alt Hacker News> It's been funny watching my own attitude to Anthropic change, from being an enthusiastic Claude user to pure frustration.
You were enthusiastic because it was a great product at an unsustainable price.
Its clear that Claude is now harnessing their model because giving access to their full model is too expensive for the $20/m that consumers have settled on as the price point they want to pay.
I wrote a more in depth analysis here, there's probably too much to meaningfully summarize in a comment: https://sustainableviews.substack.com/p/the-era-of-models-is...
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I agree with what you what you have written, which is why I would never pay a subscription to an external AI provider.
I prefer to run inference on my own HW, with a harness that I control, so I can choose myself what compromise between speed and the quality of the results is appropriate for my needs.
When I have complete control, resulting in predictable performance, I can work more efficiently, even with slower HW and with somewhat inferior models, than when I am at the mercy of an external provider.
At my job and for personal projects I pay per token with claude and I've had no problems at all with it. No slowdowns, no "throttling", nothing.
I'm honestly surprised how many people have subscriptions and are expecting anthropic to eat the cost lol
I used the $60/mo subscription and I bet most developers get access to AI agents via their company, and there was no difference. They should have reduced the rate limits, or offered a new model, anything except silently reduce the quality of their flagship product to reduce cost.
The cost of switching is too low for them to be able to get away with the standard enshittification playbook. It takes all of 5 minutes to get a Codex subscription and it works almost exactly the same, down to using the same commands for most actions.
My bad — I had Max, so more than $20. I can’t edit the comment any more. Can’t keep track of the names. I wonder when ‘pro’ started to mean ‘lowest tier’.
But your article is interesting. You think some of the degradation is because when I think I’m using Opus they’re giving me Sonnet invisibily?
So instead of breaking shit they should have just increased their prices.
Off topic, but I really like the writing style on your blog. Do you have any advice for improving my own? In an older comment[1], you mentioned the craft of sharpening an idea to a very fine, meaningful, well-written point. Are there any books, or resources you’d recommend for honing that craft? Thanks in advance.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44082994