FWIW, I just heard this guy (Head of Growth) on Lenny's podcast a few days ago and one of the things he explicitly mentioned was creating intentional friction for growth. This seems to be one of those tests.

Do they have a substantial userbase for this outside of claude code? The only two use cases for LLMs that seem to have significant traction are programming, and erotic roleplay lol. If they stop catering to devs, who is their market?

That would be a fantastic way to kill the majority of engagement with the community of users. There are very few who can afford that.