alt Hacker NewsI've found myself so deeply embedded in the Claude Max subscription that I'm worried about potentially makign a switch. How are people making sure they stay nimble enough not to get trarpped by one company's ecosystem over another? For what it's worth, Opus 4.7 has not been a step up and it's come with an enormously higher usage of the subscription Anthropic offers making the entire offering double worse.
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I have a directory of skills that I symlink to Codex/Claude/pi. I make scripts that correspond with them to do any heavy lifting, I avoid platform specific features like Claude's hooks. I also symlink/share a user AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md
MCPs aren't as smooth, but I just set them up in each environment.
Anecdotally, I get the same wall time with my Max x5 (100$) and my ChatGPT Teams (30$) subscriptions.
It's surprisingly simple to switch. I mean both products offer basically identical coding CLI experiences. Personally I've been paying for Claude max $100, and ChatGPT $20, and then just using ChatGPT to fill in the gaps. Specifically I like it for code review and when Claude is down.
I use Open Code as my harness. It's open source, bring your own API Key or OAuth token or self-hosted model. I've jumped from Opus 4.6 to Opus 4.7 to GPT 5.5 in the last 7 days. No big deal, intelligence is just a commodity in 2026.
The actual harness is great, very hackable, very extendable.
I use pi.dev.
I get openai team plan at work.
Claude enterprise too.
I have openrouter for myself.
I use minimax 2.7. Kimi 2.6. And gpt 5.5 and opus 4.7. I can toggle between them in an open source interface that's how I stay able to not be trapped.
Minimax is so cheap and for personal stuff it works fine. So I'm always toggling between the nre releases
What is the switching cost besides launching a different program? Don’t you just need to type what you want into the box?
Small tip, at least for now you can switch back to Opus 4.6, both in the ui and in Claude Code.
This might be the opposite of staying nimble as my workflows are quite tied to Claude Code specifically, however I've been experimenting with using OpenAI models in CC and it works surprisingly well.
I use Conductor which lets me flip trivially between OpenAI/Anthropic models
It’s good to just keep trying different ones from time to time.
Except for history, I don’t find much that stops you from switching back and forth on the CLI. They both use tools, each has a different voice, but they both work. Have it summarize your existing history into a markdown file, and read it in with any engine.
The APIs are pretty interchangeable too. Just ask to convert from one to the other if you need to.
As a rule I've been symlinking or referencing generic "agents" versions of claude workflow files instead of placing those files directly in claude's purview
AGENTS.md / skills / etc
use copilot and have access to all models
Coding models are effectively free. They are capable of making money and supporting themselves given access to the right set of things. That is what I do
I switched a couple of weeks ago just to see how it went. Codex is no better or worse. They’re both noticeably better at different things. I burn through my tokens much much faster on Codex though. For what it’s worth I’m sticking with Codex for now. It seems to be significantly better at UI work although has some really frustrating bad habits (like loading your UI with annoying copywriting no sane person would ever do).
Start building your own liteweight "harness" that does things you need. Ignore all functionality of clients like CC or Codex and just implement whatever you start missing in your harness.
You can replace pretty much everything - skills system, subagents, etc with just tmux and a simple cli tool that the official clients can call.
Oh and definitely disable any form of "memory" system.
Essentially, treat all tooling that wraps the models as dumb gateways to inference. Then provider switch is basically a one line config change.