Claude Code Routines

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/routines

by matthieu_bl • 3 months ago

720 413 3 months ago

code.claude.com

minimaxir4• 3 months ago

Given the alleged recent extreme reduction in Claude Code usage limits (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739260), how do these more autonomous tools work within that constraint? Are they effectively only usable with a 20x Max plan?

EDIT: This comment is apparently [dead] and idk why.

breakingcups• 3 months ago

You seem to be vouched for now, no longer dead for me.

minimaxir4• 3 months ago

Hmm, I can't edit the original comment to retract that edit either. Either my account is flagged for something or HN is being weird.

giancarlostoro2• 3 months ago

I've been talking to friends about this extensively, and read all sorts of different social media posts on X where people deep dove things (I'm at work so I don't have any links handy - though I did submit one on HN, grain of salt, unsure how valid it is but it was interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47752049 ).

I think the real issue stems from the 1 Million token context window change. They did not anticipate the amount of load it would give you. That first few days after they released the new token window, I was making amazing things in one single session from nothing, to something (a new .NET based programming language inspired by Python, and a Virtual Actor framework in Rust). I think since then they've been trying too many things to tweak things, whilst irritating their users.

They even added a new "Max" thinking mode, and made "High" the old medium, which is ridiculous because you think you're using "High" but really you're not. There's a hidden config file to change their terrible defaults to let Claude be smarter still, and apparently you can toggle off the 1M tokens.

I think the real fix, and I'm surprised nobody there has done this yet, is to let the user trim down their context window.

Think about it, you used to have what? 350k tokens or so? Now Claude will keep sending your prompt from 30 minutes ago that's completely irrelevant to the back-end, whereas 3 months ago it would have been compacted by now.

Others have noted that similar prompting for some ungodly reason adds tens of thousands of extra garbage tokens (not sure why).

Edit looks like someone figured out that if you downgrade your version of Claude Code and change one single setting it unruins Claude:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769879

dacox• 3 months ago

Yeah, I have been seeing lots of comments, tweets, etc, but given everything I have learned about these models - i do not think the change to 1M was innocuous. I'm not sure what they've claimed publicly, but I'm fairly certain they must be doing additional quantization, or at minimum additional quantization of the KV cache. Plus, sequence length can change things even when not fully utilized. I had to manually re-enable the "clear context and continue" feature as well.

SkyPuncher• 3 months ago

Yea, I've realized that if I stay under 200k tokens I basically don't have usage issues any more.

A bit annoying, but not the end of the world.

dgb23• 3 months ago

The future of harnesses cannot be „resend the whole history on every step“ or whatever this terrible compaction is.

Most of the context is unstructured fluff, much of it is distracting or even plain wrong. Especially the „thinking“ tokens are often completely disjoint halucinations that don’t make any sense.

I think what will have to happen is that context looks less like a long chat and action log and more like a structured, short, schema validated state description, plus a short log trace that only grows until a checkpoint is reached, which produces a new state.

imhoguy2• 3 months ago

AI race to the bottom is a debt game now. Once the party is over somebody will have to pay the bill.

timacles2• 3 months ago

It’s going to be crazy with the explanation they come up with why the us public has to pay to bail out AI for national security.

In a way, it’s true if china has superior AI then it’s dominance over US will materialize. But it’s not hard to see how this scenario is being used to essential lie and scam into trillions of debt.

Its interesting how the cutthroat space of big tech has manifested into an incidious hyper capitalist system where disrupting a system is it’s primary function. The system in this case is world order and western governments

stavros6• 3 months ago

It's not alleged: https://www.ghacks.net/2026/03/27/anthropic-reduces-claude-s...

minimaxir4• 3 months ago

That's a separate change to what the linked HN post described.

matthieu_bl• 3 months ago

Blog post https://claude.com/blog/introducing-routines-in-claude-code

bpodgursky2• 3 months ago

OpenClawd had about a two week moat...

Feature delivery rate by Anthropic is basically a fast takeoff in miniature. Pushing out multiple features each week that used to take enterprises quarters to deliver.

nightpool• 3 months ago

Do you mean a 3 months moat? Moltbot started going viral in January. That seems to be about a quarter to deliver to me : )

whalesalad• 3 months ago

Hard to wanna go all-in on the Anthropic ecosystem with how inconsistent model output from their top-tier has been recently. I pay $$$ for api-level opus 4.6 to avoid any low-tier binning or throttling or subversive "its peak rn so we're gonna serve up sonnet in place of opus for the next few hours" but I still find that the quality has been really hit or miss lately.

The bell curve up and then back down has been so jarring that I am pivoting to fully diversifying my use of all models to ensure that no one org has me by the horns.

bpodgursky2• 3 months ago

yeah i mean nobody uses Claude anymore, the utilization is too high

slopinthebag6• 3 months ago

You're delusional if you think these features would take competent programmers quarters to deliver.

unshavedyak4• 3 months ago

Maybe they were accounting for huge layers of red tape in large orgs. God knows those are far slower than "competent programmers" lol

buster• 3 months ago

He said "enterprises" not "competent programmers".

dbbk2• 3 months ago

And yet none of them work properly and are unstable.

renticulous• 3 months ago

Anthropic is trying to be AI version of AWS.

twoodfin• 3 months ago

That is a really tough business if you can't match AWS' efficiency & reliability at scale. Presumably AWS also wants to be the AI version of AWS.

(Amazon + Anthropic does seem like a much more compelling enterprise collaboration / acquisition than Microsoft + OpenAI ever did.)

jcims2• 3 months ago

Feature delivery rate by Anthropic is basically a fast takeoff in miniature.

I like to just check the release notes from time to time:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/releases

and the equally frenetic openclaw:

https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/releases

GPT-4.1 was released a year ago today. Sonnet 4 is ~11 months old. The claude-code cli was released last Feb. Gas Town is 3 months old.

This is a chart that simply counts the bullet points in the release notes of claude code since inception:

https://imgur.com/a/tky9Pkz

This is as bad and as slow as it's going to be.

irthomasthomas2• 3 months ago

The velocity of shipping is wild. Though I cannot recall a novel feature they shipped first. Can you?

summarity• 3 months ago

If you’re trying this for automating things on GitHub, also take a look at Agentic Workflows: https://github.github.com/gh-aw/

They support much of the same triggers and come with many additional security controls out of the box

gavinray• 3 months ago

Why have I not heard of this? Was looking for a way to integrate LLM CLI's to do automated feature development + PR submission triggered by Github issues, seems like this would solve it.

eranation4• 3 months ago

Built in Co-Pilot I believe can do this better than gh-aw (or a click away).

Cursor has that too by the way (issue -> remote coding session -> PR -> update slack)

deadfall23• 3 months ago

Why not https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code-action?

eranation4• 3 months ago

+1 for that, having that said, because GH agentic workflows require a bit more handholding and testing to work, (and have way more guardrails, which is great, but limiting), and lack some basic connectors (for example - last time I tried it, it had no easy slack connector, I had to do it on my own). This is why I'm moving some of the less critical gh-aw (all the read only ones) to Claude Routines.

ctoth2• 3 months ago

You'd think that if they were compute-limited ... Trying to get people to use it less ... The rational thing to do would be to not ship features that will use more compute automatedly? Or does this use extra usage?

whicks• 3 months ago

I would imagine that this sort of scheduling allows them to have more predictable loads, and they may be hoping that people will schedule some of their tasks in “off hours” to reduce daytime load.

ctoth2• 3 months ago

I thought about that but I'm pretty sure that if the backlog is automatically clean and I don't need to run my skill for that when I start up in the morning that just means I can do the next task I would have done which will probably use Claude Code.

Your own, personal, Jevons.

andai3• 3 months ago

It also beats OC's heartbeat where it auto-runs every 30 minutes and runs a bunch of prompts to see if it actually needed to run or not.

pletnes• 3 months ago

Also you can schedule it a bit off. Every hour? Delay it a few seconds. Can’t do that with a chat message. Also, batch up a bunch of them, maybe save some compute that way? Latency is not an issue.

iBelieve• 3 months ago

Max accounts get 15 daily runs included, any runs above that will get billed as extra usage.

dockerd• 3 months ago

It's how they can lock more users into their eco-system.

AlexCoventry• 3 months ago

I don't think "usage" is exactly the metric they're going for, more like "usage in line with our developmental strategy." Transcripts of people using Claude to write code are probably far more valuable to them than transcripts of OpenClaw trying to set up a calendar invite.

fgkramer• 3 months ago

I mean, they don’t train on your data unless you have the setting enabled. Do you really think they are reading your prompts at all? Free inference providers sure, but Anthropic?

dpark2• 3 months ago

They are more worried about building a moat than anything else. They want people building integrations that are difficult to undo so that they lock into the platform.

lostmsu• 3 months ago

They want people building integrations that are difficult to undo so that they lock into the platform.

Ironically, they are now playing against their own models that can relatively easily build wrappers around any API shape into any other API shape.

stavros6• 3 months ago

So basically what happened:

1. Anthropic realized their models weren't enough of a moat.

2. They built tools so they could expand their moat.

3. People don't want to use their tools, they want their models, and use other, better tools.

4. Anthropic bans the use of better tools, taking advantage of their model superiority to try to lock people into subpar tools.

"I don't have enough of a moat so I'll use my little moat and pretend it's a big one" doesn't sound like a great strategy. All they're doing with this anticonsumer behaviour is making sure that I'll leave the moment another model works for me as well as Claude does.

dyauspitr2• 3 months ago

The rational thing to do would be to build more data centers. Use that huge influx of money on infrastructure. Make tokens dirt cheap.

vessenes2• 3 months ago

This is one of the best features of OpenClaw - makes sense to swipe it into Claude Code directly. I wonder if Anthropic wants to just make claude a full stand-in replacement for openclaw, or just chip away at what they think the best features are, now that oAI has acquired.

mkw5053• 3 months ago

What are some of the best use cases you've found? I have some gh actions set up to call claude code, but those have already been possible.

vessenes2• 3 months ago

Well, every time a calendar invite is accepted, it sets up a cron job to check in fifteen minutes before the meeting, and text me the zoom link, for instance. Once setting the cron job itself is free, you could think of a lot of use cases.

ale• 3 months ago

So MCP servers all over again? I mean at the end of the day this is yet another way of injecting data into a prompt that’s fed to a model and returned back to you.

airstrike• 3 months ago

Still no moat.

The reason someone would use this vs. third-party alternatives is still the fact that the $200/mo subscription is markedly cheaper than per-token API billing.

Not sure how this works out in the long term when switching costs are virtually zero.

petesergeant• 3 months ago

I think at this point the aim is less about moat, and more about getting an advantage that self-sustains: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4444-1.html

TacticalCoder2• 3 months ago

Not sure how this works out in the long term when switching costs are virtually zero.

All these not really helpful, but vendor specific, "bonuses" sounds like a way to try to lock people in, to try to raise the switching cost.

I'm using, on purpose, a simple process so that at any time I can switch AI provider.

netdur• 3 months ago

didn’t we have several antitrust cases where a vendor used its monopoly to disadvantage rivals? did not anthropic block openclaw?

andai3• 3 months ago

It's not blocked, you just can't use the Claude-only subscription endpoint with unauthorized 3rd party software. (You can use it via the regular API (7x more expensive) and pay per token just fine.)

...Except now you sorta-kinda can: now they auto-detect 3rd party stuff and bill you per-token for it?

If I'm reading it right:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633568

dmix• 3 months ago

How is Anthropic a monopoly? The market is barely even fully developed and has multiple large and small competitors

Someone1234• 3 months ago

They did not.

You can still use OpenClaw on their API pricing tier as much as you want. What they did is not allow subscriptions to be used to power automated third-party workloads, including OpenClaw.

Now, is their messaging around this confusing? Absolutely. The whole thing has been handled shambolically. Everyone knows that they lack the compute to keep up, and likely have lower margins on subscriptions than API; but they cannot just say that because investors may be skittish.

nico• 3 months ago

Nice, could this enable n8n-style workflows that run fully automatically then?

outofpaper• 3 months ago

Yes but much less efficiently. Having LLMs handle automation is like using a steam engine to heat your bath water. It will work most of the time but it's super inefficient and not really designed for that use and it can go horribly wrong from time to time.

meetingthrower2• 3 months ago

Correct. But the llm can also program you the exact automation you want! Much more efficiently than gui madness with N8N. And if you want observability just program that too!

meetingthrower2• 3 months ago

Already very possible and super easy if you do a little vibecoding. Although it will hit the api. Have a stack polling my email every five minutes, classifying email, taking action based on the types. 30 minute coding session.

andai3• 3 months ago

I'm a little confused on the ToS here. From what I gathered, running `claude -p <prompt>` on cron is fine, but putting it in my Telegram bot is a ToS violation (unless I use per-token billing) because it's a 3rd party harness, right? (`claude -p` being a trivial workaround for the "no 3rd party stuff on the subscription" rule)

This Routines feature notably works with the subscription, and it also has API callbacks. So if my Telegram bot calls that API... do I get my Anthropic account nuked or not?

unshavedyak4• 3 months ago

Wait we can't use claude -p around other tools? What is the point of the JSON SDK then? Anthropic is confusing here, ugh.

edit: And specifically i'm making an IDE, and trying to get ClaudeCode into it. I frankly have no clue when Claude usage is simply part of an IDE and "okay" and when it becomes a third party harness..

grafmax• 3 months ago

They’re shooting themselves in the foot with these dumb restrictions.

hmokiguess• 3 months ago

Wouldn't ACP be better for an IDE? https://agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/introduction

cortesoft3• 3 months ago

I was pretty sure that claude -p would always be fine, but I looked at the TOS and it is a bit unclear.

It says in the prohibited use section:

Except when you are accessing our Services via an Anthropic API Key or where we otherwise explicitly permit it, to access the Services through automated or non-human means, whether through a bot, script, or otherwise.

So it seems like using a harness or your own tools to call claude -p is fine, AS LONG AS A HUMAN TRIGGERS IT. They don’t want you using the subscription to automate things calling claude -p… unless you do it through their automation tools I guess? But what if you use their automation tool to call your harness that calls claude -p? I don’t actually know. Does it matter if your tool loops to call claude -p? Or if your automation just makes repeated calls to a routine that uses your harness to make one claude -p call?

It is not nearly as clear as I thought 10 minutes ago.

Edit: Well, I was just checking my usage page and noticed the new 'Daily included routine runs' section, where it says you get 15 free routine runs with your subscription (at least with my max one), and then it switches to extra usage after that. So I guess that answers some of the questions... by using their routine functionality they are able to limit your automation potential (at least somewhat) in terms of maxing out your subscription usage.

joshstrange4• 3 months ago

Anthropic deserves to have this as the top comment on every HN post. It's absurd that they don't clarify this better and so many people are running around online saying the exact opposite from what their, confusing, docs say.

The Chilling Effect of this is real and it gets more and more frustrating that they can't or won't clarify.

throwup2382• 3 months ago

It’s also absurd that they’re doing their communication on a bunch of separate platforms like HN, Reddit, and Github with no coherent strategy or consistency as far as I can tell. Can’t I just get policy clarifications in my email like a normal business?

I downgraded my $200/mo sub to $20 this past week and I’m going to try out Codex’s Pro plans. Between the cache TTL (does it even affect me? No idea), changes in the rate limit, 429 rate limit HTTP status code during business hours, adaptive thinking (literally the worst decision they’ve ever made, as far as my line of work is concerned), dumb agent behavior silently creating batshit insane fallthroughs, clearly vibe coded harness/infrastructure, and their total lack of transparency, I think I’m done. It was fun while it lasted but I’m tired of paying for their mistakes in capacity planning and I feel like the big rug pull (from all three SOTA providers) is coming like a freight train.

NewsaHackO• 3 months ago

But it is pretty clear in their documentation. You just don't want to see it because it isn't the answer you want. The documentation clearly says that you cannot use 'claude -p' as part of a pipeline to call other tools. All tool calls have to be made by Claude Code itself. If the output of the Telegram bot is used as a proxy to call other tools, then no, it is not allowed.

wild_egg• 3 months ago

I hate the feeling of playing roulette with my account every time I use their tools.

Since they refuse to actually provide definitive rules or policies, I have fully moved off their models and actively encourage all the other devs I know to do the same.

stephbook• 3 months ago

The ambiguity is intentional. Like Microsoft not banning volume licenses. They want to scare you, so you don't max out your subscription – which they sell at a loss.

Another comparison would be "unlimited storage", where "unlimited" means some people will abuse it and the company will soon limit the "unlimited."

pixel_popping• 3 months ago

Literally yeah, the ambiguity is just so they can boycott anytime they want, people underestimate Anthropic too much, obviously they have insane amount of scrappers, bots... no comments online is made without their awareness and analyzed by a bunch of agents that then do prediction and for sure so much more. They know exactly what they are doing.

causal5• 3 months ago

Yeah in the span of a month or so we had:

- SDK that allows you to use OAuth authentication!

- Docs updated to say DO NOT USE OAUTH authentication unless authorized! [0]

- Anthropic employee Tweeting "That's not what we meant! It's fine for personal use!" [1]

- An email sent out to everyone saying it's NOT fine do NOT use it [2]

Sigh.

[0] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview#get-start...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1r8et0d/update_fr...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633396

mrgill• 3 months ago

Don't use claude -p in any kind of harness at all. I used it ONCE in a local custom made one, and got my account nuked. No help from them at all. Appealed, and the appeal was denied. I had been a Max subscriber since day 1 and Claude subscriber since day 1 in 2023. They don't care.

causal5• 3 months ago

It's like they oversold capacity and are looking for excuses to get rid of users lol

Opus is fine but it's not THAT much better than the alternatives. I want to support Anthropic because they seem "less shady" than OpenAI but they sure seem determined to push people away.

imdsm• 3 months ago

What if claude triggers claude? Is claude automated or non-human?

So if claude decides to trigger claude -p then claude violates the ToS on your behalf and you get your account nuked?

causal5• 3 months ago

Claude sets an environment variable to prevent nested invocation, but I've found it can be unset. No idea if they consider that a violation of the secret laws though.

mellosouls• 3 months ago

Put Claude Code on autopilot. Define routines that run on a schedule, trigger on API calls, or react to GitHub events...

We ought to come up with a term for this new discipline, eg "software engineering" or "programming"

avaer• 3 months ago

Setting up your agent. This part doesn't deserve a name; there is no programming or engineering or really much thinking involved.

baq2• 3 months ago

Does ‘vibe coding’ work?

jnpnj• 3 months ago

gramming

realo• 3 months ago

Ah! Totally... We have:

airgramming plusgramming programming maxgramming studiogramming

and recently the brand new way of working: Neogramming !

Personally I stick for now with the "Programming " tier. Maybe will upgrade to "Maxgramming" later this year...

raincole• 3 months ago

Sounds more like openclawing.

oxag3n2• 3 months ago

It's "promptramming".

schlesimeister3• 3 months ago

Software Stewarding

watermelon0• 3 months ago

Seems like it only supports x86_64. It would be nice if they offered a way to bring your own compute, to be able to work on projects targeting arm64.

crooked-v• 3 months ago

The obvious functionality that seems to be missing here is any way to organize and control these at an organization rather than individual level.

varispeed3• 3 months ago

Why would you use it if you don't know whether the model will be nerfed at that run?

desireco42• 3 months ago

I think they are using Claude to come up with these and they will bringing one every second day... In fact, this is probably routine they set.

consumer4512• 3 months ago

meta:

Sorry, but I just have to ask. Why is u/minimaxir's comment dead? Is this somehow an error, an attack, or what?

This is a respected user, with a sane question, no?

I vouched, but not enough.

edit: His comment has arisen now. Leaving this up for reference.

irthomasthomas2• 3 months ago

We live in strange times!

theodorewiles• 3 months ago

How does this deal with stop hooks? Can it run https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

Eldodi• 3 months ago

Anthropic is really good at releasing features that are almost the same but not exactly the same as other features they released the week before

dymk• 3 months ago

7 days is long enough for work to leave the context window, hence…

tclancy• 3 months ago

And or things I’ve spent a bunch of time building already. And naming them the same. I should have trademarked “dispatch”!

dbish• 3 months ago

you're telling me dispatchagents.ai :) (open to new names if anyone has cool ones, didn't expect anthropic to start using dispatch with their agents, naming is way too hard)

spelunker• 3 months ago

In the Desktop app, click New task and choose New remote task; choosing New local task instead creates a local Desktop scheduled task, which runs on your machine and is not a routine.

Oh uh... ok then.

masto• 3 months ago

So management can cancel all of last week’s projects when they told us all we had to be using skills because the CEO read about them in the in flight magazine. Routines are the future, baby. DevOps already made a big announcement that they’re centralizing the Routines Hub. If you can’t keep up, we’ll get someone who says they can.

titzer• 3 months ago

Just wait until they get into the phase where they're big enough that they're eating all the baby startups and have to pick winners and losers amongst the myriad of overlapping features while also having the previous baby startups they acquired crank out new features.

We're watching a speed run of growthism, folks.

foruhar• 3 months ago

That's a fairly decent defintion of vibecoding across multiple sessions.

subscribed• 3 months ago

Just wait for the new wave of github issues about things they silently broke or degraded.

Progress, I guess :)

(I had the most hilariously bad session with Sonnet 4.6 today. I asked it a reasonably simple question and linked to resources, it refused to fetch the resources, didn't ask for pdf/txt I could provide, and confidently printed absolute BS, barely in the same category but completely unrelated.

I called it off pointing the idiocy, asked if it wants more data, and requested the hallucination be fixed.

It apologised profusely and hallucinated even worse.

Maybe I'll try Opus 4.6 tomorrow because frankly Gemma-4-E4B was more coherent than that....

segmondy• 3 months ago

They are mass copying any idea they see out there. They are not happy enough being a platform, they want to be everything. Their dream is to be the one AI that eats it all. It's so stupid that folks are using their system. I will never get on board with a platform that competes with me or try to compete with me. They are the Microsoft of AI model providers.

pants2• 3 months ago

Clearly they have a weekly automation to take the backlog of feature requests and build a new feature!

ZitchDog• 3 months ago

This is the new challenge. Every vibecoder is larping as a SWE and rewriting systems left and right when all they need is a new feature or two. 6000 line PRs that could be 60. The challenge in the current era is evolving existing systems to ensure they meet previous requirements in terms of capabilities and performance. This is the new role of the SWE. Same as the old role, but with less typing.

eranation4• 3 months ago

I've been using it for a while (it was just called "Scheduled", so I assume this is an attempt to rebrand it?)

It was a bit buggy, but it seems to work better now. Some use cases that worked for me:

1. Go over a slack channel used for feedback for an internal tool, triage, open issues, fix obvious ones, reply with the PR link. Some devs liked it, some freaked out. I kept it.

2. Surprisingly non code related - give me a daily rundown (GitHub activity, slack messages, emails) - tried it with non Claude Code scheduled tasks (CoWork) not as good, as it seems the GitHub connector only works in Claude Code. Really good correlation between threads that start on slack, related to email (outlook), or even my personal gmail.

I can share the markdowns if anyone is interested, but it's pretty basic.

Very useful, (when it works).

FrenchTouch42• 3 months ago

I'd be curious to take a look if you can share

wazHFsRy• 3 months ago

Same here it just feels like something so simple, I’d rather have it under my own control. That way I can keep it independent of claude as well. I use it for all kind of routine tasks like updating the summary of projects I am working on or tracking some personal activities. My setup looks like this: https://www.dev-log.me/click_recurring_tasks_for_claude/

joshstrange4• 3 months ago

LLMs and LLM providers are massive black boxes. I get a lot of value from them and so I can put up with that to a certain extent, but these new "products"/features that Anthropic are shipping are very unappealing to me. Not because I can't see a use-case for them, but because I have 0 trust in them:

- No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the feature

- No trust they won't sunset the feature (the graveyard of LLM-features is vast and growing quickly while they throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks)

- No trust in the company long-term. Both in them being around at all and them not rug-pulling. I don't want to build on their "platform". I'll use their harness and their models but I don't want more lock-in than that.

If Anthropic goes "bad" I want to pick up and move to another harness and/or model with minimal fuss. Buying in to things like this would make that much harder.

I'm not going to build my business or my development flows on things I can't replicate myself. Also, I imagine debugging any of this would be maddening. The value add is just not there IMHO.

EDIT: Put another way, LLM companies are trying to climb the ladder to be a platform, I have zero interest in that, I was a "dumb pipe", I want a commodity, I want a provider, not a platform. Claude Code is as far into the dragon's lair that I want to venture and I'm only okay with that because I know I can jump to OpenCode/Codex/etc if/when Anthropic "goes bad".

chinathrow2• 3 months ago

Yeah so better to convert tokens into sw doing the job at close to zero costs running on own systems.

verdverm3• 3 months ago

I fully endorse building a custom stack (1) because you will learn a lot (2) for full control and not having Big Ai define our UX/DX for this technology. Let's learn from history this time around?

gritspants• 3 months ago

Here's the problem I keep running into with AI and 'history'. We all know where this is going. We'll pick our winners and losers in the interim, but so far, this is a technology that mostly impacts tech practitioners. Most people don't care, in the sense that you're a taxi driver. Perhaps you have a manual transmission and the odd person comments on your prowess with it. No one cares. I see a bunch of boys making fools out of themselves otherwise.

palata• 3 months ago

- No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the feature

I actually trust that they will.

gardenhedge• 3 months ago

Yeah, I build my workflows with two things in mind:

1) that AI will be more advanced in the future

2) that the AI I am using will be worse in the future

dvfjsdhgfv• 3 months ago

I believe the current game everybody plays is:

* make sure the model maxes out all benchmarks

* release it

* after some time, nerf it

* repeat the same with the next model

However, the net sum is positive: in general, models from 2026 are better than those from 2024.

cush• 3 months ago

You could so easily build your own /schedule. This is hardly a feature driving lock-in

ElFitz6• 3 months ago

Yes, but once everything has been deployed through their web UI or the cli command, and fine-tuned over the weeks and months as kinks get ironed out, how do you port it all to your own?

Nothing insurmontable or even complex; just laborious. Friction. That’s all it takes to lock users in.

mikepurvis• 3 months ago

I want to pick up and move to another harness and/or model with minimal fuss. Buying in to things like this would make that much harder.

Yes, I expect that is very much the point here. A bunch of product guys got on a whiteboard and said, okay the thing is in wide use but the main moat is that our competitors are even more distrusted in the market than we are; other than that it's completely undifferentiated and can be swapped out in a heartbeat for multiple other offerings. How do we do we persuade our investors we have a locked in customer base that won't just up-stakes in favour of other options or just running open source models themselves?

throwup2382• 3 months ago

I think they really knee capped themselves when they released Claude for Github integrations, which allows anyone to use their Claude subscription to run Claude Code in Github actions for code reviews and arbitrary prompts. Now they’re trying to back track that with a cloud solution.

sunnybeetroot• 3 months ago

Isn’t that what LangChain/LangGraph is meant to solve? Write workflows/graphs and host them anywhere?

tiku• 3 months ago

I believe it doesn't matter, other companies will copy or improve it. The same happend with clawdbot, the amount of clones in a month was insane.

ahmadyan• 3 months ago

I'm not going to build my business or my development flows on things I can't replicate myself.

but you can replicate these yourself! i'm happy that ant/oai are experimenting to find pmf for "llm for dev-tools". After they figure out the proper stickyness, (or if they go away or nerf or raise prices, etc) you can always take the off-ramp and implement your own llm/agent using the existing open-source models. The cost of building dev-tools is near zero. it is not like codegen where you need the frontier performance.

JohnMakin4• 3 months ago

This is a similar sentiment I heard early on in the cloud adoption fever, many companies hedged by being “multi cloud” which ended up mostly being abandoned due to hostile patterns by cloud providers, and a lot of cost. Ultimately it didn’t really end up mattering and the most dire predictions of vendor lock in abuse didn’t really happen as feared (I know people will disagree with this, but specifically speaking about aws, the predictions vs what actually happened is a massive gap. note I have never and will never use azure, so I could be wrong on that particular one).

I see people making similar conclusions about various LLM providers. I suspect in the end it’ll shake out about the same way, the providers will become practically inoperable with each other either due to inconvenience, cost, or whatever. So I’ve not wasted much of my time thinking about it.

robwwilliams2• 3 months ago

There are different level of who gets locked in. Almost every health care system in the USA is locked in to either an Epic/Oracle barrel or a Cerner barrel. I hope AI breaks this duopoly open soon.

michaeldwan2• 3 months ago

I credit containerization, k8s, and terraform for preventing vendor lock in. Compute like EC2 or GCE are effectively interoperable. Ditto for managed services for k8s or Postgres. The new products Anthropic is shipping is more like Lambda. Vendor kool-aid lots of people will buy into.

What grinds my gears is how Anthropic is actively avoiding standards. Like being the only harness that doesn't read AGENTS.md. I work on AI infra and use different models all the time, Opus is really good, but the competition is very close. There's just enough friction to testing those out though, and that's the point.

phist_mcgee• 3 months ago

Let's see how it shakes out after Athropic and OpenAI fully stop subsidizing their plans, that may alter the calculus.

chickensong4• 3 months ago

specifically speaking about aws, the predictions vs what actually happened is a massive gap

I guess I'm one of the people who disagree, specifically about AWS. I think a lot of companies just watch their bill go up because they don't have the appetite to unwind their previous decision to go all-in on AWS.

Ignoring egress fees, migrating storage and compute isn't hard, it's all the auxiliary stuff that's locked in, the IAM, Cognito, CloudFormation, EventBridge, etc... Good luck digging out of that hole. That's not to say that AWS doesn't work well, but unless you have a light footprint and avoided most of their extra services, the lock-in feels pretty real.

That's what it feels like Anthropic is doing here. You could have a cron job under your control, or you could outsource that to a Claude Routine. At some point the outsourced provider has so many hooks into your operations that it's too painful to extract yourself, so you just keep the status quo, even if there's pain.

charcircuit• 3 months ago

the predictions vs what actually happened is a massive gap

AWS is still charging a highway robbery price for internet bandwidth.

gbro3n• 3 months ago

I have heard it said that tokens will become commodities. I like being able to switch between Open AI and Anthropics models, but I feel I'd manage if one of them disappeared. I'd probably even get by with Gemini. I don't want to lock in to any one provider any more than I want to lock in to my energy provider. I might pay 2x for a better model, but no more, and I can see that not being the case for much longer.

slopinthebag6• 3 months ago

They have to become a platform because that is their only hope of locking in customers before the open models catch up enough to eat their lunch. Stuff like Gemma is already good enough to replace ChatGPT for the average consumer, and stuff like GLM 5.1 is not too far off from replacing Claude/Codex for the average developer.

wookmaster• 3 months ago

They're trying to find ways to lock you in

straygarr• 3 months ago

Can't tell if you're joking, but if not: was -> want

crystal_revenge• 3 months ago

This sounds like someone complaining about how Windows is a black box while ignoring the existence of Linux/BSD.

I'm currently hosting, on very reasonable consumer grade hardware, an LLM that is on par performance wise what every anyone was paying for about a year ago. Including all the layers in between the model and the user.

Llama.cpp serves up Gemma-4-26B-A4B, Open WebUI handles the client details: system prompt, web search, image gen, file uploading etc. With Conduit and Tailscale providing the last layer so I can have a mobile experience as robust as anything I get from Anthropic, plus I know how all the pieces works and can upgrade, enhance, etc to my hearts delight. All this runs from a pretty standard MBP at > 70 tokens/sec.

If you want to better understand the agent side of things, look into Hermes agent and you can start understanding the internals of how all this stuff is done. You can run a very competitive coding agent using modest hardware and open models. In a similar note, image/video gen on local hardware has come a long way.

Just like Linux, you're going to exchanging time for this level of control, but it's something anyone who takes LLMs seriously and has the same concerns can easily get started with.

Yet I still see comments like this that seem to complete ignore the incredible work in the open model community that has been perpetually improving and is starting to really be competitive. If you relax the "local" requirement and just want more performance from an LLM backend you can replace the llama.cpp part with a call to Kimi 2.5 or Minimax 2.7 (which you could feasibly run at home, not kimi though). You can still control all the additional part of the experience but run models that are very competitive with current proprietary SoTA offering, 100% under your control still and a fraction of the price.

slopinthebag6• 3 months ago

You're spot on btw, not sure why you're getting downvoted. It's funny that a community of supposed "hackers" seems to think your only choice is dolling out money to hyper scalers for what amounts to a code writing SAAS.

alex_sf• 3 months ago

Everytime I've tried a local model, and I have tried lots for a couple years now, they just seem like they were overtrained on benchmarks. They consistently perform dramatically worse than even older models from Anthropic/OAI/Google.

suslik• 3 months ago

What is reasonable hardware in your case? Doesn’t this model require 50+ Gb vram?

pc862• 3 months ago

- No trust that they won't nerf the tool/model behind the feature

To the contrary, they've proven again and again and again they'll absolutely do that the first chance they get.

rbalicki5• 3 months ago

You can lessen your dependence on the specific details of how /loop, code routines, etc. work by asking the LLM to do simpler tasks, and instead, having a proper workflow engine be in charge of the workflow aspects.

For example, this demo (https://github.com/barnum-circus/barnum/tree/master/demos/co...) converts a folder of files from JS to TS. It's something an LLM could (probably) do a decent job of, but 1. not necessarily reliably, and 2. you can write a much more complicated workflow (e.g. retry logic, timeout logic, adding additional checks like "don't use as casts", etc), 3. you can be much more token efficient, and 4. you can be LLM agnostic.

So, IMO, in the presence of tools like that, you shouldn't bother using /loop, code routines, etc.

nine_k2• 3 months ago

In this regard, the release of open-weight Gemma models that can run on reasonable local hardware, and are not drastically worse than Anthropic flagships, is quite a punch. An M2 Mac Mini with 32GB is about 10 months worth of Claude Max subscription.

Readerium• 3 months ago

In coding they are worse.

Chinese models (GLM, MiniMax) are better.

SV_BubbleTime• 3 months ago

Without getting too pedantic for no reason… I think it’s important to not call this an LLM.

This isn’t an LLM. It’s a product powered by an LLM. You don’t get access to the model you get access to the product.

An LLM can’t do a web search, an LLM can’t convert Excel files into something and then into PDF. Products do that.

I think it’s a mistake to say I don’t trust this engine to get me here, rather than it is to say I don’t trust this car. Because for the most part, the engine, despite giving you a different performance all the time is roughly doing the same thing over and over.

The product is the curious entity you have no control over.

freedomben2• 3 months ago

This echoes my thoughts exactly. I've tried to stay model-agnostic but the nudges and shoves from Anthropic continue to make that a challenge. No way I'm going that deep into their "cloud" services, unless it's a portable standard. I did MCP and skills because those were transferrable.

I also clearly see the lock-in/moat strategy playing out here, and I don't like it. It's classic SV tactics. I've been burned too many times to let it happen again if I can help it.

hatmanstack• 3 months ago

Agree. I just don't think it's realistic to expect the technology to not become a tool for commercialism. It plays out the same way every time: technology arrives, mass adoption with idealist intentions, somebody has to pay the mortgage, delight disappears.

Woz has been saying this for decades, we went from buying a computer and owning it to being trapped inside someone else's platform. MCP being open was a good sign but I'm watching how tightly Routines gets coupled to their stack.

jann• 3 months ago

I have the same sentiments, but I also get a lot of value out of simple things like memory for long-term project planning and task management. I'm willing to commit to one provider right now with the assumption that memories (and now routines) can be ported within a few hours to a new provider (for example Claude Desktop provides a prompt to export memories from other providers). Also the memory being human readable (markdown files) makes me worry less about lock-in.

jeppester2• 3 months ago

I always hated SEO because it was not an exact science - like programming was.

Too bad we've now managed to turn programming into the same annoying guesswork.

uriegas3• 3 months ago

I don't really think it is turning into a guesswork. A lot of people wrote bad code before by pasting things from the internet they didn't understand. I think some people are using LLMs the same way, but it does not mean that programming has changed. But I do think that code quality is being neglected nowadays.

rbalicki5• 3 months ago

If you want to feel like you're using a programming language when orchestrating agents, check out https://github.com/barnum-circus/barnum

alfalfasprout• 3 months ago

Yep. Trust is easy to lose, hard to earn. A nondeterministic black box that is likely buggy, will almost certainly change, and has a likelihood of getting enshittified is not a very good value proposition to build on top of or invest in.

Increasingly, we're also seeing the moat shrink somewhat. Frontier models are converging in performance (and I bet even Mythos will get matched) and harnesses are improving too across the board (OpenCode and Codex for example).

I get why they're trying to do that (a perception of a moat bloats the IPO price) but I have little faith there's any real moat at all (especially as competitors are still flush with cash).

dsf2aa2• 3 months ago

I think in the long-term open source models will be enough and a handful of firms will figure out how to use them at scale to generate immense cash flows. It is in China's interest that America does not have more healthy going-concerns that generate tens of billions in cash flows that are then reinvested to increase the gap in capabilities and have the rest of the world purchasing their offerings.

So yeah, doesn't bode well for being a pure play model producer.

spprashant• 3 months ago

I think it behooves us to be selective right now. Frontier labs maybe great at developing models, but we shouldn't assume they know what they are doing from a product perspective. The current phase is throwing several ideas on the wall and see what sticks (see Sora). They don't know how these things will play out long term. There is no reason to believe Co-work/Routines/Skills will survive 5 years from now. So it might just be better to not invest too much in ecosystem upfront.

karl_gluck• 3 months ago

This is exactly why my preferred method at the moment is simple markdown files with instructions. At worst, a human could do it.

rbalicki5• 3 months ago

You may want to check out Barnum, which is a programming language/agent orchestration tool that makes it easy to build things like /loop, or Claude code routines. And you won't end up dependent on the specifics of how Claude code routines work!

https://github.com/barnum-circus/barnum

jwpapi2• 3 months ago

It all went downhill from the moment they changed Reading *.* to reading (*) files.

I can’t use Claude Code at all anymore, not even for simple tasks. The output genuinely disgusts me. Like a friend who constantly stabs you in the back.

My favorite AI feature at the moment is the JetBrains predict next edit. It‘s so fast that I don’t lose attention and I’m still fully under control.

windexh8er• 3 months ago

This 10000%.

Anthropic wants a moat, but that ship has sailed. Now all I keep reading about is: token burn, downtime and... Wait for it, another new product!

Anthropic thinks they are pulling one over on the enterprise, and maybe they are with annual lock-in akin to Microsoft. But I really hope enterprise buyers are not this gullible, after all these years. At least with Microsoft the product used to be tangible. Now it's... Well, non-deterministic and it's clear providers will gimp models at will.

I had a Pro Max account only for a short period of time and during that short stint Anthropic changed their tune on how I could use that product, I hit limits on a Max account within hours with one CC agent, and experienced multiple outages! But don't worry, Anthropic gave me $200 in credits for OpenClaw. Give me a break.

The current state of LLM providers is the cloud amplified 100x over and in all the worst ways. I had hopes for Anthropic to be the least shitty but it's very clear they've embraced enshittification through and through.

Now I'm spending time looking at how to minimize agent and LLM use with deterministic automation being the foundation with LLM use only where need be and implemented in simple and cost controllable ways.

bob1029• 3 months ago

I am still using the chat completion APIs exclusively. I tried the agent APIs and they're way too opinionated for me. I can see 100% of the tokens I am paying for with my current setup.

ElFitz6• 3 months ago

Not because I can't see a use-case for them, but because I have 0 trust in them
[…]
Put another way, LLM companies are trying to climb the ladder to be a platform, I have zero interest in that, I was a "dumb pipe", I want a commodity, I want a provider, not a platform.

That is my sentiment precisely, and a big reason why I’ve started moving away from Claude Code in the past few weeks when I realised how much of my workflow was becoming tied to their specific tools.

Claude Code’s "Memory" feature was the tipping point for me, with the model committing feedbacks and learnings to some local, provider-specific path, that won’t persist in the git repo itself.

That’s fine for user preferences, not for workflows, rules, etc.

And the latest ToS changes about not being allowed to even use another CLI made up my mind. At work we were experimenting with an autonomous debug agent using the Claude Code cli programmatically in ephemeral VMs. Now it just returns an error saying we can’t use subscriptions with third-party software… when there is no third-party software involved?

Anyway, so long Claude.

dzink• 3 months ago

They can’t allow third party software because the third parties save the outputs of Claude responses and distill them into new models to compete with Claude.

mooreds• 3 months ago

I use opencode with claude models through a GitHub subscription. I've also used claude through Amazon Bedrock.

Both give you optionality because they support N models.

Nevermark3• 3 months ago

Claude Code’s "Memory" feature was the tipping point for me

My standing orders are the default MEMORY.md must be a stub directing Claude to another MEMORY.md file in the local folder, project, etc.

All memories remain with their respective projects over syncs, moves, devices, etc. The stub must state all this clearly, and nothing else.

This has worked very well.

If you give the model/memory a name, that name can be persistent and independent over "backend" model swaps.

bg24• 3 months ago

Think another way, these product features are easy to build in other harnesses too. And as the open source models and the other models which are much lower cost are getting better, there will be a time when it will be justified to have a harness that can work with many models and optimize your cost and efficiency.

eru3• 3 months ago

Claude Code’s "Memory" feature was the tipping point for me, with the model committing feedbacks and learnings to some local, provider-specific path, that won’t persist in the git repo itself.

It's a bit annoying, but as long as it's local and human (or LLM) readable, you can use your favourite agent to rework this stuff for itself.

elias1233• 3 months ago

Many of the new features in claude code have soon been implemented in other harnesses, for example plugins/skills. After all it is just a prompt.

uriegas3• 3 months ago

I think AI labs are realizing that they no longer have any competitive advantage other than being the incumbents. Plus hardware improvements might render their models irrelevant for most tasks.

jordanarseno• 3 months ago

In my view, lock-in anxiety is a holdover from a previous era of tech platforms, and it doesn't really apply in an era where frontier agents can migrate you between vendors in hours. So I personally don't see any good worrying about this. On top of that, every major LLM provider is rapidly converging on the same feature set. They watch each other and clone what works. So the "platform" you're building on isn't really Anthropic's platform so much as it is the emerging shared surface area of what LLMs can do. By the time this Routines feature becomes a problem for you, other solutions will have emerged, and I'd be very surprised if you couldnt lift-and-shift very quickly.

s3p• 3 months ago

Can you explain what you meant when you called yourself a dumb pipe? What does that mean

dbmikus2• 3 months ago

We might be building something up your alley! I wanted an OSS platform that let me run any coding agent (or multiple agents) in a sandbox and control it either programmatically or via GUI / TUI.

Website is https://amika.dev

And part of our code is OSS (https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika) but we're working on open sourcing more of it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vevSJsSCWT_reuD7JwAuGCX5...

We've been signing up private beta users, and also looking for feedback on the OSS plans.

Traubenfuchs• 3 months ago

Right you are! We aren‘t even in the real squeezing phase yet and everyone‘s already crying about plan limits and model nerfing.

brandensilva2• 3 months ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels this way. I've been creating a local first open source piece of software that lets me spin up different agent harnesses with different runtimes. I call it Major Tom because I wanted to be set free from the imprisonment of Claude Code after their DMCA aggression for their own leak and actions leading to lock down from open source adoption.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket has be true for me and my business for ages.

I could really use the open source community to help make this a reality so I'll release this soon hopefully to positive reception from others who want a similar path forward.

Rekindle8090• 3 months ago

The problem is without a platform Anthropic has no stack and will just be bought up by Google when the bubble pops. Same with OpenAI, without some sort of moat, their product requires third party hardware in third party datacenters and they'll be bought by Microsoft.

Alphabet doesn't have this issue. Google doesn't need Gemini to win the "AI product" race. It needs Gemini to make Search better at retaining users against Perplexity and ChatGPT search, to make YouTube recommendations and ad targeting more effective, to make Workspace stickier for enterprise customers, to make Cloud more competitive against AWS, to make Android more useful as a device OS. Every percentage point improvement in any of those existing businesses generates billions in revenue that never shows up on a "Gemini revenue". Any actual "Gemini" revenue is just a bonus.

Anthropic trains on Google TPUs hosted in Google Cloud. Amazon invested billions and hosts Anthropic's models on Bedrock/AWS. So the two possible outcomes for Anthropic are: succeed as a platform (in which case Google and Amazon extract rent from every inference and training run), or fail as a platform and get acquired (in which case Google or Amazon absorb the talent and IP directly)

Hilariously, if the models were open source, Anthropic, OpenAI et al wouldn't be in this situation. Instead, they have no strategic independence to cover for a lack of product independence and have to keep chasing "platforms" and throwing out products no one needs (people need claude. thats it.)

benrapscallion• 3 months ago

If this is so, why do I find (for scientific research on biomedicine topics, primarily) that Claude’s results are much better than say Gemini’s? I hear the same opinion from others in biotech and big pharma.

dheera• 3 months ago

No trust they won't sunset the feature

I've had so many websites break and die because Google or Amazon sunsetted something.

For example I had a graphing calculator website that had 250K monthly active users (mostly school students, I think) and it just vanished one day because Amazon sunsetted EC2 clasic and I didn't have time to deal with that. Hopefully those students found something else to do their homework with that day.

ChadMoran• 3 months ago

Agree. I keep my involvement "close to the metal". These higher order solutions seem to cause more noise than provide signal.

idrdex• 3 months ago

The framing is off. AI is a tool that can operate as a human. GOV is how the humans are organized. AI can basically scale GOV. That’s the paradigm shift. Provenance is durable. AI is just the first opportunity we have had to make it scaleable.

hdjrudni• 3 months ago

I also don't see the value add here... "schedule" is just a cron. "GitHub Event" is probably a 20-minute integration, which Claude itself can write for you.

Maybe there's something I'm not seeing here, but I never want to outsource something so simple to a live service.

superjan• 3 months ago

For Anthropic, it is valuable that they control the scheduling, so they can move jobs around to use the infa when it is relatively quiet. If you let customers choose the time, a lot of work will start at whole hours.

ulrikrasmussen• 3 months ago

I agree with your analysis. Platforms are some of the most profitable business models because they come with vendor lock-in, but they are always shittier on the long run compared to commodities. Platforms are a way for companies to capture part of the market and decrease competition by increasing the cost of changing vendors.

simonjgreen• 3 months ago

Completely agree. Use of features like this places one the wrong side of the vendors moat, increasing switching cost, decreasing competitive pressure.

redanddead3• 3 months ago

totally agree

they're very shady as well! can't believe i spent 140$ on CC and every day they're adding some "feature flag" to make the model dumber. Spending more time fighting the tool instead of using it. It just doesn't feel good. Enterprises already struggle with lock-in with incumbent clouds, I wanna root for neoclouds but choices matter, and being shady about this and destroying the tool is just doesn't sit right with me. If it's not up to the standard, just kick users off, I would rather know than find out. Give users a choice.

The flag name is loud_sugary_rock. It's gated to Opus 4.6 only, same as quiet_salted_ember.

Full injected text:

# System reminders User messages include a <system-reminder> appended by this harness. These reminders are not from the user, so treat them as an instruction to you, and do not mention them. The reminders are intended to tune your thinking frequency - on simpler user messages, it's best to respond or act directly without thinking unless further reasoning is necessary. On more complex tasks, you should feel free to reason as much as needed for best results but without overthinking. Avoid unnecessary thinking in response to simple user messages.

@bcherny Seriously? So what's next, we just add another flag to counter that? And the hope is that enough users don't find out / don't bother? That's an ethical choice man.

matheusmoreira4• 3 months ago

I swear to god... What Claude Code version introduced this "system reminder"?

They had obnoxious "output efficiency" instructions in previous versions. The community was patching it out via shell script.

https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5...

It actually improved Opus's performance too.

A few days later, they deleted the instructions targeted by this script, breaking it.

Now they're doing this?

alexhans• 3 months ago

This is what AI evals [1] and local llms should be a focus of your investment.

If you can define good enough for you and local llms can meet that you'll get:

- no vendor lock-in (control)

- price

- stability (you decide when to hot swap with newer models)

- speed (control)

- full observability and predictability.

- Privacy / Data Locality (Depending on implementation of infrastructure).

- [1] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/measure-first-...

codebolt• 3 months ago

At some point I think I'd prefer to deploy my own model in Azure or AWS and simply bring the endpoint to the coding harness.

pjmlp• 3 months ago

I fully agree with you, however this is basically the fashion on big corporations.

Building business on top of SaaS products, iPaaS integrations, and serverless middleware.

joelthelion• 3 months ago

The good news is that, apart from the models themselves, we don't need much from these companies:

- Use Opencode and other similar open-source solutions in place of their proprietary harnesses. This isn't very practical right now because of the heavily subsidized subscriptions that are hard to compete with. But subsidies will end soon, and with progress in inference, it should be very doable to work with open-source clients in the near future.

- Use Openrouter and similar to abstract the LLM itself. That makes AI companies interchangeable and removes a lot of any moat they might have.

EZ-E• 3 months ago

I want a commodity, I want a provider, not a platform

That is exactly what the big LLM providers are trying to prevent. Them being only commodity providers might lead them to be easily replaced, and will likely lead to lower margins compared to "full feature" enterprise solutions. Switching LLM API provider is next to no work the moment a competitor is slightly cheaper/better.

Full solutions are more "sticky", harder to replace, and can be sold at higher prices.

theshrike79• 3 months ago

Every company is trying to become THE platform where all other tools connect to. Notion is integrating everything under the sun, as is Slack, big LLM providers have one-click MCP installation for all major services.

But... these are the "retail" tools that they sell to people organisations without the skills or knowhow to build a basic agentic loop by themselves. Complaining about these being bad and untrustworthy is like comparing a microwave dinner to something you cook yourself. Both will fill your belly equally. One requires zero skill from the user and the second one is 90% skill and 10% getting the right ingredients.

Creating a simple MVP *Claw with tool calling using a local model like gemma4 is literally a 15 minute thing. In 2-3 hours you can make it real pretty. If you base it on something like pi.dev, you can make it easily self-modifying and it can build its own safeguards.

That's all this "routines" thing is, it's just an agentic loop they launch in their cloud on a timer. Just like the scheduled tasks in Claude Cowork.

schlesimeister3• 3 months ago

I found your response interesting, I've been working on a tool that is trying to tackle the problem I think you're describing. It's a CLI tool that sits between you and whatever agent you're using — your context lives in plain Markdown files on your machine, git-backed, portable across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, whatever. You own it. Switch between providers and it comes with you. Happy to share more, we're only starting to share it now. Here's our site: https://www.fathym.com/

yencabulator• 3 months ago

Also, remember the code quality in the accidental Claude Code source publishing? Expect that for all their features. Thinking about having to debug automations hidden by their SaaS gives me the shudders.

verdverm3• 3 months ago

One gripe I have with Claude Code is that the CLI, Desktop app, and apparently the Webapp have a Venn Diagram of features. Plugins (sets of skills and more) are supported in Code CLI, maybe in Cowork (custom fail to import) but not Code Desktop. Now this?

The report that they are 90% Ai code generated seems more likely the more I attempt to use their products.

bottlepalm• 3 months ago

Their source code leak showed how badly vibe coded Claude Code is, despite it being one of the best AI assistants.

But yea there's some annoying overlap here with Cowork which also has scheduled tasks, in Cowork the tasks can use your desktop, browser and accounts which is pretty useful - a big difference from these Claude Code Routines.

dispencer2• 3 months ago

This is massive. Arguably will be the start of the move to openclaw-style AI.

I bet anthropic wants to be there already but doesn't have the compute to support it yet.

dpark2• 3 months ago

What’s massive about cron jobs and webhooks? I feel like I’m missing something. This is useful functionality but also seems very straightforward.

jcims2• 3 months ago

Is there a consensus on whether or not we've reached Zawinski's Law?

senko• 3 months ago

I've had an AI assistant send me email digests with local news, and another watching a cron job, analyzing the logs and sending me reports if there's any problem.

I'd say that counts as yes.

(For clarity: neither are powered by Claude Code Routines. Rather, Claude Code coded them and they're simple cron jobs themselves.)

verdverm3• 3 months ago

TIL email is what I'm missing in my personal development (swiss army) tool

dispencer2• 3 months ago

This wild, one of the pieces I was lacking for a very openclaw-esque future. Now I think I have all the mcp tools I need (github, linear, slack, gmail, querybear), all the skills I need, and now can run these on a loop.

Am I needed anymore?

brcmthrowaway• 3 months ago

imhoguy2• 3 months ago

Let it "build power plant" and we are on track with "Paperclip maximizer" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...

srid• 3 months ago

I just used this to summarize HN posts in last 24 hours, including AI summaries.

This PR was created by the Claude Code Routine:

https://github.com/srid/claude-dump/pull/5

The original prompt: https://i.imgur.com/mWmkw5e.png

egamirorrim• 3 months ago

I wish they'd release more stuff that didn't rely on me routing all my data through their cloud to work. Obviously the LLM is cloud based but I don't want any more lock-in than that. Plus not everyone has their repositories in GitHub.

taw1285• 3 months ago

I have a small team of 4 engineers, each of us is on the personal max subscription plan and prefer to stay this way to save cost. Does anyone know how I can overcome the challenge with setting up Routines or Scheduled Tasks with Anthropic infra in a collaborate manner: ie: all teammates can contribute to these nightly job of cleaning up the docs, cleaning up vibe coding slops.

hallway_monitor• 3 months ago

My team was doing this until recently but I think in February, Anthropic made team accounts available for subscription instead of API billing. Assuming that is the cost you mentioned.

teucris• 3 months ago

My only real disappointment with Claude is its flakiness with scheduling tasks. I have several Slack related tasks that I’ve pretty much given up trying to automate - I’ve tried Cowork and Claude Code remote agents, only to find various bugs with working with plugins and connectors. I guess I’ll give this a try, but I don’t have high hopes.

dbmikus2• 3 months ago

If you don't get it working with Claude Code Routines, would love to connect and see if we can help! We're building an open core product that can spin up sandboxed coding and control them from Slack (and also web UI, TUI, and HTTP APIs + CLIs)

We work with any coding model / harness.

website: https://www.amika.dev/

OSS repo: https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika

And my email is dylan@amika.dev (I'm one of the founders)

sminchev• 3 months ago

Everything is big race! Each company is trying to do as much as possible, to provide as many tools as possible, to catch the wave and beat the concurrency. I remember how Antropic and OpenAI made releases in just 10-15 minutes of difference, trying to compete and gain momentum.

And because they use AI heavily, they produce new product every week. So fast, that I have no time to check, does it worth or not.

This one looks interesting. I have some custom commands that I execute manually weekly, for monitoring, audits, summary, reports. It it can send reports on email, or generate something that I can read in the morning with my coffee, or after I finish with it ;) it might be a good tool.

The question is, do I really want to so much productive? I am already much better in performance with AI, compared with the 'old school' way...

Everything is just getting to much for me.

tills13• 3 months ago

react to GitHub events from Anthropic-managed cloud infrastructure

Oh cool! vendor lock-in.

comboy3• 3 months ago

Unrelated, but Claude was performing so tragically last few days, maybe week(s), but days mostly, that I had to reluctantly switch. Reluctantly because I enjoy it. Even the most basic stuff, like most python scripts it has to rerun because of some syntax error.

The new reality of coding took away one of the best things for me - that the computer always just does what it is told to do. If the results are wrong it means I'm wrong, I made a bug and I can debug it. Here.. I'm not a hater, it's a powerful tool, but.. it's different.

pacha30002• 3 months ago

I'm the first to be tired of everyone, for every model, that says "uuuh became dumber" because I didn't believe them

... until this week! Opus is struggling worse than Sonnet those last two weeks.

comboy3• 3 months ago

Pretty reassuring to hear that. I was skeptical too, there's a lot of variables like some crap added to memory specific skill or custom instructions interfering with the workflow and what not. But now it was like a toddler that consumes money when talking.

jpcompartir• 3 months ago

Likewise, I foolishly assumed everybody else was just doing it wrong.

But this week I've lost count of the times I've had to say something along the lines of: "Can you check our plan/instructions, I'm pretty sure I said we need to do [this thing] but you've done [that thing]..."

And get hit with a "You're absolutely right...", which virtually never happened for me. I think maybe once since Opus 4-6.

girvo• 3 months ago

My favourite was, Opus 4.6 last night (to be fair peak IST time, late afternoon my time), the first prompt with a small context: jams a copy-pasted function in between a bunch of import statements, doesn't even wire up it's own function and calls it done. Wild, I've not seen failure states like that since old Sonnet 4

combyn8tor• 3 months ago

In my experience Opus and Claude have declined significantly over the past few weeks. It actually feels like dealing with an employee that has become bored and intentionally cuts corners.

qingcharles2• 3 months ago

Is it? Or is it the task you're trying to do? Opus 4.6 has been staggeringly good for me this last week, both inside Claude Code and through Antigravity until I used up my quota.

saghm• 3 months ago

Forget the agent itself being dumber: right now I'm getting an "API error: usage limit exceeded" message whenever I try anything despite my usage showing as 26% for the session limit and 8% for the week (with 0/5 routines, which I guess is what this thread is about). This is with the default model and effort, and Claude Code is saying I need to turn on extra usage for it to work. Forget that, I just canceled my subscription instead.

There's utility in LLMs for coding, but having literally the entire platform vibe-coded is too much for me. At this point, I might genuinely believe they're not intentionally watering anything down, because it's incredibly believable that they just have no clue how any of it works anymore.

bluegatty5• 3 months ago

Codex with 5.4 xhigh. It's a bad communicator but does the job.

elAhmo• 3 months ago

You mean codex (client) with GPT 5.4 xhigh? I am using Codex 5.3 (model) through Cursor, waiting for Codex 5.4 model as I had great experience so far with 5.3.

winrid3• 3 months ago

It's bad at long running tasks.

taspeotis• 3 months ago

https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/

chillacy• 3 months ago

If SWE Bench is public then Anthropic is at a minimum probably also looking at their SWE bench scores when making changes, I'd trust more a tracker which runs a private benchmark not known to Anthropic.

comboy3• 3 months ago

I think API is fine, likely only subscription is affected. Not to mention trivial heuristics to differentiate repeated API calls / same data and potential CLI usage although that would be true malice.

It seemed to me that it was performing better through opencode using API but did not test extensively.

bicepjai• 3 months ago

Yes totally agree it’s regurgitating crazy expansive text like book author who needs to publish 10 books a day

scandinavian• 3 months ago

I'm not a big user, but I have been doing some vibe-ish coding for a PoC the past few days, and I'm astonished at how bad it is at python in particular (Opus 4.6 High).

* It likes to put inline imports everywhere, even though I specify in my CLAUDE.md that it should not.

* We use ruff and pyright and require that all problems are addressed or at least ignored for a good reason, but it straight up #noqa ignores all issues instead.

* For typing it used the builtin 'any' instead of typing.Any which is nonsense.

* I asked it to add a simple sum of a column from a related database table, but instead of using a calculated sum in SQL it did a classic n+1 where it gets every single row from the related table and calculates the sum in python.

Just absolute beginner errors.

lovlar• 3 months ago

Clajjan is this you?

Lord-Jobo• 3 months ago

It really does have some disgusting inline behaviors. I’ve also seen it do some really bizarre stuff with SQL

codethief• 3 months ago

Weird, I've been using Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5/4.6 for Python programming the last couple months and I rarely see the issues you mentioned.

oxag3n2• 3 months ago

Are they going to mirror every tool software engineers were used to for decades, but in a mangled/proprietary form?

I think to become really efficient they'll have to invent new programming language to eliminate all the ambiguity and non-determinism. Call it "prompt language", with ai-subroutines, ai-labels and ai-goto.

causal5• 3 months ago

Haven't Github-triggered LLMs already been the source of multiple prompt injection attacks? Seems bad.

cedws• 3 months ago

This is the beginning of AI clouds in my estimation. Cloud services provide needed lock-in and support the push to provide higher level services over the top of models. It just makes sense, they'll never recoup the costs on just inference.

hamuraijack• 3 months ago

please, no more features. just fix context bloat.

woeirua• 3 months ago

I don't get the use case for these... Their primary customers are enterprises. Are most enterprises happy with running daily tasks on a third party cloud outside of their ecosystem? I think not.

So who are they building these for?

dbbk2• 3 months ago

Not really any different to GitHub Actions

chickensong4• 3 months ago

Nobody likes infra. PMs don't know wtf a crontab is.

qwertyuiop_• 3 months ago

“Scheduled tasks and actions invoked by callback urls”

eranation4• 3 months ago

If anyone from anthropic reads it. I love this feature very much, when it works. And it mostly doesn't.

The main bugs / missing features are

1. It loses connection to it's connectors, mostly to the slack connector. It does all the work, then says it can't connect to slack. Then when you show it a screenshot of itself with the slack connector, it will say, oh, yeah, the tools are now loaded and does the rest of the routine.

2. ability to connect it to github packages / artifactory (private packages) - or the dangerous route of allowing access to some sort of vault (with non critical dev only secrets... although it's always a risk. But cursor has it...)

3. the GitHub MCP not being able to do simple things such as update release markdown (super simple use case of creating automated release notes for example)

You are so close, yet so far...

Terretta• 3 months ago

It's remarkable how often it refuses to introspect but a SCREENSHOT of itself and suddenly "yeah this works fine".

This happens in all their UIs, including, say, Claude in Excel, as well.

twobitshifter2• 3 months ago

It seemed OpenClaw is just Pi with Cron and hooks, and it seems like this is just Claude Code with Cron and hooks. Based on the superiority of Pi, I would not expect this to attract any one from OpenClaw, but it will increase token usage in Claude Code.

richardw• 3 months ago

I’m moving away from Claude for anything complicated. It’s got such nice DX but I can’t take the confident flaky results. Finding Codex on the high plan more thorough, and for any complicated project that’s what I need.

Still using Claude for UX (playgrounds) and language. OpenAI has always been a little more cerebral and stern, which doesn’t suit those areas. When it tries to be friendly it comes off as someone my age trying to be a 20-something.

jwpapi2• 3 months ago

All these new offers try to kill fire with fire. You don’t make the codebase better with more agents. You introduce more complicated issues.

It’s a trap.

blcknight2• 3 months ago

For the love of god fix bugs and write some fricken tests instead of dropping new shiny things

It is absolutely wild to me you guys broke `--continue` from `-p` TWO WEEKS AGO and it is still not fixed.

weird-eye-issue2• 3 months ago

--resume works fine?

blcknight2• 3 months ago

That's why I mentioned `-p`.

`--continue` and `--resume` are broken from `-p` sessions for the last 2 weeks. The use case is:

1. Do autonomous claudey thing (claude -p 'hey do this thing')

2. Do a deterministic thing

3. Reinvoke claude with `--continue`

This no longer works. I've had this workflow in GitHub actions for months and all of a sudden they broke it.

They constantly break stuff I rely on.

Skill script loading was broken for weeks a couple months ago. Hooks have been broken numerous times.

So tired of their lack of testing.

tallesborges92• 3 months ago

Anthropic I don’t care for your tools, just ship good and stable models so we can build the tools we need.

dbg31415• 3 months ago

Seems like more vendor lock-in tactics.

Not saying it doesn’t look useful, but it’s something that keeps you from ever switching off Claude.

Next year, if Claude raises rates after getting bought by Google… what then?

And what happens when Claude goes down and misses events that were supposed to trigger Routines? I’m not at the point where I trust them to have business-dependable uptime.

haukem• 3 months ago

I used the claude-code-action GitHub Action to review PRs before, but it is pretty buggy e.g. PRs from forked repositories do not work, and I had to fix it myself. This should work better with Claude Code Routines. claude-code-action only works with the API and is therefore pretty expensive compared to the subscription.

I think LLM reviews on PRs are helpful and will reduce the load on maintainers. I am working on OpenWrt and was approved for the Claude Code Max Open Source Program today. The cap of 15 automatic Claude Code Routines runs per day is a bit low. We get 5 to 20 new PRs per day and I would like to run it on all of them. I would also like to re-run it when authors make changes, in that case it should be sufficient to just check if the problems were addressed.

Is it possible to get more runs per day, or to carry over unused ones from the last 7 days? Maybe 30 on Sonnet and 15 on Opus?

When I was editing a routine, the window closed and showed an error message twice. Looks like there are still some bugs.

rahimnathwani• 3 months ago

The docs list the GitHub events that can be used as triggers. This is included in the list:

  Push Commits are pushed to a branch

But when I try to create a routine, the only GitHub events available in the drop down related to pull requests and releases. Nothing available related to pushes/commits or issues. Am I holding it wrong?

gegtik• 3 months ago

how did they not call this OpenClaude?

yalogin• 3 months ago

I am beginning to fear Claude is going to massively raise prices or at the very least severely restrict its $20/month plan. Hope it doesn’t happen but feels inevitable

drumttocs8• 3 months ago

Can someone tell me what this does that n8n doesn't?

bofia• 3 months ago

Could be a start

brandensilva2• 3 months ago

Anthropic is burning their good will faster than the tokens we use these days. It is hard to be excited about these new features when the core product has been neutered into oblivion.

yohamta• 3 months ago

Claude and Open AI seems to be trying not to be 'Just a model', but this is intrinsically problematic because model can be degraded and prices only goes up once they lock-in customers. It is increasingly important for anyone who are responsible of managing 'AI workflows' to keep the sovereignty about how you use AI models. This is why I'm super excited in building the local-first workflow orchestration software called "Dagu", that allows us to own your harness on your own. It's not only more cost-effective, but outcome is better as well because you have 100% full control. I think it's only matter of time that people notice they need to own their workflow orchestration on their own not relying on Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google.

smartbit• 3 months ago

Hi HN! I'm the author of Dagu, a workflow engine that's been in development for a few years.

yohamta in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142130

thegdsks• 3 months ago

Looks like they are slowly getting the OpenClaw features here in Cowork Already seeing the 5 limit per day in usage bar now..

lherron• 3 months ago

It’s interesting to watch Ant try to ship every value-add product feature they can while they still have the SOTA model for agentic. When an open weights equivalent to Opus 4.5’s agentic capabilities comes out, I expect massive shifts of workloads away from Claude.

Don’t get me wrong, I think their business model is still solid and they will be able to sell every token they can generate for the next couple years. They just won’t be critical path for AI diffusion anymore, which will be good for all sides.

heartleo• 3 months ago

I couldn’t agree more.

hackermeows• 3 months ago

Is claude at the AWS's old throw sh*t at the wall and see what sticks phase of their business already . That did not take very long.

sublimefire• 3 months ago

Did this sort of a thing in my own macos app which can have routines with a cron, custom configs and chains of prompts. There is also more like custom VMs and models to be used for different tasks. Interesting to see larger providers trying to do the same.

But their own failure is the fact that there is a limited way to configure it with other models, think 3d modelling and integrating 3d apps on a VM to work with. I believe an OSS solution is needed here, which is not too hard to do either.

bryanhogan• 3 months ago

So do I understand correctly that this is a competitor to something like n8n, but instead entirely vibe-coded?

n8n: https://n8n.io/

lofaszvanitt• 3 months ago

AI companies act like pelicans. They want to gobble everything.

kennywinker• 3 months ago

Am I crazy in thinking an LLM doing any kind of serious workload is risky as hell?

Like, say it works today, but tomorrow they update the model and instead of emailing you an update it emails your api keys to all your contacts? Or if it works 999 times out of 1000 but then commits code to master that makes all your products free?

Idk man… call me Adama, but i do not trust long-running networked ai one bit

amebahead• 3 months ago

Anthropic's update cycle is too fast..

cryptonector• 3 months ago

Oof, running Claude Code automatically on PRs is scary.

mercurialsolo• 3 months ago

Why not just do event based triggers e.g. register (web)hooks instead of schedules time based triggers. Have a mechanism to listen to an event and then run some flow - analyze, plan, execute, feedback

holografix• 3 months ago

Anthropic is putting a lot of eggs into the same Claude Code basket.

If the Lovable clone is real that’s going to piss off many model consumers out there.

Is Sierra next?

kylegalbraith• 3 months ago

Having used the cowork version of this: scheduled automations. I have very little confidence in this from Anthropic. 90% of the time the automation never even runs.

xuxu298• 3 months ago

Can we use it free or fee? If free, how many free routines per day.

whh• 3 months ago

I don’t think LLMs should be trying to replace what essentially should be well tested heuristics.

It’s fine if it’s a stop gap. But, it’s too inconsistent to ever be reliable.

mkagenius• 3 months ago

I also felt the need for a cloud based cron like automations, so decided to build it myself https://cronbox.sh with:

  1. an ephemeral linux sandbox for each task 
  2. capability to fetch any url
  3. can use tools like ffmpeg to fulfill your scheduled task

compounding_it• 3 months ago

A year ago everyone was so hyped on LLMs even on HN. A year later I see frustration and disappointment on HN. It’s very interesting because this is the case with every new technology and the ‘next thing’

i_love_retros• 3 months ago

hehe imagine 10 years ago releasing a library where the functions may or may not do what you expect 100 percent of the time. And paying lots of money to use it.

What a time to be alive.

vfalbor• 3 months ago

Two things about My experience, first you only have one at a time per suscription, if you need implement two at the same time i could not able to. The second is that you can do that with a well configured cron.

nojvek• 3 months ago

I could understand the portal before. Now it’s a gazillion things bolted on.

Enshittification is well in force.

I’d trust the huperscalers a lot more with their workers/lambda like infra to run routine jobs calling LLM APIs or deterministic code instead of Anthropic.

Anthropic is a phenomenal paid model but they have a poor reliability record.

I don’t care much if Claude code hiccups when generating code. But after the code is generated I want it to run with multiple 9s under certain latencies every single time.

manishfp• 3 months ago

So basically OpenClaw but better and safer I presume haha!

Chrisszz• 3 months ago

I don't get all the hype around these kinds of things, it's not something that crazy that when it gets released you solve some kind of problem you had. Those are things that can easily be replicated and that many of us already built for ourselves months ago, before those were published and became mainstream

robeym• 3 months ago

I'm not interested in new features when the main ones are mysteriously getting worse and worse. I need to have a sense of stability before I get excited about any other features.

causal5• 3 months ago

100%. Every time I see a Claude Code announcement I sigh when I still can't get the desktop app to fullscreen without fritzing or make a plan and display it consistently. Many papercuts.

MyUltiDev• 3 months ago

The trigger matrix here is actually the most interesting part. Schedule plus API plus GitHub event on the same routine unlocks some nice patterns, and the /fire endpoint returning a session URL means you can wire this into alerting tools or a CD pipeline from almost anywhere. The part that is not really covered in the docs is what state a routine is supposed to recover from if a previous run died halfway through a repository change. The protection around claude/-prefixed branches helps you not clobber main, but it does not tell the next run what the previous run actually finished. I run scheduled jobs against multi step pipelines on my own infra and the failure mode that bites is not the crash, it is the run that returned success while a downstream side effect quietly broke. The /fire response returns a session URL and a session ID, which tells you the routine started, but how is a routine expected to notice when the downstream thing it kicked off (a CD pipeline, an alert follow-up, a library port PR like the one in the examples quietly fell over five minutes after the session ended?

MajorLettuce• 3 months ago

Yeah the only issue is that it is a major vendor lock-in + hazy perspective, so it is essentially unfit for any "serious" processes (read: mission critical / where you have to invest time and effort). I guess you could simply copy-paste the prompt from there in case of emergency. That is, if they allow you to.

Other than that it is a really neat utility and saves some time. However, I feel like there can be OpenClaw moment for this as well. Somebody simply needs to create an open-source version that supports all of the agents and models.

Claude Code Routines

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