Hacker News

I wouldn't trust another company either. Some people have reported some issues with Cursor. The solution is probably not a cloud API with unknown quotas or pay as you go pricing.

> It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs".

I have been wondering if it's more geared at reducing resource usage, given that at the moment there's a known constraint on AI datacenter expansion capability. Perhaps they are struggling to meet demand?

> (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)

How often? Realistically, if you invoke it occasionally, for what's clearly an amount that's "reasonable personal use", then no you don't get nuked.

They also screwed up the API token detection and also blocked a bunch of 1st party tool users for ~24h.

Support consisted of AI bots saying you did something stupid, you did something wrong, you were abusing the system, followed by (only when I asked for it explicitly) claiming to file a ticket with a human who will contact you later (and it either didn't happen or their ticket system is /dev/null).

(By the way this is the 2nd time I've been "please hold" gaslit by support LLMs this exact same way, the other being with Square)

Perhaps Anthropic should put a freeze on new signups until they can increase capacity. This is the best kind of problem for a business, I'm cheering for them.

Claude -p is allowed. They're not going to give you a feature then ban you for using it.

What they changed is that it now uses extra usage, which is charged at api rates

claude -p not working would be instant unsubscribe downgrade from Max to Pro and further drive my use of codex. I use both but overall have noticed I reach for Claude less than codex lately because claude keeps getting slower and slower (I have not noticed a drop off in quality, but I use it less and less so maybe I'm not in a good position to notice).

Generally I find codex and claude make a good team. I'm not a heavy user, but I am currently Claude Max 5x and ChatGPT Plus. Now that OpenAI has a $100 offering and I am finding myself using Claude less, I am considering switching to Claude Pro and ChatGPT Pro x5. The work hours restriction on Claude Max x5 really pisses me off.

I am not a heavy user. Historically I only break over 50% weekly one week a month and average about 30-40% of Max x5 over the entire month. I went Max because of the weekly limits and to access the better models and because I felt I was getting value. I need an occasional burst of usage, not 24/7 slow compute. But even for pay-as-you-go burst usage Anthropic's API prices are insane vs Max.

I have yet to ever hit a limit on codex so it's not on my mind. And lately it seems like Claude is likely to be having a service interruption anyway. A big part of subscribing to Claude Max was to get away from how the usage limits on Pro were causing me to architect my life around 5hr windows. And now Anthropic has brought that all back with this don't use it before 2pm bullshit. I want things ready to go when the muses strike. I'm honestly questioning whether Anthropic wants anyone who isn't employed as a software engineer to use their kit.

Anyway for the last month or so codex "just works" and Claude has been an invitation for annoyances. There was a time when codex was quite a bit behind claude-code. They have been roughly equal (different strength and weaknesses) since at least February (for me).

> (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)

100% this, I’ve posted the same sentiment here on HN. I hate the chilling effect of the bans and the lack of clarity on what is and is not allowed.

Why were third party harnesses banned? Surely they'd want sticking power over the ecosystem.

I think we are about a month away from a class action lawsuit, at their revenue they are a juicy target. And god knows they got the entirely self inflicted unholy combination going on, marketing & sales that borders on fraud (X times the usage of plan Y which has Z times of free tier which has unknowable "magic tokens") and then of course the actual fraud, reducing usage in fifteen different non obvious non public ways.

> claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked

I've used it with a sub a lot. Concurrency of 40 writing descriptions of thousands of images, running for hours on sonnet.

I have a lot of complaints. I've cancelled my $200 subscription and when it runs out in a few days I'll have to find something else.

But claude -p is fine.

... Or it was 2 week ago. Who knows if they've silently throttled it by now?

>> apparently a bug?

it's a bug only if they get a harsh public response, otherwise it becomes a feature

Most of those are issues are coming from a very small minority. A lot of times its good for businesses to focus on the customers that are driving them the highest margin, most likely not users like yourself.

1) Nobody should expect to use OpenClaw without API usage.

2) We have known for a long time that the plans are subsidized. It was not as big of a deal but now that demand has continued to explode at a multiple and tools like OpenClaw were creating a lot of usage from a small minority of customers, prices change.

Everything for me points more towards, we have made a service people really want to use and we are trying to balance a supply shortage (compute) with pricing. Nothing is stopping folks like yourself from simply paying the API rates. It is the simple no hassle way to get around any issue you are having, pay the API cost and you will have no limitations!

Is it the models themselves or the tools around them? There's that patch[1] that floats around for Claude Code that's supposed to solve a lot of these problems by adjusting its tool-level prompts. Also, if it were the models themselves, wouldn't Cursor users have the same complaints (do they? I haven't heard anything but the only Cursor users I talk to are coworkers)?

I think it's more likely they're trying to optimize the Claude Code prompts to reduce load on their system and have overcorrected at the cost of quality.

1: https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5...

Part hypecycle, part desperate attempts to rein in usage

Pretty bad decision on his part. I've been telling other engineers within my company who felt threatened by AI that this would happen. That prices would rise and the marginal cost for changes to big codebases would start to exceed the cost of an engineer's salary. API credits are expensive, especially for huge contexts, and sometimes the model will use $200 in credits trying to solve a problem that could be fixed in an hour by a good engineer with enough context.

It kind of reminds me of the joke where a plumber charges $500 for a 5 minute visit. When the client complains the plumber says it's $50 for labor and $450 for knowing how to fix the problem.

I can’t believe how many small to mid size companies are being destroyed by bad decisions like this.

A friend’s company fired all EMs and have engineers reporting to product managers. They aren’t allowed to do refactors because the CTO believes the AI doesn’t need organized code.

He must be feeling pretty good, after all he still believes that it was the right call, and he definitely won't be admitting a mistake.

There's 0 chance of him facing the consequences for it either.

Hopefully that EVP feels embarrassed that a big bet was made that not only didn't pay off but left the company in a worse position. Some schadenfreude may be all you can expect, since this is an executive.

But cancelling IDE subscriptions? You need a proper IDE to along side AI augmented development unless you want to simply be along for the ride.

lol. dude is so incompetent. changing tool for cost cutting is so stupid, we all know real cost cutting is firing people. if he is really good at he's doing, just fire 10% people and replace them with his Claude. If that didn't get backfired in 3 months, he will be CT0.

Wow, that sounds like you have a astoundingly terrible EVP.

The real question I see nobody asking is how GPT-5.4 beats Opus at a fraction of the price. I doubt it’s only a question of subsidization. My impression from the past is that GPT-5 was around a Sonnet-sized model, and 5-mini was Haiku-sized. At least on my codebase anyways, Codex one-shots tricky things that Opus needs several tries to fully get right.

There's a github issue for this: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796

It's not just you, there is a github issue for it: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796

Both can be a thing at same time

Just one more anecdote:

I'm on the enterprise team plan so a decent amount of usage.

In March I could use Opus all day and it was getting great results.

Since the last week of March and into April, I've had sessions where I maxed out session usage under 2 hours and it got stuck in overthinking loops, multiple turns of realising the same thing, dozens of paragraphs of "But wait, actually I need to do x" with slight variations of the same realisation.

This is not the 'thinking effort' setting in claude code, I noticed this happening across multiple sessions with the same thinking effort settings, there was clearly some underlying change that was not published that made the model get stuck in thinking loops more for longer and more often without any escape hatch to stop and prompt the user for additional steering if it gets stuck.

I think there's a much more nefarious reason that you're missing.

It's pretty clear that OpenAI has consistently used bots on social networks to peddle their products. This could just be the next iteration, mass spreading lies about Anthropic to get people to flock back to their own products.

That would explain why a lot of users in the comments of those posts are claiming that they don't see any changes to limits.

I think on HN we always underestimate how much momentum matters. Anthropic has so much clout and mindshare that even if they continue burning goodwill and everyone on HN ditches Claude Code and stops recommending it, they will still be revenue leader for years to come. Those enterprise contracts aren’t month-to-month.

The enshittification meme has been taken too seriously to the point where it is shoehorned into every single place possible.

It is not in the interests for Anthropic to screw its customer base. Running a frontier lab comes with tradeoffs between training, inference and other areas.

My experience has been that this isn’t generally true, mainly because worse models pursue red herrings or get confused and stuck. a better model will get to the correct solution in fewer tokens, and my surface-level understanding of how RL works supports this.

Stop thinking billion dollar publicly traded companies are "cool" just because they make widget you like.

You will be backstabbed

You will be squeezed for all they can.

And you will be betrayed.

> Phase N: People can't afford computing anymore. Everything is thin clients and rented. It's become like the private railroad industry. End of the PC era. Like kids growing up on smartphones, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.

Thankfully none of them actually makes money and just runs on investment so there is a good chance bubble will drop and the price of PC equipment will... continue to rise as US gives up Taiwan to China

What I want to know is how did they make the only LLM that doesn't sound cringe?

I think it has something to do with mode collapse (although Claude certainly has its own "tells"), but I'm not sure.

It sounds trivial but even for Agentic, I found the writing style to be really important. When you give Claude a persona, it sounds like the thing. When you give GPT a persona, it sounds like GPT half-assedly pretending to be the thing.

---

Some other interesting points about Anthropic's models. I don't know if any of these relate to my LLM style question, but seems worth mentioning:

Claude models also use way less tokens for the same task (on ArtificialAnalysis, they are a clear outlier on this metric).

And there's a much stronger common sense, subjectively. (Not sure if we have a good way to actually measure that, though.) It takes context and common sense into account, to a much greater degree.

(Which ties in with their constitution. Understanding why things are wrong at a deeper level, rather than just surface level pattern matching.)

Opus is great but it should be bigger. You notice the difference between Sonnet and Opus, but with heavy use you notice Opus's limitations, too.

Good read on the situation.

It all boils down to a brilliant but extremely expensive technology. Both to build and to run.

We've been sold a product with heavy subsidy. The idea (from Sam) scale out and see what happens.

Those who care to read between the lines can see what's happening. A perfect storm of demand that attract VCs who can't understand they are the real customers. Once they understand that it will be too late.

Regarding open weight models: eventually we will, as humanity, benefit from the astronomical capital poured into developing a technology ahead of its time. In a few years this and even more will run on edge.

Written by open source developers, likely former openai and anthropic employees who got so much cash in the bank they don't need to worry about renting their knowledge.

What leads you to say China AI is giving up on open weights?

I've been using GLM for over 6 months and pretty happy.

> We need open weights companies now more than ever.

If you're objective it to democratize AI, sure. But for those fed up with it and the devastating effects it's having on students, for example, can opt to actively avoid paying for products with AI (I say this as someone who uses it every day, guilty). At some point large companies will see that they're bleeding money for something that most people don't seem to want, and cancel those $100k/mo deals. I've already experienced one AI-developer-turned company crash and burn.

Personally, I don't think this LLM-based AI generation will have any significant positive impacts. Time, energy (CO2) and money would have been far better spent elsewhere.

> End of the PC era, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.

This one seems too far fetched. Training models is widespread. There will always be open weight models in some form, and if we assume there will be some advancements in architecture, I bet you could also run them on much leaner devices. Even today you can run models on Raspberry Pis. I don't see a reason this will stop being a thing, there will be plenty of ways to tinker.

However, keep in mind the masses don't care about tinkering and never have. People want a ChatGPT experience, not a pytorch experience. In essence this is true for all tech products, not just AI.

When did Hacker News become a fountain of dystopian science fiction?

The hypothesis that makes the most sense is not that they are idiots, but that they have no choice. They cannot meet the new demand. So they’ve quantized the model.

Five million. No matter the unit, just, 5.000.000

For days? Someone spent days trying to convince Claude to do something?

I have noticed refusals as context windows grow.

That was my immediate impression too! It feels like it's all AI maximalists who seem to have a need to filter their every interaction through an LLM. And the result looks and reads just like Moltbook.

Those are the same thing

Is this not the same thing?

I’ve noticed the models still can’t complete complex tasks

Such as:

Adding fine curl noise to a volumetric smoke shader

Fixing an issue with entity interpolation in an entity/snapshot netcode

Find some rendering bugs related to lightmaps not loading in particular cases, and it actually introduced this bug.

Just basic stuff.

While I’ve had tremendous success with Golang projects and Typescript Web Apps, when I tried to use Metal Mesh Shaders in January, both Codex and Claude both had issues getting it right.

That sort of GPU code has a lot of concepts and machinery, it’s not just a syntax to express, and everything has to be just right or you will get a blank screen. I also use them differently than most examples; I use it for data viz (turning data into meshes) and most samples are about level of detail. So a double whammy.

But once I pointed either LLM at my own previous work — the code from months of my prior personal exploration and battles for understanding, then they both worked much better. Not great, but we could make progress.

I also needed to make more mini-harnesses / scaffolds for it to work through; in other words isolating its focus, kind of like test-driven development.

" or if it just can't solve everything yet."

Obviously it cannot. But if you give the AI enough hints, clear spec, clear documentation and remove all distracting information, it can solve most problems.

My impression is that it always comes down to how well what you’re trying to do pattern-matches the training set.

It works somewhat well with trivial things. That's where most of these success stories are coming from.

Nah, it only lives up to the hype for crud apps and web ui. As soon as you stop doing webshit it becomes way less useful.

(Don’t get mad at me, I’m a webshit developer)

Most of the folks are building CRUD apps with AI and that works fine.

What you're doing is more specialized and these models are useless there. It's not intelligence.

Another NFT/Crypto era is upon us so no you're not holding it wrong.

Enemy centered decision making

Cannot you use Codex (which is open source, unlike Claude Code) with Claude, even via Amazon Bedrock?

I'm with you on the ethical part, but everything is a spectrum. All the AI leadership are some shade of evil. There's no way the product would be effective if they weren't. I don't like that Sam Altman is a lunatic, but frankly they all are. I also recognize that these are massive companies filled with non shitty engineers who are actually responsible for a lot of the magic. Conflating one charlatan with the rest of it is a tragedy of nuance.

You'd think they would have dashboards for all of this stuff, to easily notice any change in metrics and be able to track down which release was responsible for it.

keep in mind, efficient KV caching needs to be next to the GPU, so you sls need you HA to keep routing the user to the same hardware.

the hardware VM model is almost identical. Each session can go anywhere to start but a live session cant just be routed anywhere without penalty.