The obvious reason is that they would prefer to have CLAUDE.md files in every repo (even if it's just a symlink to AGENTS.md). It serves as a free advertisement for them. Same reason as for auto-adding attribution text in commit messages, etc. It's the "Sent from my iPhone" of our time.
I think it's more than that. They truly believe Claude Code to be a moat (both the harness and the posttraining) to be a moat.
I've been deeply distrustful of Anthropic from early early days. They have always been openly disdainful of user feedback. I would not be surprised if later they try to implement more shenanigans to keep people locked into CC.
Claude Code is quickly becoming an anchor. Every week I marvel at how much worse it gets, how much more essential information is hidden and replaced with bloated useless TUI and rambling tangential responses that hide the useful bits of info behind jargon invented by the agent without ever explaining it to the user.
It's like the PMs for Claude Code are reward hacking their own reinforcement learning.
I have been happy with Claude Code lately, but I haven't explored other options much in over a year. Curious to try something else out if it's less rambling and tangential.
This is not necessarily a problem with the harness (IE, swapping from Claude Code wouldn't necessarily fix this).
If what you're looking to avoid is specifically 'rambling and tangential', you can get quite far with anything that adds directives to avoid those things, early in every context window. Ie, through use of Agents.md/claude.md, skills, hooks, and so on.
Changing model would also affect this. Fable 5, Opus 5, and Sonnet 5 are all going to average out to different levels of ramble. Openai, Xai, Google, etc; different providers models will also have different levels of ramble.
What Claude Code does take away from you is some level of control over what makes it into the context window. The system prompt which claude code append to the beginning of every session of course has measurable ramble-affect.
I quite like the Pi harness, most in part because important goal with the approach behind it is "give the user as much control over what makes it into the cotext window as possible."
Codex TUI is also good. Haven't touched it since moving to Pi however. Again- harness isnt the big "stop rambling" thing to change, tho.
Yeah, exactly, the thinking process of the latest Claude models have really mucked up the responses they show to users, presumably to game benchmarks or something. My agents are constantly referring to things that happened behind the scenes, either in thinking or with subagents, as if I had full visibility into every aspect of everything they saw. But with Claude Code, everything is hidden.
I've taken to looking through the jsonl of sessions rather than trying to get Claude Code to explain what it means, and have better success about 50% of the time.
Older models work better, IMHO, and one can configure Claude Code to use any model that supports Anthropic Messages format, or a translator to other models, but the TUI itself is something I'm also straining against, and prefer Pi usually.
Anthropic's moat is actually workplace environments that are serving the opposing goals of 1) executive demands to use AI, and 2) legal demands to keep all company data on lockdown. In that environment, employees can get locked into whatever the approved AI methods are, and Anthropic excels in navigating that.
The sub only works in Claude Code itself (unless they changed that rule again?), and all the Chinese models are trained on Claude Code (a bunch of them don't even work in Codex).
I use a custom harness, but I constantly hear good things about Pi.
EDIT: Checked out Pi and Oh-My-Pi. 250k LoC and 1.5M LoC respectively. Sheesh. How's that for minimalism...
Vendored in my own LLM micro library (100 LoC) so it's 150.[0]
There's no parallelism or anything, but I use it for surgical edits and it's much faster and cheaper than the official harnesses for some reason. (Absence of sysprompt bigger than my repo probably helps there...)
[0] This one uses OpenRouter so you can use it with any model, but jerry rigged Codex sub version available on demand :)
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I also have a ultra turbo bloated version (500 lines... need to strip it down a bit!) which has autorun files (for grep-based context injection), notification (frog croak when agent done, etc.) Watch this space!
Shoot, yes. The user experience of logging in is the same, but yes- using a different (non-cc) harness bumps you up to the pay-per-token rates.
However! I have seen projects which use CC under the hood, in order to get the subsidized rates.
Writing comments which get me to go look through anthropic documentation, and find friction I wasnt aware of (CC does not have an app-server), refreshes my frustration towards anthropic.
Doing the whole “pay per token rate” when logging into a harness not made by them is not only being enforced by anthropic/claude though. It also is what Google does with agy (their TUI).
Is there any provider that doesn’t do this? That’s the one I want to support.
> TLDR: they are all probably doing it because they are banking on you not using all your tokens.
I would be surprised though, it makes business sense to make the default vendor native TUI cheaper because it’s understood that most nascent users will just use the harness offered by the LLM provider and those that would stray off that would probably be more power users who would spend their token share more consistently till it drains.
OpenAI allows you to use the subsidized limits outside of their products. I don't think they clearly "tell" the world that this is the case, but they do put out a product surface that- I dont think they would, if they didnt allow this usage.
Pi with Claude is better than Claude code in my experience. But I even use old GLM5.2 with pi and generally have a better experience than current Claude Code. It reminds me of peak productivity with Claude Code of 5+ months ago.
New guidelines that I have seen in a certain place is to configure and update existing CC setups to be CC/Codex agnostic. Plus setting up both allows Claude Code to delegate tasks [1] to Codex to reduce usage.
Oh my god, that's an official plugin. That's hilarious. I had the same idea last year, when I noticed how much cheaper GPT was for the same tasks, but Claude was still better as a high level "operator".
Also cause OpenAI was cool with you calling their sub in an automated way, but Anthropic very much was not (they were banning people at the time).
yeh i tried pi, as a neovim user i naturally like customizability, but with how little i use agents, i want something that just works, which opencode does for me.
I use it in a very basic way on the $20 plan and the code it produces seems alright (for the parts I care about) but I increasingly can't stand the way it "talks". I may actually change to something else entirely for this reason.
>auto-adding attribution text in commit messages what about this? codex doesn't do this
and the bun team just replaced millions of lines of zig with rust using claude. For this you might not even need AI at all.
