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> - 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.

> 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?

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

I actually trust that they will.

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.

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.

Yeah so better to convert tokens into sw doing the job at close to zero costs running on own systems.

They're trying to find ways to lock you in

You could so easily build your own /schedule. This is hardly a feature driving lock-in

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.

Isn’t that what LangChain/LangGraph is meant to solve? Write workflows/graphs and host them anywhere?

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.

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?

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.

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."

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

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..

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

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.

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…

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Sounds more like openclawing.

It's "promptramming".

Does ‘vibe coding’ work?

gramming

+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.

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

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.

Not really any different to GitHub Actions

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

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

> 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.

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

No

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We live in strange times!

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

>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.

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

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.

And yet none of them work properly and are unstable.

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