Interesting. Given that OpenAI and Anthropic are steadily moving down the stack (e.g. remote execution, Codex desktop, Claude Code integrations), how do you think about defensibility? Do you expect the labs to eventually offer a cloud-native ADE themselves, and if so, what advantage do you think an independent platform retains?
Also, do you see Boxes supporting OpenCode and self-hosted/local models in the future? If the rented machines have enough RAM and GPU access, it seems like there could be an interesting path toward a model-agnostic platform rather than being tied to the frontier labs.
Personally, with our company on Cursor, I can see why model makers are not the best people to go all the way down the stack. Using the right model for the situation will continue to be important, and model makers, by design, do not want to give you the choice to run different models.
Right now, we use:
- Kimi K2.5 for easy fixes, asking about the code, various agentic commands (e.g., summarizing Loom videos for Slack messages)
- Opus 4.8, Sonnet, or Kimi for planning (we find GPT-5.5 to have too terse outputs for plans)
- Kimi K2.5, Composer 2.5, GPT-5.4 mini, etc. for faster implementation (i.e. we don't have to wait around for the slower tokens-per-second generation on Sonnet, etc.)
If we had to only use Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku, I'd definitely be looking to switch harnesses
A few angles to this. One is that coding just went through a massive change over the past year, that is not yet fully settled. Remember when everyone insisted on using IDEs and seeing the code with a chat sidebar? It's hard to argue you'll still be reading code a year from now. And even today, most people are still developing locally, which we're betting will shift to the cloud over the next few years.
I imagine other players will build cloud support in their own apps, but even now there's a lot of distraction for them. Everyone is trying to still support local execution, which looks really different from cloud. A lot of the labs are taking their coding-focused teams and throwing non-coding on their plates as well (the same app for non-engineers slinging google sheets).
We think getting the cloud experience right for software engineers (as well as companies, with their own hosting/development needs) is going to be really hard, and the problem needs a team fully focused on that. We also think that companies are rightly nervous about putting all their eggs in one basket -- their long term development environment should be harness and model agnostic.
RE OpenCode + self-hosted/local models: definitely. There's nothing holding us back from supporting these since we're just linux machines. But we wanted to start with the most popular harnesses first and go from there.
>It's hard to argue you'll still be reading code a year from now
groan
how can I short the we won't read code anymore bet?
Maybe I'm in the minority but I still program with an IDE and a chat window in the side at work, as well as when I work on side projects. I do like to actually see the code that is getting produced.
I have gotten into the habit of keeping the Codex app open on my laptop, and using the ChatGPT app on my phone as a remote. Maybe hosting is the way to go!