alt Hacker NewsOh man.
What a wonderful way to stop people from using your LLM.
All these AI companies trying to get everyone to be locked into their toolchains is just hilariously short sighted. Particularly for dev tools. It's the sure path to get devs to hate your product.
And for what? The devs are already paying a pretty penny to use your LLM. Why do you also need to force them to using your toolkit?
Replies
I imagine its a case of the providers not wanting to admit its costing them a fortune because suddenly all these low-medium usage accounts are now their highest use ones.
Not saying it's right. But it's also not exactly a secret that they are all taking VERY heavy losses even with pricey subscriptions.
Antigravity is useless anyway. I tried it last week and it needs approval for every file read and tool call. There's an option in the app to auto-approve, except it doesn't work. Plenty of complaints online about this. Clearly they don't actually care about the product, some exec just felt that they need to get into the editor game.
Next I tried using the Antigravity Gemini plan through OpenCode (I guess also a bannable offense?) and the first request used up my limit for the week.
Google has been particularly pernicious in the corporate exercise of zero-tolerance.
Because of their large footprint in so many areas, it is wise to greatly (re)consider expansion in the ways that you rely on them.
Hopefully this gets people to stop using Google for more than just LLMs.
The tool thing is kind of infuriating at the moment. I've been using Claude on the command line so I can use my subscription. It's fine, but it also feels kind of silly, like I'm looking at ccusage and it seems like I'm using way more $ in tokens than I'm paying for with the subscription. Which is a win for me, but, I don't really feel like Claude Code is such a compelling product that it's going to keep me locked in to their model, so I don't know why they're creating such a steep discount to get me to use it. I'm perfectly fine using Codex's tools, or whatever. I dunno, it seems like way more cost effective to use the first party tools but I'm not sure why they really want that. Are the third party tools just really inefficient with API usage or something?
The devs are paying to use the UIs provided by the company. The usage-based API is a separate offering, and everyone knows that.
It's okay to be annoyed at being caught, but honestly the deer in the headlights bit is a bit ridiculous.
If you want to use an API, pay for the API option. Or run your own models.
You are being subsidised to the tune of 50 to 99.9 cents on the dollar compared to the API.
What the hell do you expect? To get paid for using other people's tools on Google's servers?
There is a reality that when they control the client it can be significantly cheaper for them to run: the Claude code creator has mentioned that the client was carefully designed to maximise prompt caching. If you use a different client, your usage patterns can be different and it may cost them significantly more to serve you.
This isn't a sudden change, either: they were always up-front that subscriptions are for their own clients/apps, and API is for external clients. They don't document the internal client API/auth (people extracted it).
I think a more valid complaint might be "The API costs too much" if you prefer alternative clients. But all providers are quite short on compute at the moment from what I hear, and they're likely prioritising what they subsidise.