alt Hacker NewsEmbarrassingly, I don't have one yet. I'm mostly still writing code one keystroke at a time. I've used Github Copilot to translate between languages and look things up, but haven't trusted it to write new code or fix anything.
Claude Fable is now good enough that I should be using it. The latest Claude version is said to be comparable to a mid-career graphics programmer, which is about what I need. Six months ago it wasn't good enough to use for such work, and probably would have made a hash of my code. There's been progress.
But Anthropic's business practices are scary. They have a reputation for cancelling accounts for random reasons, offer rather bad terms, and have no customer support. I have a strong aversion to services with a reputation for cancelling services arbitrarily. They will apparently cancel based on their system's guesses as to what you're working on. Sometimes they guess wrong. What I'm doing (metaverse clients) is so far out of the mainstream they may guess wrong.
I'm currently stalled signing up for Claude because their verification email system can't get to my inbox. (Some problem with their using Constant Contact, a spam system, to send transactional emails to my own domain, which, long ago, I had blocked at the Constant Contact end. I think. The verification email never touches the inbound mail server.) It's very important to Anthropic that you sign up with the "right" email address, and it may not be possible to change it, so using some disposable address is not a good idea.
Suggestions?
Replies
You don't even need to start off with Fable. Give Opus 5.5 a try first and then then try Fable if you feel like you need to push it further
You can access Claude models through any number of providers - OpenRouter, AWS Bedrock, etc. and as far as I know, Claude Code can be used with any of them. The only real benefit to going direct through Anthropic is the subscriptions. It’s worth the risk for the discount, but if you get locked out, there’s other (pricy) options to get unblocked.
Just use a random gmail address, it works.
I would suggest that based on your current level of "trust" in these things (justifiably very low, I use zero openai or anthropic products myself) that you look into self hosting locally something reasonably capable and smart on your own hardware, on llama-server or something functionally equivalent to it. And running it in something like the opencode harness, using zero of the opencode API or online services. Qwen 3.8-flash-next will run on a lot of different hardware setups that are within the reach of normal people, or possibly deepseek v4 flash 1017, glm5.3-flash, things in that general category.
> But Anthropic's business practices are scary. They have a reputation for cancelling accounts for random reasons, offer rather bad terms, and have no customer support. I have a strong aversion to services with a reputation for cancelling services arbitrarily. They will apparently cancel based on their system's guesses as to what you're working on. Sometimes they guess wrong. What I'm doing (metaverse clients) is so far out of the mainstream they may guess wrong.
Then use open alternatives as much as possible. Something like Opencode with OpenRouter with Deepseek 4.1 from ZDR provider works very well and costs like 1/20th.