It makes sense that anthropic is cranking out these products trying to find and maintain a foothold in the market.
But part of me just wishes they would go back to developing and refining an excellent and user-friendly harness.
I can't imagine what the long term support is for the dozens of products they release every three months.
Meanwhile, they're shipping a more and more buggy and Byzantine Claude code with a million switches and tons of ways to use it wrong.
The subscription play really does feel like a bait and switch lock-in: "we can focus less on the harness because people with subscriptions need to use it, and focus on growth."
Interested to see if this works out for them.
> The subscription play really does feel like a bait and switch lock-in: "we can focus less on the harness because people with subscriptions need to use it, and focus on growth."
Of course it is and they're not hiding it. Paying 200$ a month for the equivalent of maybe 2000$ is no secret. Theyre at the frontier of the models and they need to stay there to stay relevant. Otherwise they will fall like the majority of these "AI" companies will when the bubble bursts.
I bet subs are not their main source of revenue (by far), big cos are throwing big dollars to them, offering things like this entrenches these corps more into their products (makes it harder to just switch to OpenAI if your entire infra is built on top of their products)
This movement is brilliant for them