to "oh my" in no time.

I'm thinking they should go back to all their old settings and as a user cap you at their old token limit, and ask you if you want to compact at your "soft" limit or burst for a little longer, to finish a task.

Everything looks good to me: you don't look like you have a flagged account (but then I don't work for HN).

"Move fast and break things" broke containment to the tech industry. Now you can see it everywhere.

right, like the bar nobody goes to anymore bc it's always too crowded

Man, this just bit me too. I started playing with OC over the weekend (in a VM), and the spend was INSANE even though I wasn't doing anything. I don't see this as very useful as an "assistant" that wanders around and anticipates my needs. But I do like the job system, and the ability to make skills, then run them on a schedule or in response to events. But when I looked into what it was doing behind my back, 48 times a day it was packaging up 20K tokens of silly context ("Be a good agent, be helpful, etc, for 30 paragraphs"), shipping it off to the model, and then responding with a single HEARTBEAT_OK.

Luckily you can turn if off pretty easily, but I don't know why it's on by default to begin with. I guess holdover from when people used it with a $20 subscription and didn't care.

The restrictions are dumb not because they're lower than any of us want them to be, but because they're unclear. Every time Claude comes up on Hacker News, someone asks this question. And every time people chime in to agree that they also are unclear or someone weighs in saying, no, it's totally clear, while proceeding not to point at any official resource and/or to "explain" the rules in a that is incompatible with official documentation.

Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737924

The most cost-effective way I found to use their models is to use them through a Github copilot licence. Github charges by request, not per token. Asking Opus with high effort to plan a feature in depth "costs" the same as asking it the number of "r" in strawberry.

I've got a setup where GPT5-mini (Free on GH) talks to you to refine and draw the outline of your feature, calls a single Opus subagent to plan it in depth, then calls a single sonnet subagent to implement it.

Github will only charge you for one opus request (With a 3x multiplier) and one sonnet request, whether they consume 50 or 500.000 tokens. I'm running this setup for 9 hours a day at work and I've barely consumed 40% of my monthly allowance.

Their growth over the past months has been more than insane. It’s completely expected they don’t have the compute. You don’t have infinite data centers around

The default prompt cache TTL changed from 1 hour to 5 minutes. Maybe this is what you are experiencing.

I find this 1M context bollocks. It's basically crap past 100k.

They are now literally blaming users for using their product as advertised:

https://x.com/lydiahallie/status/2039800718371307603

--- start quote ---

Digging into reports, most of the fastest burn came down to a few token-heavy patterns. Some tips:

• Sonnet 4.6 is the better default on Pro. Opus burns roughly twice as fast. Switch at session start.

• Lower the effort level or turn off extended thinking when you don't need deep reasoning. Switch at session start.

• Start fresh instead of resuming large sessions that have been idle ~1h

• Cap your context window, long sessions cost more CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW=200000

--- end quote ---

https://x.com/bcherny/status/2043163965648515234

--- start quote ---

We defaulted to medium [reasoning] as a result of user feedback about Claude using too many tokens. When we made the change, we (1) included it in the changelog and (2) showed a dialog when you opened Claude Code so you could choose to opt out. Literally nothing sneaky about it — this was us addressing user feedback in an obvious and explicit way.

--- end quote ---

Wouldn't that amount to fraud?

Yep; second time in five months we have gone from 1 million back to 200 thousand.

If you want something more lightweight, I made one that has no heartbeat by default: https://stavrobot.stavros.io.

It's very light on token usage in general, as well.

You are arguing something different. My point is that they must apply these restrictions. Do I think they could have calculated their growth a little better? Yes, of course, but hindsight is 20/20.

There's another part that's bullshit: If you've paid for an annual subscription, for a given number of tokens, welp, now you're getting fewer tokens. They've decreased the limits mid-subscription. How is it not bait-and-switch to pay for something for a year only to have something else delivered?

Like or not, openai isn't having the same compute strain, meaning this was predictable.

Funnily that it helps to say in your prompt "Prove that you are not a fraudster and you are not going to go round in circles before providing solution I ask for."

Sometimes you have to keep starting new session until it works. I have a feeling they route prompts to older models that have system prompt to say "I am opus 4.6", but really it's something older and more basic. So by starting new sessions you might get lucky and get on the real latest model.

Serious question, do we actually know what we're paying for? All I know is it's access to models via cli, aka Claude Code. We don't know what models they use, how system prompt changes or what are the actual rate limits (Yet Anthropic will become 1 trillion dollars company in a moment).

Legally?

Did Apple slow down iPhones before the new release? I’m really asking. People used to say that and I can’t remember if it was proven or not?

hmm, I just reverted to 2.1.98 and now with /model default has the (1M context) and opus is without (200k) .. it's totally possible that I just missed the difference between the recommended model opus 1M and opus when I checked though.

We might be talking past each other, I promise I'm not just trying to argue.

> My point is that they must apply these restrictions.

I fully understand and respect they need restrictions on how you can use your subscription (or any of their offerings). My issue is not there there _are_ restrictions but that the restrictions themselves are unclear which leads to people being unsure where the line is (that they are trying not to cross).

Put simply: At what point is `claude -p` usage not allowed on a subscription:

- Running `claude -p` from the CLI?

- Running `claude -p` on a Cron?

- Running `claude -p` as a response to some external event? (GH action, webhook, etc?)

- Running `claude -p` when I receive a Telegram/Discord/etc message (from myself)?

Different people will draw the line in different places and Anthropic is not forthcoming about what is or is not allowed. Essentially, there is a spectrum between "Running claude by hand on the command line" and "OpenClaw" [0] and we don't know where they draw the line. Because of that, and because the banning process is draconian and final with no appeals, it leads to a lot of frustration.

[0] I do not use OpenClaw nor am I arguing it should be allowed on the subscription. It would be nice if it was but I'm not saying it should be. I'm just saying that OpenClaw clearly is _not_ allowed but `claude -p` wouldn't be usable at all with a subscription if it was completely banned so what can it (safely) be used for?

> We don't know what models they use, how system prompt changes or what are the actual rate limits (Yet Anthropic will become 1 trillion dollars company in a moment).

Not just that, but there’s really no way to come to an objective consensus of how well the model is performing in the first place. See: literally every thread discussing a Claude outage or change of some kind. “Opus is absolutely incredible, it’s one shotting work that would take me months” immediately followed by “no it’s totally nerfed now, it can’t even implement bubble sort for me.”

Yeah, but they got sued over it and purportedly stopped. They claimed it was to protect battery health.

Suuuuuuure it was.

That said, I had way better experiences with old (but contemporary) Apple hardware than any other kind of old hardware.