The reason Anthropic is pushing on the closed harness is that they're not confident with their ability to win on model quality long term, so they're trying to build lock-in. They can capture some additional telemetry owning the harness as well, but given the amount of data the agent loop already transmits, that borders on unethical spyware (which might be part of the reason they're afraid to open source).

Ultimately the market is going to force them to open up and let people flex their subs.

> Being locked into a specific harness because you pay 20 bucks per month vs. pay-per-use ... is kinda dumb.

I’ll probably get downvoted for this, but am I the only one who thinks it’s kind of wild how much anger is generated by these companies offering discounted plans for use with their tools?

At this point, there would be less anger and outrage on HN if they all just charged us the same high per-token rate and offered no discounts or flat rate plans.

Also another place where having it change out from underneath you can drastically alter the quality of your work in unexpected ways.

Like most things - assume the "20/100/200" dollar deals that are great now are going to go down the enshitification route very rapidly.

Even if the "limits" on them stay generous, the product will start shifting to prioritize things the user doesn't want.

Tool recommendations are my immediate and near term fear - paid placement for dev tools both at the model level and the harness level seem inevitable.

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The right route is open models and open harnesses, ideally on local hardware.