I hear you on vendor lock-in. Everyone's freaked out about other companies getting the upper-hand with AI in the loop, so there's this charge to use the hell out of it at all costs. Meanwhile, we're quietly picking winners and losers on the service side of all this, and we'll have to live with that outcome for a long time.

At this point, I'm seriously considering what it would take to build a reasonable budget-AI box that's self-hosted. It wouldn't need to blow the doors off of Claude, just get me most of the way there. Maybe even build it out of used and/or last-gen GPUs and a beefy motherboard.

Self-hosting right now is in a weird spot. I'd say that the main benefit of the open models is not self-hosting, but having dozens of different independent providers that can host them for you. You aren't stuck with a single one.

Right now, self-hosting is too expensive if you’re starting from scratch. We have an old EliteDesk that can run the most basic of models, but it doesn’t feel like it’s worth it. Electricity is also quite expensive in many places, it adds up.

If hardware prices ever come back to sane levels, eh… the Framework desktop with Ryzen AI might be interesting to play with.

self-hosting is fine, but even if you had a $100k god box with opus-level LLMs, you'd still end up grinding it to a halt if you tried running 5-10 parallel inference streams

For most people, CC is cheaper tokens for a SOTA model.

What agentic platform would you recommend for those with API access (including other models)?

Basically any other that is not stuck to being managed just by one company. Claude Code does things like using CLAUDE.md and other stuff specific to just their platform, so you are basically locking your project, and everyone else who works on it, to Claude Code only, if you don't also port everything you do to other harnesses. If Anthropic is giving cheaper tokens in exchange for locking you in into their ecosystem, then maybe it's time to test other models and not just use Claude for everything.

It also can respect AGENTS.md, just saying. It’s all about your README.md. But I’m with you about being agent agnostic.

Of course it can, it's Microsofty tactics, support everything but generate "proprietary" stuff by default. Read ODF but generate docx.

If you don't like CLAUDE.md, you can just add a memory/modify the plan agent to make an AGENTS.md. These aren't rigid systems. And, you don't have to tell it to look for an AGENTS.md, it'll just pick it up. First thing it does with /init is just look at what's already in the project folder. You should give CC a try!

works the other way as well, i have my opencode.jsonc which declares what model an agent should use, and it points at .claude/agents/ those agents each have their anthropic based model instead, almost feel like this broke in the past week though for just cc, hard to tell as cc keeps changing and i dont wanna update and learn more claude based nonsense again, if i wasn't locked into a year of pro or whatever, I would 100% be done using them entirely.

I do find it somewhat concerning that the incentives aren't aligned, but as long as things live on your computer it should take just a prompt to migrate to something new

And Codex is open source

Most people would do fine with DeepSeek (4, Pro) and OpenCode.

Much cheaper too.

The comment wasn't about CC specifically. If you rely (like, can't ship without it) on any model that you don't control, it's not really your product. If Dario decides to increase pricing 500% because it's Tuesday, and you can't work without CC, you really have no choice but to open your wallet.

Open your wallet and pay someone who can? We used to call those technical cofounders, right?

codex is also good, has better usage limits compared to CC.

Issue is that CC forced corps over 150 people into a API pricing, which is, well, suboptimal compared what we get. I think it will push those towards hiring more juniors (finally).

>I think it will push those towards hiring more...

...H1Bs.

If you need to use an "agentic platform" I'd recommend that you get accustomed to reading and writing without one.

If you can't one-shot your problem with the free LLM that Google gives you, you're jerking yourself off.

Just write it the old fashioned way.