We're about to get Claude Code for work and I'm sad about it. There are more efficient ways to do the job.
OpenCode is incentivized to make a good product that uses your token budget efficiently since it allows you to seamlessly switch between different models.
Anthropic as a model provider on the other hand, is incentivized to exhaust your token budget to keep you hooked. You'll be forced to wait when your usage limits are reached, or pay up for a higher plan if you can't wait to get your fix.
CC, specifically Opus 4.5, is an incredible tool, but Anthropic is handling its distribution the way a drug dealer would.
they get to see (if not opted-out) your context, idea, source code, etc. and in return you give them $220 and they give you back "out of tokens"
It's also a way to improve performance on the things their customers care about. I'm not paying Anthropic more than I do for car insurance every month because I want to pinch ~~pennies~~ tokens, I do it because I can finally offload a ton of tedious work on Opus 4.5 without hand holding it and reviewing every line.
The subscription is already such a great value over paying by the token, they've got plenty of space to find the right balance.
I've done RL training on small local models, and there's a strong correlation between length of response and accuracy. The more they churn tokens, the better the end result gets.
I actually think that the hyper-scalers would prefer to serve shorter answers. A token generated at 1k ctx length is cheaper to serve than one at 10k context, and way way cheaper than one at 100k context.
(And once you've done that, also consider whether a given task can be achieved with a dumber model - I've had good luck switching some of my sub-agents to Haiku).
They need more training data, and with people moving on to OpenCode/Codex, they wanna extract as much data from their current users as possible.
by default?
