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pplanteyesterday at 5:23 PM8 repliesview on HN

I feel like we are seeing agentic coding tools morph into walled gardens with these acquisitions. Anthropic has restricted claude code usage while OpenAI has sort of let Codex fill the void. I am curious to see how this continues to evolve.


Replies

asdffyesterday at 5:36 PM

This is the whole point and the reason for the lofty valuations. Get everyone to shift their work to be dependent on these tooling, to the point they can't imagine working in any other way, and then raise prices. Tale as old as enterprise software.

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allknowingfrogyesterday at 7:08 PM

Claude is just a tool. My team members are each free to choose the text editor or IDE that they are happiest with. In the near future, I hope to be able to say the same for coding agents. I really like Claude, but I don't track Claude resources in our repos. If something better comes along, I'm betting it will be perfectly happy to parse the markdown of my existing memory files, and nothing in the repo itself will force anyone else to know that I switched.

It kind of blows my mind that the majority of Claude users have just accepted that CLAUDE.md is a tracked file that the whole team has to standardize on and share. Coding agents are the ultimate API. They conform to however you prefer to interact. Is anyone really expecting to enforce standard operating procedures with this non-deterministic black box of magic?

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noir_lordyesterday at 5:43 PM

That was always going to be the end point.

The amount of money thrown at it means at some point the words Return on Investment were going to appear.

It’s the classic loss leader applied to trillion dollar (across the market) capital investments.

MangoCoffeeyesterday at 5:54 PM

Frontier AI labs is pivoting to something that can justified their IPO. just like OpenAI shut down other services and pivot more into coding. They want to show profitability before their mega IPO.

scottchayesterday at 6:30 PM

I use claude code and pi.dev side by side most days and i'm mostly choosing pi for most work in last couple of weeks.

geodelyesterday at 6:50 PM

True. But this sounds: "I feel like Mondays are coming after Sundays...".

nielsbotyesterday at 5:29 PM

I think that's the normal path for new markets as they consolidate...

Analemma_yesterday at 5:32 PM

I don’t really see where the “walled garden” complaint is coming from. Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through trillions of tokens on their flat-rate subscription plan, but that’s a billing detail, and one that I honestly don’t share the outrage about. The technology part of CC is still totally open: skills, MCP, etc. are all open informal standards and there hasn’t been any movement to lock that down.

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