I hear you on vendor lock-in. Everyone's freaked out about other companies getting the upper-hand with AI in the loop, so there's this charge to use the hell out of it at all costs. Meanwhile, we're quietly picking winners and losers on the service side of all this, and we'll have to live with that outcome for a long time.
replyAt this point, I'm seriously considering what it would take to build a reasonable budget-AI box that's self-hosted. It wouldn't need to blow the doors off of Claude, just get me most of the way there. Maybe even build it out of used and/or last-gen GPUs and a beefy motherboard.
Self-hosting right now is in a weird spot. I'd say that the main benefit of the open models is not self-hosting, but having dozens of different independent providers that can host them for you. You aren't stuck with a single one.
replyFor most people, CC is cheaper tokens for a SOTA model.
replyWhat agentic platform would you recommend for those with API access (including other models)?
Basically any other that is not stuck to being managed just by one company. Claude Code does things like using CLAUDE.md and other stuff specific to just their platform, so you are basically locking your project, and everyone else who works on it, to Claude Code only, if you don't also port everything you do to other harnesses. If Anthropic is giving cheaper tokens in exchange for locking you in into their ecosystem, then maybe it's time to test other models and not just use Claude for everything.
replyIt also can respect AGENTS.md, just saying. It’s all about your README.md. But I’m with you about being agent agnostic.
replyOf course it can, it's Microsofty tactics, support everything but generate "proprietary" stuff by default. Read ODF but generate docx.
replyworks the other way as well, i have my opencode.jsonc which declares what model an agent should use, and it points at .claude/agents/ those agents each have their anthropic based model instead, almost feel like this broke in the past week though for just cc, hard to tell as cc keeps changing and i dont wanna update and learn more claude based nonsense again, if i wasn't locked into a year of pro or whatever, I would 100% be done using them entirely.
replyMost people would do fine with DeepSeek (4, Pro) and OpenCode.
replyMuch cheaper too.
The comment wasn't about CC specifically. If you rely (like, can't ship without it) on any model that you don't control, it's not really your product. If Dario decides to increase pricing 500% because it's Tuesday, and you can't work without CC, you really have no choice but to open your wallet.
replyOpen your wallet and pay someone who can? We used to call those technical cofounders, right?
replycodex is also good, has better usage limits compared to CC.
replyIssue is that CC forced corps over 150 people into a API pricing, which is, well, suboptimal compared what we get. I think it will push those towards hiring more juniors (finally).
>I think it will push those towards hiring more...
reply...H1Bs.
If you need to use an "agentic platform" I'd recommend that you get accustomed to reading and writing without one.
replyIf you can't one-shot your problem with the free LLM that Google gives you, you're jerking yourself off.
Just write it the old fashioned way.