Its even more maddening for me because my whole team is paying direct API pricing for the privilege of this experience! Just charge me the cost and let me tune this thing, sheesh!

Why don’t you switch to codex? The grass is greener here. Do use 5.3-codex though, 5.4 is not for coding, despite what many say.

Anthropic in general is miles ahead in “getting work done”, and its not just me on the team. Theres a lot of paper cuts to work through to be truly generic in provider

I did try out codex before claude went to shit and it was good, even uniquely good in some ways, but wasnt good enough to choose it over claude. Absolutely when claude was bad again it would have been better, but thats hindsight that I should have moved over temporarily.

If you get to pay X to YY $$ per each request (because thats the real cost for Anthropic), I strongly believe AI train would suddenly derail.

Currently we are all subsidied by investors money.

How long you can have a business that is only losing money. At some point prices will level up and this will be the end of this escapade.

Once local models hit claude code + opus 4.5 levels that is the new normal. That is a good-enough baseline of intelligence to sustain productivity for the next 10 years or more. We are still so close to this line in the sand that theres not a lot of margin for regression in the SOTA models before they become "worse than no AI" for getting real work done day-to-day. But eventually the local models and harnesses will catch up and there will no longer be a need to use the SAAS versions and still reap the benefits of AI in general.

It's very unlikely that API use is subsidized.

I keep hearing both sides of this "debate," but no one is providing any direct evidence other than "I do(n't) think that is true."

Well there can't be direct evidence, it's a private corporation and we don't know how big the model is. But you can look on Openrouter for hosters that offer free models with known sizes, where there's no brand and so no incentive to subsidize, and they don't look wildly bigger than OpenAI/Anthropic API prices.

edit: example: GLM 5.1, a 751B model, is offered for 0.6$/m in, 4.43$/m out. Scuttlebutt (ie. I asked Google's AI) seems to think that Opus 4 is a 1T/5T MoE model, so you can treat it (with some effort) as a 1T model for pricing purposes. Its API pricing is $1.55 in, $25 out, ie. 2x to 5x more than GLM. Idk what to say other than this sounds about right, probably with healthy margin.

That's why they put the cute animal in your terminal.

Ok, side topic… but that little bastard cheerfully told me out of no where that I have a mall of without a null check AND a free inside a conditional that might not get called.

It didn’t give me a line number or file. I had to go investigate. Finally found what it was talking about.

It was wrong. It took me about 20 minutes start to finish.

Turned it off and will not be turning it back on.

I thought it just emitted tongue-in-cheek comments, not serious analysis. And I use the past tense because I had it enable explicitly and a few days ago it disappeared by itself, didn't touch anything.

The buddies were Anthropics April fools day stunt. Buddies were removed from a newer version of Claude code. By default Claude code updates automatically.

Maybe it was supposed to be tongue in cheek.

But I don’t know, man in my opinion you don’t fucking snicker about a malloc without a null check and only a conditional free that isn’t there.

Go to hell “Sprocket”.

Except for the model weights themselves, they hardly have any!