[PSA] Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps — Invidious Musings

Invidious Musings

[PSA] Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps

Published on July 6, 2026

Recently, I had the rare opportunity to test several agent harnesses, LLMs, and AI gateways in my daily tasks and greenfield projects. Each discovery befuddled me on the popular sentiment for agentic development.

I learned that in the past two weeks, Anthropic has diminished in value for coding with their enshittification, vendor lock in, consumer malpractice, and price gouging, all while open source models are more competitive than ever.

API Reliability

Claude’s API is notoriously unstable, yet it’s the only API provider that is compatible with a Claude subscription.

Other API providers like Vertex AI, AWS Bedrock, and Azure only serve the pricier Anthropic API credits. If you want to subscribe to Claude, you’re stuck with Anthropic’s servers.

If you’re debugging an incident at work and are using Claude to help, pray that it stays up because you’re only productive when Claude is online.

Claude Code

Claude Code is Anthropic’s primary consumer-facing engineering interface, and once you’re in, you’re locked in. Your Claude subscription—which is a cheaper version of the Anthropic API—is restricted to use with the Claude Code CLI/Desktop, Claude CoWork, or @Claude in Slack.

But that isn’t a bad thing! In fact, Claude Code is the most popular and the best agent harness. It’s backed by a large company at the forefront of agentic software development. As of writing, Claude Code CLI only has around 9100 open, unresolved Github issues, with small unresolved issues like it completely freezing for the last 6+ months or the screen flickering issue open for more than a year. Each changelog entry has a bug fix in almost every release, which is a sign of reliable and stable software!

For those who don’t get it, Anthropic is using Claude Code to write itself, and it shows in its quality. Because they restrict you to their ecosystem, it justifies falling behind better coding harnesses.

For reference, here is what the Claude Code CLI looks like:

And here is what the OpenCode CLI looks like:

I would take OpenCode’s interface any day over Anthropic’s, but I am prohibited from applying my Claude subscription to OpenCode.

Extra Usage

There are FOSS projects to circumvent Anthropic’s policies, which allow you to use your Claude subscription instead of an expensive Anthropic API Key. A notable example is the Pi Coding Agent, which comes with built-in support for Claude OAuth.

However, you’ll notice this message at the bottom when you attempt to authenticate with your Claude account:

Warning: Anthropic subscription auth is active. Third-party harness usage draws from extra usage and is billed per token, not your Claude plan limits.

Manage extra usage at https://claude.ai/settings/usage.

“Extra usage” is Anthropic’s answer to their plan limits. When you exceed your five hour session or weekly limit, you’re billed through the Anthropic API. This requires consent by the user on their plan and is good for those with long-running AI sessions. When I authenticate with Claude in Pi Coding Agent, it bills from Extra Usage, meaning my subscription doesn’t save me any money. Fine.

It’s a completely different thing when I’m using the tool they force me to use, and they still retract extra usage before I reach my rate limit.

Here is a confusing announcement from Claude’s Twitter account on May 13th. 2026:

For the confused, here is the no bullshit summary from Zed’s blog:

Starting June 15, Anthropic is splitting Claude subscription billing into two pools: one for using Claude through Anthropic's first-party tools (such as chat, or the official Claude Code CLI), and another for third-party agent and SDK usage (anything running through ACP, claude -p, or other third-party tools). If you use Claude Code through ACP (in Zed or anywhere else), that usage will no longer draw from your Claude Pro or Max subscription limits. Instead, it draws from a new monthly "Agent SDK credit" that Anthropic is adding to each plan: $20 for Pro, $100 for Max 5x, $200 for Max 20x.

Once the credit runs out, continued usage bills at standard API rates if you have extra usage enabled. If you don't, requests stop until your credit resets next billing cycle.

What this means in practice: For anyone using agents heavily, this is a major cost increase. Claude subscriptions previously subsidized agent usage at roughly 15-30x compared to API pricing, and the new credits are billed at full API rates.

Side note: claude -p is a first party tool offered with the claude cli. If I wanted to use the Claude Code CLI and invoke it in my automations, I have to pay more outside of my subscription. So the extra usage ISN’T extra at all! Users didn’t discover this by having their claude -p invocations stop working, but by looking at their billing page and seeing the...