> (You can’t use your Claude subscription.)

How come?

Anthropic only authorizes their own Claude code to be used with a subsidized subscription.

They want you to use and get accustomed to only their own tools. If other coding harnesses were allowed, it's far too easy to switch providers.

They can't allow that, because they only have a few months of head start.

So everyone accepts Claude code which is required for these sweet subsidized tokens.

That is old. Every harness (herdr, paseo, pi, etc) uses claude through the Agent SDK, and this draws from your subscription, not API pricing. If you're thinking of going with the "but Anthropic could ban every user doing this", if it's good enough for Google to slap it in Android Studio for everyone to use, it's good enough for you in literally any other harness.

Google has an agreement with Anthropic for the usage inside Android Studio.

> Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login [..] for their products.

ref: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk.md

Yes there is a huge gray area. Yes people are getting away with it. That does not mean it's allowed. Anthropic could clarify their terms any day and they don't, on purpose.

Harnesses don't use claude.ai login, they use your `claude` binary.

Herdr is a harness aware terminal multiplexer, not a harness itself.

If paseo and herdr are harnesses then so are tmux and iTerm

I dont think you know what a harness is.

The Claude subscription does not include Claude API usage.

Claude behaves in Claude Code somewhat differently vs other coding harnesses (sometimes it's a remarkable improvement) connected directly via api. Also, it cost more than the subscription. There's quite a bit of baked in tooling and assumptions in Claude code that may be good for you, or unhelpful based on what you are doing.

Minor correction: the $20 Claude subscription doesn't include API usage, but the $100 and $200 subscriptions include a corresponding amount of monthly API credits.

You’d need to use Claude API pricing (pay as you go, not a subscription).

No you don't, Claude subscriptions allow headless use (either via claude -p or by wrapping the session) for personal use.

T3 does it this way.

The "for personal use" is a significant limitation and perhaps not a common use case here.

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