GoKawiilRecently, I had the rare opportunity to test several agent harnesses, LLMs, and AI gateways in my daily tasks and greenfield projects. Each discovery befuddled me on the popular sentiment for agentic development.
I learned that in the past two weeks, Anthropic has diminished in value for coding with their enshittification, vendor lock in, consumer malpractice, and price gouging, all while open source models are more competitive than ever.
API Reliability
Claude’s API is notoriously unstable, yet it’s the only API provider that is compatible with a Claude subscription.
Other API providers like Vertex AI, AWS Bedrock, and Azure only serve the pricier Anthropic API credits. If you want to subscribe to Claude, you’re stuck with Anthropic’s servers.
If you’re debugging an incident at work and are using Claude to help, pray that it stays up because you’re only productive when Claude is online.
Claude Code
Claude Code is Anthropic’s primary consumer-facing engineering interface, and once you’re in, you’re locked in. Your Claude subscription—which is a cheaper version of the Anthropic API—is restricted to use with the Claude Code CLI/Desktop, Claude CoWork, or @Claude in Slack.
But that isn’t a bad thing! In fact, Claude Code is the most popular and the best agent harness. It’s backed by a large company at the forefront of agentic software development. As of writing, Claude Code CLI only has around 9100 open Github issues, with small unresolved issues like it completely freezing for the last 6+ months or a screen flickering issue open for more than a year. Each changelog entry has a bug fix in almost every release, which is a sign of reliable and stable software!
For those who don’t get it, Anthropic is using Claude Code to write itself, and it shows in its quality. Because they restrict you to their ecosystem, it justifies falling behind better coding harnesses.
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