Well OpenCode already exists and you can connect it to multiple providers, so you could just say that the agentic CLI harness business model as a service/billable feature is no more. In hindsight I would say it never made sense in the first place.

When I compared OpenCode and Claude Code head to head a couple of months ago, Claude Code worked much better for me. I don't know if they closed the gap in the meantime, but for sure Claude Code has improved since then.

OpenCode launched a couple of months ago so that makes sense that it's worse. It's much better than Claude Code now. Somehow for the same model, opencode completes the same work faster than claude code and the ux is much better.

Meant to say "it was worse" not "it's worse"

You win by adoption.

Here adoption is a combination on the tool and the model.

If people can’t pay the model to use the tool, they might not use the tool even if it’s better.

That’s what anthropic is doing.

It might be faster, but it’s more expensive.

There is no loyalty. They eho have the best models win.

The only way remains to try and lock consumers into your ecosystem.

The above does not prove that it is irrational for Anthropic to keep the Claude Code source code closed. There are many reasons I can see (and probably some I can’t) for why a closed source is advantageous. One such (mentioned in various places) is the value-add of certain kinds of analytics and or telemetry.

Aside: it is pretty easy to let our appreciation* of OSS turn into a kind of confirmation bias about its value to other people/orgs.

* I can understand why people promote OSS from various POVs: ethics, security, end user control, pro-innovation, goodwill, and so on. I value all of these things. But I’m wary of reasoning and philosophies that offer merely binary judgments.

Except that the cost is better with their harness and looks like people don’t want to fork 5x.

Adoption is how one wins. Look at all the crappy solutions out there that are still around.

Branding and customer relationships matter as much or more than the "billable service" part of Claude Code.

It's not unheard of for companies that have strong customer mindshare to find themselves intermediated by competitors or other products to the point that they just became part of the infrastructure and eventually lose that mindshare.

I doubt Anthropic wants to become a swappable backend for the actual thing that developers reach for to do their work (the CLI tool).

Don't get me wrong, I think developers should 100% have the choice of tooling they want to use.

But from a business standpoint I think maintaining that direct or first-party connection to the developer is what Anthropic are trying to protect here.

Disagree, this is like terraform for Hashicorp. Give the cow away for free and no one will want to buy the milk. Claude code is a golden cow they should not give away.

Claude code is nothing more than a loop to Opus.

I use Q/aka kiro-cli at work with opus and it's clearly inferior to CC within the first 30s or so of usage. So no, not quite

Kiro is such a disaster. It starts well with all the planning, but I haven't been able to control it. It changes files on a whim and changes opinion from paragraph to paragraph.

Also it uses the Claude models but afaik it is constantly changing which one is using depending on the perceived difficulty.

> it uses the Claude models but afaik it is constantly changing which one is using depending on the perceived difficulty

Claude Code does the same. You can disable it in Kiro by specifically setting the model to what you want rather than “auto” using /model.

Tbh I’ve found Kiro to be much better than Claude Code. The actual quality of results seems about the same, but I’ve had multiple instances where Claude Code get stuck because of errors making tool calls whereas Kiro just works. Personally I also just prefer the simplicity of Kiro’s UX over CC’s relative “flashy” TUI.

> the reality is that Claude Code is what makes Anthropic so relevant in the programming more, much more than the Claude models themselves

but Claude Code cannot run without Claude models? What do you mean?

Relative to their competitors who also have comparable models, Anthropic's design choices in effectively managing context with a very well thought out and coherent design, makes them stand out.

(i.e. competitors can still use Claude models but haven’t achieved the same DevEx as CC so far, at least in my opinion and many others)

also while I was initially on the “they should open source” boat, and I’m happy Codex CLI did, there are a ton of benefits to keeping to closed source. just look at how much spam and dumb community drama OpenAI employees now have to deal with on GitHub. I increasingly think it’s a smart moved to keep it closed source and iterate without as direct community involvement on the codebase for now

They could open source and not take contributions fwiw.

They could close the issues and only allow discussions.

There was a project mentioned here recently that did just that.

*Edit

It was Ghostty,

"Why users cannot create Issues directly" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319

They could open source it and not even have a Github project associated. Just provide a read-only git repo on anthropic.com or drop a source tarball every release.

Then a ton of vibe-coded Claude Code forks out of their control would pop up on GitHub and people would be even more frustrated at Anthropic for not fixing their issues.

If you enjoy working out of the terminal and CLI/TUI's then it's not even close. Gemini, Codex, CoPilot, and every other CLI I can think of are awful. Stumbling, bumbling and you'd be lucky to keep your file tree in tact even with tight permissions (short of a sandbox).

Claude Code feels like my early days when pair programming was all the rage.

If you have the time OpenCode comes the closest and lets you work across providers seamless.

Yes, it can.

Yeah, I've heard of people swapping out the model that Claude Code calls and apparently its not THAT much of a difference. What I'd love to see from Anthropic instead is, give me smaller LLM models, I don't even care if they're "open source" or not, just pull down a model that takes maybe 4 or 6 GB of VRAM into my local box, and use those for your coding agents, you can direct it and guide it with Opus anyway, so why not cut down on costs for everyone (consumer and Anthropic themselves!) by just letting users who can run some of the compute locally. I've got about 16GB of VRAM I can juice out of my Macbook Pro, I'm okay running a few smaller models locally with the guiding hand of Opus or Sonnet for less compute on the API front.

So, like, why don’t people just use the better-than-Claude OpenCode CLI with these other just-as-good-as-Claude models?

not sure there are any models yet that you can get the quality out you need to do this and run on your mbp

Anthropic might have good models, but they are the worse. I mentioned in another thread how they do whatever they can to bypass bot detection protection to scrap content.

Nah, I think Opus is fantastic but not Claude Code. Their models are way better.

I have the rehydrated version, should I publish it

Rehydrated version of what? And what does that mean?