alt Hacker News> Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain
Why is that their “huge asset?” The genus of this complaint is that Opencode et al replace everything but the LLM, so it seems like the latter is the true “huge asset.”
If Clause Code is being offered at or near operational breakeven, I don’t see the advantage of lock-in. If it’s being offered at a subsidy, then it’s a hint that Claude Code itself is medium-term unsustainable.
“Training data” is a partial but not full explanation of the gap, since it’s not obviously clear to me how Anthropic can learn from Claude Code sessions but not OpenCode sessions.
Anthropic and OpenAI are essentially betting that a somewhat small difference in accuracy translates to a huge advantage, and continuing to be the one that's slightly but consistently better than others is the only way they can justify investments in them at all. It's natural to then consider that an agent trained to use a specific tool will be better at using that tool. If Claude continues to be slightly better than other models at coding, and Claude Code continues to be slightly better than OpenCode, combined it can be difficult to beat them even at a cheaper price. Right now, even though Kimi K2 and the likes are cheaper with OpenCode and perform decently, I spend more than 10x the amount on Claude Code.