Claude's brand is sliding dangerously close to "the Microsoft of AI."
DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS
I write mainly out of the hope that some Anthropic employees read this: you need an internal crusade to fight these impulses. Take the high road in the short-term and you may avoid being disrupted in the long-term. It's a culture issue.
Probably your strongest tool is specifically educating people about the history. Microsoft in the late 90s and early 00s was completely dominant, but from today's perspective it's very clear: they made some fundamental choices that didn't age well. As a result, DX on Windows is still not great, even if Visual Studio has the best features, and people with taste by and large prefer Linux.
Apple made an extremely strategic choice: rebuild the OS around BSD, which set them up to align with Linux (the language of servers). The question is: why? Go find out.
The difference is a matter of sensibility, and a matter of allowing that sensibility to exist and flourish in the business.
> you need an internal crusade to fight these impulses. Take the high road in the short-term...
Anthropic is the market leader for advanced AI coding with no serious competitor currently very close and they are preparing to IPO this year. This year is a transition year. The period where every decision would default toward delighting users and increasing perceived value is ending. By next year they'll be fully on the quarterly Wall Street grind of min/maxing every decision to extract the highest possible profit from customers at the lowest possible cost.
This path is inevitable and unavoidable, even with the most well-intentioned management and employees.
The thing that annoys me most of all is they block me from using OpenCode with my Claude Max plan. I find the OpenCode UI to be meaningfully better than Claude Code's, so this is really annoying.
Some workarounds are here https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/7410 but I agree with you, this should be a native feature.
if you are an expert developer smarter than everyone at anthropic, like everyone else commenting on this post, you'll know that it's not difficult to use the claude agent sdk behind an api to achieve almost exactly the same thing
Huh? Why wouldn’t developers (who probably have stock options in Claude) try to prevent becoming 'the Microsoft of AI'? That's probably what they are actively trying to do.
This take is overly cynical. Every major corporation has people with influence who care and fight for good outcomes. They win some fights, they lose others. The only evidence you need is to notice the needlessly good decisions that were made in the past.
Some greatest hits:
- CoreAudio, Mac OS memory management, kernel in general, and many other decisions
- Google's internal dev tooling, Go, and Chrome (at least, in its day)
- C#, .NET, and Typescript (even Microsoft does good work)
One of the hallmarks of heroic engineering work is that everyone takes it for granted afterward. Open source browsers that work, audio that just works, successors to C/C++ with actual support and adoption, operating systems that respond gracefully under load, etc. ... none of these things were guaranteed, or directly aligned with short-term financial incentives. Now, we just assume they're a requirement.
Part of the "sensibility" I'm talking about is seeking to build things that are so boring and reliable that nobody notices them anymore.
Your incentive is to stay in the job so you can vest. Fighting the slide may just make enemies