No, it's just that it's confusing, because there are two ways of using Claude Code credentials:

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.

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 think this is consistent with the Anthropic announcement. I do not see anything on this page that says it will NOT be charged as extra usage.

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.

> No official statement and not even a tweet?

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

Almost seems like business leaders have to balance different aspirations and make tradeoffs. Unbelieveable.

They said from the beginning it was compute constraint and that OpenClaw was causing way more usage than they could handle

This is called FUD, amplify negativity, silence positivity

But... Even when running it in mode 2 ("claude -p") they at certain points tried to detect OpenClaw-usage based prompts made, and blocked them [0]. Now OpenClaw says that Antrophic sanctions this as allowable again.

I agree with GP that this is hard to take seriously.

[0]: https://x.com/steipete/status/2040811558427648357

What's puzzling or schizophrenic about that? Those seem like two very natural factors that would be in tension with one another and have to be balanced.

Wait, how?

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.

Consider Z.ai if you need "bulk" usage, GLM is now very good. They still have the occasional API brown out however.

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.

GPT-5.4 brutally consumptive for sure. It's not very verbal, but gpt-5.3 codex is wildly smart about coding & planning, and way way less token hungry.

Same here. I've been on the Claude Max 20x plan for a while. Now I'm really giving codex a try and looking at the cheaper models as well.

ai garbage

More people flocked to Codex and found out that it's not worse, and sometimes superior.

It's also something super simple to clarify from Anthropic if they want.

I'm trying out codex for first time as well cause something up with Claude for sure, 4.7 has been super frustrating. For other models, highly recommend trying MiniMax 2.7, using it with Hermes is actually pretty good, and their token subscription plans include a lot of usage for $10.

Enshittification 101, codex is undergoing the same thing on a 3 month lag.

Or Claw-like harnesses that we make ourselves? It takes honestly like 15 minutes to roll your own, so I did it thinking "well, hopefully it's not considered third party"

Considering Anthropic is constantly doing the opposite, I would just call it "balance".

^every comment when someone says something remotely negative about LLM’s and their less useful cousins, cryptocurrencies. It’s baffling how similar the language and attitude is sometimes.

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.

> Switching to other providers is the best way to go, if you want to keep your insanity.

Best and most applicable typo ever ʕ ´ • ᴥ •̥ ` ʔ

> Switching to other providers is the best way to go, if you want to keep your insanity

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.

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.

I don't see anything on this page that claims something different from that, or that addresses that claim at all.

Is the tail end of the bubble, is just ridiculous things now. Models cannot made leap-improvements and now you have the enterprise to deal with and for enterprise is not about disruption so you can't break the wheel, you just need to make everyone work less.

But the bills comes thru, one has to pay AWS cause you need the servers, but pay AI agents that make mistake and everyone hopes they work just by typing and saying do x or y. And now they actually invented and engineering and deploy something called Adaptive Thinking and the models can allocate allocate zero reasoning tokens. Its game over, but it was over regardless, there is nothing special about models and they trained them now even with YouTube and soon to be Twitter(X), TikTok and bullshit. Now all those Nvidia GPUs interconnected via NVLink definitely powerful super computers, but the "software" let alone the "AI" is not there yet and OpenAI is worth close to 1 Trillions Dollars ... I mean come on!

you know how s bunch of IT people are trying to "escape the permanent underclass" well it seems like anyone building their tools on cloud providers is doing the opposite. theyre willingly bexoming the underclass in hopes it trickles down

> until they all or sudden update their policy tomorrow that retracts everything.

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.

I have never heard of this, and cannot be reproduced, and is not according to Anthropic's ToS. And there's a lot of FUD being spread around.

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.

Naive question but are you not afraid z.ai will train on your personal data?

This is such a strange way for this to be announced. Why is openclaw telling us this? I wouldn't even trust it until Anthropic says so themselves.

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. And we still aren't there (or even close).

It's almost like they want me to switch to the Chinese clones - which they consider malicious actors.

Yes, exactly.

I also cancelled my 20x and switched to Codex. At this point even the Codex CLI seems to perform better than Claude Code... And so far I'm on the OpenAI Pro plan and haven't even needed to upgrade to their $100/mo plan. I'm getting more value for almost 10x cheaper.

Same, I am from 5x plan and cancel and switched to codex as I want to use Pi.

I switched to Droid+Opus (with Claude Max) many months ago and it was my favorite combo.

Had to stop because they don't like us proxying requests anymore.

My experience is the opposite of this thread's consensus. Context: Full time SWE, working on large and messy codebase. Not working on crazy automations, working on fixing bugs, troubleshooting crashes, implementing features.

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.

> I wonder how many other people recently did the same.

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.

Because the Harness is the Moat and key IP not the Models themselves that is the why! now for both OpenAI and Anthropic with all their money raised and the compute they acquire and have in the books of course no one can easily replicate, whom can afford all those datacenters and Nvidia GPUs interconnected is why OpenAI throws you a bone and gives you an Open Source SDK Harness but not the one they actually use for ChatGPT. But now both of them have to deliver and do all the bull-shet they said this models can do... truth is they cannot. So now the bubbles burst and we will see what happens. We all have to buy iPhones or MacBooks so that makes sense, we all use Chrome or Google Search, Instagram, TikTok.

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.

And then recommends to use an API key, which as far as I know was never restricted, it was trying to use the subscription that was prohibited/limited.

I'm confused by the comments being full of people swearing off Claude, feels like real HN bubble stuff.

Same thing happened to me in January. Never heard back from them after submitting the google form. A few weeks ago I went through the subscription flow again and the 'account disabled' message was no longer there. Didn't go through with the payment so it's possible I would have been blocked at that point but it looked like my account had been re-enabled. I think you just have to play the waiting game unfortunately.

Perfect, thanks. Codex app sucks, but I've been exploring opencode for that. Will try MiniMax!

I do claw like things all the time. Give CC an API document and it figures out how to take a snapshot of the data. Pulls it down and does an analysis.

Haha, thanks for the heads-up

Would you please think of the shareholders

Boiling the frog is an art form. You've got to know when to turn up the heat and when to let it simmer.

Aren't they just doing what Hacker News was trying to tell them to do? That AI is useful but not sure if sustainable. Now they're increasing prices and decreasing tokens and you guys are pissed off.

Many people likely objected to the original restriction because it seemed as though Anthropic was trying to impede the development of competing tools.

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?

I’ve been using Codex Pro since they lobotomized Opus 4.6. Codex is so much better, GPT 5.4 xhigh fast is definitely the smartest and fastest model available.

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.

I left anthropic a while ago because of the similar shenanigans they had earlier. I went with opencode & zen.

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

(That's implied by the sitename to the right of the title)

Yeah, I tried Codex pro today and the $20 plan is way more generous than Claude's, especially lately.

What's funny is I had personally settled on Anthropic as... the best of a bad situation, I guess? I found the tech useful even if I still deeply hate the industry and hype machine around it. Now though I can't get through a full discussion with Claude before the usage restrictions kick in, which has done a far better job getting me to kick the habit than anything else.

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.

Not that I'm some paragon when it comes to critical thinking exactly, but if there any sort of proof or evidence of Anthropic "silencing negativity"? Wouldn't surprise me, but also haven't seen anything conclusive about it either, so spreading that they are as fact, is ironically FUD itself.

No, if you ran Openclaw using Anthropic API as a provider, or had it use the ‘claude -p’ cli interface, you got an email from Anthropic threatening a ban unless you upgraded billing.

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.

FAANG already did this all the time isn't it? Regardless of their policy. US is no better than China from my point of view. In this case, I see no difference between sending my prompts to US or China companies. At least China models are open source.

Claude -p is using Claude cli. How can you know it's my own claw?

I accept that all the providers will do what I would consider unethical with my data and simply don't expose what I don't consider a price of doing the business I want.

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.

Either me or you are misunderstanding the situation. A comment from the GP link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633867

> 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.

That's the thing, it's not announced at all. The title is wrong.

It's just OpenClaw people claiming "Anthropic told us it's fine".

They had this on here since day 1 of the block. This is just Openclaw saying "if you run Openclaw inside Claude Code, it's compliant with the Anthropic ToS", because, well, it's literally running inside Claude Code.

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).

Strategic ambiguity.

I see the current situation as a plus. I get SOTA models for dumping prices. And once the public providers go up with their pricing, I will be able to switch to local AI because open models have improved so much.

It's the PayPal model of customer service: they'll ban you at any time for any reason or none at all, but if you're very nice they might be willing to have a human look at that decision at some point, but probably not.

The open models may not be as great but maybe these are good enough. AI users can switch when the prices rise before it becomes sustainable for (some) of the large LLM providers.

They are taking in more than they are spending hosting them. However, the cost for training the next generation of models is not covered.

If they started doing caching properly and using proper sunrooms for that they'd have a better chance with that

I think this has to be done with technological advances that makes things cheaper, not charging more.

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.

Don’t know, I feel like I’ve watched every tech company get through every controversy without consequence.

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.

Hormussy started it.

I've had the cheapest personal tier for both since forever and I think I've run out of Codex quota _once_.

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 =)

/gestures at all the comments

I pay the $20 sub for all of the Frontier models and just hop between them as performance changes

I will say that Codex high/x-high has consistently performed the best for me, but YMMV

What shareholders, Anthropic is a money burning pit. Not to the same extent as OpenAI, but both will struggle hard to actually turn a profit some day, let alone make back the massive investments they've received.

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.

I feel this has to be said constantly, though I hate doing it.

hn is not a monolith. People here routinely disagree with each other, and that's what makes it great

Isn't their argument that third party harness dont play nice with their GPUs which is a fair argument.

With Claude Code they can predict what the traffic would look like with third party harness they cannot.

I also made the switch to OpenAI, the $20 plan, I dunno about "so much better" but it's more or less the same, which is great!

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.

Any alternative to Claude Design ? Tried Figma with Opus 4.6 but it doesn't come close in my experience.

Codex is abysmal for UI design imo.

Doesn't using pi be against their terms of use about having to go through Claude Code cli for all Max plan usage? (I had use Droid with Max previously, it was a great combo).

Name a startup that isn’t trying to downplay, scrub, or otherwise silence negative press.

If Openclaw was still using Claude Code as the harness, I don't know how to reconcile that with "Openclaw is based on the pi framework", which is decidedly NOT claude code.

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,

Oh yeah that happened to my paypal the one time I had a user donate to me!

At least the only action I was still able to perform was to refund the user, or paypal would have just kept the money.

If my empty plate had a pizza on it it would be a good lunch

Currently it costs so much more to host an open model than it costs to subscribe to a much better hosted model. Which suggests it’s being massively subsidised still.

Nope. They're losing money on straight inference (you may be thinking of the interview where Dario described a hypothetical company that was positive margin). The only way they can make it look like they're making money on inference is by calling the ongoing reinforcement training of the currently-served model a capital rather than operational expense, which is both absurd and will absolutely not work for an IPO.

They probably aren’t planning on making the money on consumer subscriptions. Any price is viable as long as the user can get more value out of it than they spend.

Making it more affordable would be very bad news for Amazon, who are now counting on $100B in new spending from OpenAI over the next 10 years.

I'm aware. When I say "Hacker News", I mean a very sizable portion of users who keep repeating the OpenAI collapse imminent opinion.

If that was the argument, why did they reverse it?

Anthropic is constantly destroying goodwill and now seems to be in panic mode.

I underscored using xhigh + fast mode when saying it’s so much better.

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.

It really depends on what you‘re trying to do and what your skillset is.

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.

Google Stitch

Probably - it was that kind of confusion that resulted in me switching providers.

Plus I like being able to switch a model.

Openclaw allows you to effectively “shell out” to another harness for your model calls, while still using Pi as your main agentic harness. This is the claude -p workflow. Tools and skills are injected into Claude and they hack session persistence into it as well.

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.

>> both will struggle hard to actually turn a profit some day, let alone make back the massive investments they've received.

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.

$20B ARR or so reported added in Q1 doesn’t sound particularly bad, they’ll raise effective prices some more while Claude diffuses into the economy, sounds like a money printer. The issue is they’re compute constrained on the supply side to grow faster…

What issues did you consider about sending your code base to OpenAI?

I created some decent prototypes with stitch but I don't know how it compares to claude design

Have you tried stitch.withgoogle.com?

It's unclear right now. The current stance is that using pi or other coding harnesses eats into extra usage and that is the behavior one sees today. We have added a hint to pi now that warns you when you use an anthropic sub.

You can use open models through OpenRouter, but if you want good open models they’re actually pretty expensive fairly quickly as well.

If I drop $10k on a souped-up Mac Studio, can that run a competent open-source model for OpenClaw?

For a lot of tasks smaller models work fine, though. Nowadays the problem is less model quality/speed, but more that it's a bit annoying to mix it in one workflow, with easy switching.

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.

Do you have sources? I would be interested to read them

"Sell this for less than it cost us" was a viable business plan during the ZIRP era but is not now

Someone's going to get burned here that's for sure. This isn't going to end with every person on the planet paying $100 a month for an LLM.

Somethings not adding up. Why is Amazon making financial plans for the next decade based on continued OpenAI spending but you’re saying AI providers like OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t even close to being profitable, so how can they last a decade or more?

Who’s wrong?

> $20B ARR or so reported added in Q1 doesn’t sound particularly bad

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.

None mate. Code is cheap, it's not worth anything any more, especially not my little personal projects

stitch.withgoogle.com

I’m not sure there will be consolidation. There’s too much room for specialization and even when the models are trained to do the same task they have very different qualities and their own strengths and weaknesses. You can’t just swap one for the other. If anything, as hardware improves I’d expect even more models and providers to become available. There’s already an ocean of fine tuned and merged models.

Thanks for the great work.

Thanks for the tip! Hadn't seen that, but definitely giving it a try.

Qwen is probably your best bet…

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

I've found MiniMax 2.7 pretty decent and even pay-as-you-go on OpenRouter, it's $0.30/mt in, and $1.20/mt out you can get some pretty heavy usage for between $5-$10. Their token subscription is heavily subsidized, but even if it goes up or away, its pretty decent. I'm pretty hopeful for these openweight models to become affordable at good enough performance.

Rapid MLX team has done some interesting benchmarking that suggests Qwopus 27B is pretty solid. Their tool includes benchmarking features so you can evaluate your own setup.

They have a metric called Model-Harness Index:

MHI = 0.50 × ToolCalling + 0.30 × HumanEval + 0.20 × MMLU (scale 0-100)

https://github.com/raullenchai/Rapid-MLX

I haven’t tried it yet, but Rapid MLX has a neat feature for automatic model switching. It runs a local model using Apple’s MLX framework, then “falls forward” to the cloud dynamically based on usage patterns:

> 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

https://github.com/raullenchai/Rapid-MLX

Probably the best roundup is Ed Zitron at https://wheresyoured.at

Half the articles are paywalled but the free ones outline the financial situation of the SOTA providers and he has receipts

A guy from Meta interviewing at BBC a few years ago claimed that every school child in India was going to have the metaverse VR or they'd be left behind in their education, so every family was certainly going to pony up the money.

I take it you don't remember 2008

> But the problem is, they have no moat

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.

It’s okay, but if you compare it to eg Sonnet it’s just way too far off the mark all the time that I cannot use it.

Pardon the silly question, but why do I need this tool versus running the model directly (and SSH’ing in when I’m away from home)?

Are we before or after the part where they start throwing money out of helicopters?

You're actually reinforcing my point. Models are interchangable and easy to switch between to adjust based on needs and costs. That means that no individual model / model provider has any sort of serious moat.

If tomorrow Kimi release a model better at something, you'd switch to it.

That's the interesting question, right? Because if this unwinds during a period of external inflation (say, because of a big war and energy shortage) then even the Bernanke would say helicopter money won't work

Yes, in that sense, technically correct.

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).