Why would they have that feature in claude code cli if it goes against the ToS? You can use Claude Code programatically. This is not the issue. The issue is that Anthropic wants to lock you in within their dev ecosystem (like Apple does). Simple as that.
allowed shell pipes doesn't necessarily mean they want loops running them.
One of the economic tuning features of an LLM is to nudge the LLM into reaching conclusions and spending the tokens you want it to spend for the question.
presumably everyone running a form of ralph loop against every single workload is a doomsday situation for LLM providers.
> allowed shell pipes doesn't necessarily mean they want loops running them.
insane that people apologize for this at all. we went from FOSS software being standard to a proprietary cli/tui using proprietary models behind a subscription. how quickly we give our freedom away.
Anthropic itself advertised their own implementation of agentic loop (Ralph plugin). Sure, it worked via their official plugin, but the end result for Anthropic would be the same.
There's nothing in TOS that prevents you from running agentic loops.
I don't know why this is downvoted, see my nephew (?) comment [0] for a longer version, but this is not at all clear IMHO. I'm not sure if a "claude -p" on a cron is allowed or not with my subscription, if I run it on another server is it? Can I parse the output of claude (JSON) and have another "claude -p" instance work on the response? It's only a hop, skip, and a jump over to OpenClaw it seems, which is _not_ allowed. But at what point did we cross the line?
It feels like the only safe thing to do is use Claude Code, which, thankfully, I find tolerable, but unfortunate.
