4/14/2026 at 6:32:29 PM
LLMs and LLM providers are massive black boxes. I get a lot of value from them and so I can put up with that to a certain extent, but these new "products"/features that Anthropic are shipping are very unappealing to me. Not because I can't see a use-case for them, but because I have 0 trust in them:- No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the feature
- No trust they won't sunset the feature (the graveyard of LLM-features is vast and growing quickly while they throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks)
- No trust in the company long-term. Both in them being around at all and them not rug-pulling. I don't want to build on their "platform". I'll use their harness and their models but I don't want more lock-in than that.
If Anthropic goes "bad" 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.
I'm not going to build my business or my development flows on things I can't replicate myself. Also, I imagine debugging any of this would be maddening. The value add is just not there IMHO.
EDIT: Put another way, LLM companies are trying to climb the ladder to be a platform, I have zero interest in that, I was a "dumb pipe", I want a commodity, I want a provider, not a platform. Claude Code is as far into the dragon's lair that I want to venture and I'm only okay with that because I know I can jump to OpenCode/Codex/etc if/when Anthropic "goes bad".
by joshstrange
4/14/2026 at 9:59:41 PM
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.
by freedomben
4/14/2026 at 9:12:23 PM
> - No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the featureTo the contrary, they've proven again and again and again they'll absolutely do that the first chance they get.
by pc86
4/14/2026 at 9:21:59 PM
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.
by rbalicki
4/14/2026 at 10:19:55 PM
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.by spprashant
4/14/2026 at 8:26:23 PM
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.
by JohnMakin
4/14/2026 at 10:30:06 PM
> specifically speaking about aws, the predictions vs what actually happened is a massive gapI 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.
by chickensong
4/14/2026 at 8:58:59 PM
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.
by michaeldwan
4/14/2026 at 9:27:23 PM
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.
by JohnMakin
4/14/2026 at 10:01:30 PM
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).
by fragmede
4/14/2026 at 8:42:42 PM
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.by robwwilliams
4/14/2026 at 9:59:50 PM
Let's see how it shakes out after Athropic and OpenAI fully stop subsidizing their plans, that may alter the calculus.by phist_mcgee
4/14/2026 at 7:31:01 PM
> 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?
by mikepurvis
4/14/2026 at 8:15:49 PM
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.by throwup238
4/14/2026 at 7:08:12 PM
> - No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the featureI actually trust that they will.
by palata
4/14/2026 at 7:16:44 PM
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
by gardenhedge
4/14/2026 at 10:02:47 PM
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
by freedomben
4/14/2026 at 7:44:33 PM
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.
by dvfjsdhgfv
4/14/2026 at 7:58:12 PM
I guess there's a pretty clear incentive to nerf the current model right before the next model is about to come out.by snek_case
4/14/2026 at 8:20:11 PM
Wouldn't that amount to fraud?by chinathrow
4/14/2026 at 8:45:03 PM
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).by tomwojcik
4/14/2026 at 9:07:42 PM
> 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.”
by xienze
4/14/2026 at 9:51:09 PM
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?by twobitshifter
4/14/2026 at 10:21:22 PM
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.
by DrewADesign
4/14/2026 at 10:26:37 PM
[dead]by rexpop
4/14/2026 at 9:09:28 PM
Legally?by ambicapter
4/14/2026 at 8:22:39 PM
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 4.6I 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.
by _blk
4/14/2026 at 9:12:51 PM
The default prompt cache TTL changed from 1 hour to 5 minutes. Maybe this is what you are experiencing.by dr_kiszonka
4/14/2026 at 8:44:54 PM
Yep; second time in five months we have gone from 1 million back to 200 thousand.by robwwilliams
4/14/2026 at 8:56:53 PM
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.by _blk
4/14/2026 at 9:17:28 PM
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 ---
by troupo
4/14/2026 at 10:00:23 PM
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.
by jeppester
4/14/2026 at 8:47:39 PM
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.by gbro3n
4/14/2026 at 8:15:13 PM
> 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.
by ahmadyan
4/14/2026 at 6:34:33 PM
Yeah so better to convert tokens into sw doing the job at close to zero costs running on own systems.by chinathrow
4/14/2026 at 9:17:40 PM
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.by nine_k
4/14/2026 at 9:48:03 PM
In coding they are worse.Chinese models (GLM, MiniMax) are better.
by Readerium
4/14/2026 at 10:00:14 PM
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.
by nine_k
4/14/2026 at 7:22:13 PM
You could so easily build your own /schedule. This is hardly a feature driving lock-inby cush
4/14/2026 at 8:02:04 PM
I believe it doesn't matter, other companies will copy or improve it. The same happend with clawdbot, the amount of clones in a month was insane.by tiku
4/14/2026 at 9:03:28 PM
They're trying to find ways to lock you inby wookmaster
4/14/2026 at 7:45:41 PM
Isn’t that what LangChain/LangGraph is meant to solve? Write workflows/graphs and host them anywhere?by sunnybeetroot
4/14/2026 at 9:56:43 PM
Without getting too pedantic for no reason… I think it’s important to not call this an LLM.This isn’t an LLM. It’s a product powered by an LLM. You don’t get access to the model you get access to the product.
An LLM can’t do a web search, an LLM can’t convert Excel files into something and then into PDF. Products do that.
I think it’s a mistake to say I don’t trust this engine to get me here, rather than it is to say I don’t trust this car. Because for the most part, the engine, despite giving you a different performance all the time is roughly doing the same thing over and over.
The product is the curious entity you have no control over.
by SV_BubbleTime
4/14/2026 at 8:48:52 PM
They have to become a platform because that is their only hope of locking in customers before the open models catch up enough to eat their lunch. Stuff like Gemma is already good enough to replace ChatGPT for the average consumer, and stuff like GLM 5.1 is not too far off from replacing Claude/Codex for the average developer.by slopinthebag
4/14/2026 at 6:37:29 PM
I fully endorse building a custom stack (1) because you will learn a lot (2) for full control and not having Big Ai define our UX/DX for this technology. Let's learn from history this time around?by verdverm
4/14/2026 at 7:37:39 PM
Here's the problem I keep running into with AI and 'history'. We all know where this is going. We'll pick our winners and losers in the interim, but so far, this is a technology that mostly impacts tech practitioners. Most people don't care, in the sense that you're a taxi driver. Perhaps you have a manual transmission and the odd person comments on your prowess with it. No one cares. I see a bunch of boys making fools out of themselves otherwise.by gritspants
4/14/2026 at 9:15:53 PM
Theres something bizarre going on and many have completely lost their minds.The funniest thing Ive heard is that now we have LLMs, Humanoid robots are on the horizon. Like wtf? People who jump to these conclusions were never deep thinkers in the first place. And thats OK, its good to signal that. So we know who to avoid.
by dsf2aa
4/14/2026 at 10:06:15 PM
Yep. Trust is easy to lose, hard to earn. A nondeterministic black box that is likely buggy, will almost certainly change, and has a likelihood of getting enshittified is not a very good value proposition to build on top of or invest in.Increasingly, we're also seeing the moat shrink somewhat. Frontier models are converging in performance (and I bet even Mythos will get matched) and harnesses are improving too across the board (OpenCode and Codex for example).
I get why they're trying to do that (a perception of a moat bloats the IPO price) but I have little faith there's any real moat at all (especially as competitors are still flush with cash).
by alfalfasprout
4/14/2026 at 6:46:00 PM
[dead]by andrewmcwatters
4/14/2026 at 9:03:47 PM
This sounds like someone complaining about how Windows is a black box while ignoring the existence of Linux/BSD.I'm currently hosting, on very reasonable consumer grade hardware, an LLM that is on par performance wise what every anyone was paying for about a year ago. Including all the layers in between the model and the user.
Llama.cpp serves up Gemma-4-26B-A4B, Open WebUI handles the client details: system prompt, web search, image gen, file uploading etc. With Conduit and Tailscale providing the last layer so I can have a mobile experience as robust as anything I get from Anthropic, plus I know how all the pieces works and can upgrade, enhance, etc to my hearts delight. All this runs from a pretty standard MBP at > 70 tokens/sec.
If you want to better understand the agent side of things, look into Hermes agent and you can start understanding the internals of how all this stuff is done. You can run a very competitive coding agent using modest hardware and open models. In a similar note, image/video gen on local hardware has come a long way.
Just like Linux, you're going to exchanging time for this level of control, but it's something anyone who takes LLMs seriously and has the same concerns can easily get started with.
Yet I still see comments like this that seem to complete ignore the incredible work in the open model community that has been perpetually improving and is starting to really be competitive. If you relax the "local" requirement and just want more performance from an LLM backend you can replace the llama.cpp part with a call to Kimi 2.5 or Minimax 2.7 (which you could feasibly run at home, not kimi though). You can still control all the additional part of the experience but run models that are very competitive with current proprietary SoTA offering, 100% under your control still and a fraction of the price.
by crystal_revenge
