I'm going to be paranoid and guess they're trying to segment the users into those that'll notice they're dumbing down the system via caches, limited model via quantized downgrade and those that expect the fully available tools.
I'm going to be paranoid and guess they're trying to segment the users into those that'll notice they're dumbing down the system via caches, limited model via quantized downgrade and those that expect the fully available tools.
Thariq (who's on the Claude Code team) swears up and down that they do not do this.
Honestly, man, this is just weird new tech. We're asking a probabilistic model to generate English and JSON and Bash at the same time in an inherently mutable environment and then Anthropic also release one or two updates most workdays that contain tweaks to the system prompt and new feature flags that are being flipped every which way. I don't think you have to believe in a conspiracy theory to understand why it's a little wobbly sometimes.
Yeah, I know it's new tech and the pipeline for the magic is a bunchof shims ontop of a non-deterministic models; but the MBAs are going to swoop in eventually and segmenting the users into tiers of price discrimnation is in the pike regardless of how earnest the current PMs are.
Hmm, honestly I'm not so sure. Many devs seem extremely price-sensitive and the switching cost is... zero.
If Anthropic do something you don't like, you just set a few environment variables and suddenly you're using the Claude Code harness with a local model, or one of thousands available through OpenRouter. And then there is also OpenCode. I haven't tried this, but I'm not worried.
^ https://github.com/ruvnet/claude-flow/wiki/Using-Claude-Code...