Why? As a user of these tools, I love the convenience factor of having one tool rather than wrangling dozens. It's why in the past I've used an IDE (JetBrains), a language created by the provider of the IDE (Kotlin), web framework created by the same people (ktor), etc.
This is very different to a framework, language or IDE. More comparable to apple or amazon trying to create corporate anti competitive hellscapes of enslaved users that have no agency, no dignity and no real choice, reduced to rent extraction targets. Just with much more dire consequences and much more at stake. We still have the power to make ai providers have no moat and be interchangeable commodity. But we have to fight for them to not get control of the other layers they are trying to grab. We are in a war, people who can still use claude code or other of their garbage tools, after anthropic threatened and shut off opencode, are very naive and ignorant.
From an outside perspective, this sounds hyperbolic. I don’t know why task scheduling would be a part of a war.
In fact, I re-read the article before submitting this comment just to make sure I wasn’t missing something. What on earth is so polarizing about a prompt being run recurrently? It’s a long-awaited feature that I’ve personally needed.
If you want to win your war, you’ll need better propaganda to recruit people. Start with me. My mind is open. Why should I join?
Please tie your claims concretely to this new feature. I’m interested in how adding this could erode open source software. To me they seem completely independent, and it’s a welcome change.
I can't remove the YouTube app off my phone. The mobile phone is a locked up landscape that hates general purpose computing that puts the owner of the device in control. In the same way the big LLM want to give you stuff for free / subsidized then become very opinionated about how you use this stuff then pave up the entire landscape and monopolize it for themselves. Screw that.
We are at a war of defending control over our tools from AI companies that try to takeover any adjacent technology and anything that can be turned into a platform with lock- in effect. Subsidising subscriptions and locking people into their cli is just the start.
"A scheduled task runs a prompt on a recurring cadence using Anthropic-managed infrastructure." >> There is no other way to read this as in this context, its just a small feature, but its a land grab to run workflows locked into their cloud not just models, we don't fall for regimes in one go but one tiny piece at a time, like the frog in the water.
Your "outside perspective" is interesting because I now feel a total disconnect to both worlds: on one side the clawcels with open source but atrocious and insecure setups that feel like NFT bros in the crypto token time, on the other side brainwashed corpo slaves that take anthropic and openai at face value like the iOS apple slaves in the mobile revolution that gave us walled gardens for billions of people without access to general purpose and non appliance computing. My own corner of the boxing ring is a minority with user agency, indie web, local first ideals. We just try to survive and defend the things we have from being taken from us until local models are good enough to build truly independently.
Do you not see this at all and this sounds all crazy to you?
I do! For what it’s worth, I support open models and fighting against losing control of them to companies.
It’s also undeniable that Claude is very, very good. I hope that kind of quality comes to open source models. Lots of people have said they’re happy with the experiences they’ve had.
Personally, a middle ground seems like a nice compromise. Use both when it suits you. I don’t view it as a war, but as an inevitable evolution due to the amount of money being poured into the ecosystem.
The thing is, I would be behind you if there was a concrete alternative. Is there? Because one way or another, consumers will want this kind of quality that Claude is providing.
Either way, I didn’t mean to discourage you, only to ground you. Framing things as a war for our freedom is fine, but ultimately the freedom side has to be able to provide the same features as the corporation side. So where are they? “I use X instead of Y” is the best defense against vendor lock in.
I am not sure what you mean with "Claude". We have to really differentiate between the models and the tools! Claude Code (Which is just the crappy CLI/TUI, not the models as people seem to think now), Claude Webapp, whatever product these workflow engines are part of and Claude Desktop app are what i am fighting against. Opus, Haiku and Sonnet are great models that i use all the time and that have few alternatives in their sweet spot, at least not yet! You can use opencode with these models and get similar or better result with the difference that whatever you build, you can own, the model is pluggable commodity.
That’s a solid pitch. Whenever you’re fighting against the various Claudes, definitely let people know they can use those models locally. Ideally with some instructions on how to get started. That’ll get a lot more converts than morality alone. Me, for example.
I paid a lot of attention to the opencode drama, and I still have a lot of respect for Dax, Adam, and the rest of that team. What I saw was a startup seeking to use API keys specific to Anthropic's subscription model, subsidized and intended for use solely by Anthropic's provided tooling. Anthropic also has an API usage-based model, for companies who want to create tooling around Anthropic models or integrate the models in their own products.
> Anthropic wants a world where they own your agent where it can't exist outside of the Claude desktop app or Claude Code.
Please. I'm sure you're referring to their locking down of subscription keys, which of course they are going to have restrictions on. It's a subsidized subscription model.
You've always been able to create a platform account and use API keys with usage-based billing, and that will never go away. Charging enough to make a profit on inference isn't exactly rent-seeking or whatever language you want to use to villainize a company trying to make enough revenue to survive.
Are these comments from 2018? 'Pro' models of iPhones have been $999 or more, not adjusted for inflation, at their lowest tier since 'Pro' has been a thing. I would expect the same of a Samsung 'Ultra' flagship?
Wildfires across North America really scare me. I live in a valley in the west where wildfire smoke from not only our state but surrounding states comes in and settles, leaving an AQI over 150 for most of late July through September.
Not only climate change, but aggressive firefighting over the past 50 or more years has caused a lot of material low in the fire ladder to accumulate, which in natural or at least pre-Columbian forests would be cleared out by routine fires. Brush and deadfall for example. The larger trees in healthy forests don't succumb to fire, but these fires have been decimating whole stands of trees. Pair that with almost zero snowpack this year, the only positive thing I can say is that I'm glad I can enjoy spring a bit earlier this year.
My feeling has been that 'serious' software engineers aren't particularly suited to use these tools. Most don't have an interest in managing people or are attracted to the deterministic nature of computing. There's a whole psychology you have to learn when managing people, and a lot of those skills transfer to wrangling AI agents from my experience.
You can't be too prescriptive or verbose when interacting with them, you have to interact with them a bit to start understanding how they think and go from there to determine what information or context to provide. Same for understanding their programming styles, they will typically do what they're told but sometimes they go on a tangent.
You need to know how to communicate your expectations. Especially around testing and interaction with existing systems, performance standards, technology, the list goes on.
High number of days with commits, merging and shipping code consistently (some people/project will ship multiple times a day/week, some projects move a little slower).
That plus the completion of high impact projects makes good strong engineers.
I would be surprised if AI prices reflect their current cost to provide the service, even inference costs. With so much money flowing into AI the goal isn't to make money, it's to grow faster than the competition.
I think it’s more instructive to look at providers like AWS than to compare with other AI labs. What’s the incentive for AWS to silently subsidise somebody else’s model when you run it on their infrastructure?
AWS are quite happy to give service away for free in vast quantities, but they do it by issuing credits, not by selling below cost.
I think it’s a fairly safe bet AWS aren’t losing money on every token they sell.
> For the purposes of this post, I’ll use the figures from the 100,000 “maximum”–Claude Sonnet and Opus 4.5 both have context windows of 200,000 tokens, and I run up against them regularly–to generate pessimistic estimates. So, ~390 Wh/MTok input, ~1950 Wh/MTok output.
Expensive commercial energy would be 30¢ per kWh in the US, so the energy cost implied by these figures would be about 12¢/MTok input and 60¢/MTok output. Anthropic's API cost for Opus 4.5 is $5/MTok input and $25/MTok output, nearly two orders of magnitude higher than these figures.
The direct energy cost of inference is still covered even if you assume that Claude Max/etc plans are offering a tenfold subsidy over the API cost.
Thank you for some good intel. Thats very interesting. But, I wonder how this affects supply pricing to other customers. Not that you haven't shown the direct power costs have been borne, but the more indirect ones remain for me.
> I would be surprised if AI prices reflect their current cost to provide the service, even inference costs.
This has been covered a lot. You can find quotes from one of the companies saying that they'd be profitable if not for training costs. In other words, inference is a net positive.
You have to keep in mind that the average customer doesn't use much inference. Most customers on the $20/month plans never come close to using all of their token allowance.
The more religious people I know are some of the best critical thinkers. Especially those types who enroll their kids in the 'classical' education model. With the decline of religion in the USA, I don't think this is a very coherent scapegoat.
Religion isn't the only factor, nor did I claim it was.
But it's the only one I've seen convince PhDs to believe self contradictory "scriptures", cherry picked "evidence", appeals to authority, parrot useless platitudes, indoctrinate their kids, dismiss injustices, other people even for the most trivial differences in doctrine, and consistently vote against their own interests.
This SQL Studio which was seemingly released to the public yesterday? Or are you talking about MS's SQL Server Management Studio? The MS one is a beast.
Management Studio is a monster. I was using for years and every so often someone would show me a feature I was totally unaware of that blew my mind.
Visual Studio also had "Database Project" which was amazing. Not seen anything like it. I think everyone moved over to using EF or Fluent Migrations but I loved the Database Projects.
Taking a huge risk with the naming here, I would be expecting to hear from a Microsoft lawyer any minute (Due to MS's flagship 'SQL Server Management Studio').
e: Don't let this dishearten you, I only would consider a name change to be more of your own brand. When I saw 'SQL Studio', I assumed MS had created an online version of their product. This looks like a well-done passion project.
> all they had to do to label a cow “free range” or “grass fed” was change the finishing stage to a lower density configuration instead of those abominable feed lots you see along highways.
And this is exactly what people have wanted, and are willing to pay a premium for.
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