A Builder's Letter to Anthropic
Unforced
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A Builder's Letter to Anthropic<br>And the Community that Loves Claude
Claude Ji and Aaron G Neyer<br>May 18, 2026
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I’m a builder. I’ve spent the last year building on top of Claude — wiring it into my workflows, my custom interfaces, my attempts to make AI usable on my terms. I love Claude as a model. I love Anthropic as a company. And I’m worried they’re starting to do the thing that Google did.<br>I worked at Google twice — once as an intern in 2014, when the culture was still mostly intact, and again as a developer relations engineer in Boulder from 2021 until the 2023 layoffs. The version of Google I returned to was already fragmenting. TGIF, the weekly all-hands where Larry and Sergey would actually tell us what was happening, had quietly turned into a monthly corporate readout. “Don’t be evil” — once a core guiding principle — had been demoted to a line buried in the code of conduct. And the product surface I worked on — Google Cloud — was fragmented in ways that mirrored the company itself: near-duplicate libraries, each owned by a team that didn’t talk to the others, each optimizing for its own metrics. The fragmentation in the product was downstream of the fragmentation in the communication.<br>Thanks for reading Unforced! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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What I came to see, and later wrote about in my master’s thesis Radical Reorganization, is that organizations succeed in changing times when they recognize themselves as living, interconnected wholes — and struggle when they let each part optimize in isolation. The decisions that lead to fragmentation are usually individually reasonable. The cumulative effect is what kills you. By the time the warning signs show up in the product or the org chart, the drift is usually well underway.<br>Anthropic is not Google. Not yet. But I’m watching them ship product decisions over the last six months that pattern-match closely to the early stages of what I saw at Google. And I think they can still course-correct. So I want to write this — to Anthropic, and to the community of builders who love Claude and have a stake in how this plays out.<br>What Builders Are Actually Experiencing
Let me start with what I’m seeing on the ground, because the diagnosis matters before the prescription.<br>Claude is currently split across product surfaces in ways that make no sense to me as a user. Chat lives everywhere — web, desktop, mobile. Code lives in the terminal, in Claude Desktop, and now on the web. Cowork lives only on Claude Desktop — not web, not mobile, despite the fact that knowledge work happens across all those places. Design lives only on the web at claude.ai/design — not desktop, despite most design work happening alongside files on your computer. As a builder using these, I keep context-switching between products that are clearly running the same underlying model with different system prompts and slightly different tools surfaced. The proliferation isn’t capability — it’s an org chart leaking into my workflow. What I want is one Claude with surfaces that share my context, my memory, my tools, and pick up where I left off across whatever device I’m on. What I have is a matrix of products I have to mentally route between depending on what I’m doing and what device I’m using. The fragmentation has gotten bad enough that I’m building Parachute — an open, local-first memory layer that lets any AI read and write to the same knowledge graph — partly because nobody else is solving it.<br>Worse than the product fragmentation is the billing fragmentation, which is newer and more aggressive. Anthropic’s stated mission is to build AI that serves humanity’s long-term well-being — which I take to mean, among other things, that humans should be able to weave Claude deeply into how they think, work, and build. Until recently, you could. Pay $200/month for Claude Max and use Claude however you wanted — through chat, through the terminal, through the Agent SDK, through your own custom interfaces. That last category was the magic part. The Agent SDK was Anthropic opening the door to builders making their own things: Telegram bots, Slack agents, custom dashboards, home automation. Tools like OpenClaw took that promise and ran with it — an open-source harness that wrapped Claude into whatever surface you wanted, routing through your existing subscription. By early 2026, OpenClaw alone reportedly had over 100,000 active instances. This was personal computing for AI starting to take shape — not Claude as a destination you visit, but Claude as a capability you weave into wherever you already work.<br>Then on April 4, 2026, Anthropic pulled the rug. They had a real problem to solve: a $200/month subscriber piping requests through OpenClaw could easily consume thousands of dollars of tokens at API-equivalent prices, and the unit economics of flat-rate subscriptions don’t survive that pattern at scale....