If the software is, say, Audacity, who's target market isn't specifically software developers, sure, but seeing as how Claude code's target market has a lot of people who can read code and write software (some of them for a living!) it becomes material. Especially when CC has numerous bugs that have gone unaddressed for months that people in their target market could fix. I mean, I have my own beliefs as to why they haven't opened it, but at the same time, it's frustrating hitting the same bugs day after day.
They are turning it into a distributed system that you'll have to pay to access. Anyone can see this. CLI is easy to make and easy to support, but you have to invest in the underlying infrastructure to really have this pay off.
Especially if they want to get into enterprise VPCs and "build and manage organizational intelligence"
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> ... numerous bugs that have gone unaddressed for months that people in their target market could fix.
THIS. I get so annoyed when there's a longstanding bug that I know how to fix, the fix would be easy for me, but I'm not given the access I need in order to fix it.
For example, I use Docker Desktop on Linux rather than native Docker, because other team members (on Windows) use it, and there were some quirks in how it handled file permissions that differed from Linux-native Docker; after one too many times trying to sort out the issues, my team lead said, "Just use Docker Desktop so you have the same setup as everyone else, I don't want to spend more time on permissions issues that only affect one dev on the team". So I switched.
But there's a bug in Docker Desktop that was bugging me for the longest time. If you quit Docker Desktop, all your terminals would go away. I eventually figured out that this only happened to gnome-terminal, because Docker Desktop was trying to kill the instance of gnome-terminal that it kicked off for its internal terminal functionality, and getting the logic wrong. Once I switched to Ghostty, I stopped having the issue. But the bug has persisted for over three years (https://github.com/docker/desktop-linux/issues/109 was reported on Dec 27, 2022) without ever being resolved, because 1) it's just not a huge priority for the Docker Desktop team (who aren't experiencing it), and 2) the people for whom it IS a huge priority (because it's bothering them a lot) aren't allowed to fix it.
Though what's worse is a project that is open-source, has open PRs fixing a bug, and lets those PRs go unaddressed, eventually posting a notice in their repo that they're no longer accepting PRs because their team is focusing on other things right now. (Cough, cough, githubactions...)