Ok. Someone explain to me why they would f themselves this hard with software engineers when they are absolutely winning. This just seems like a bad move.
Is it infrastructure? Are they unable to control costs?
Everyone else is spending like money is water to try to get adoption. Claude has it and is dialing back utility so that its most passionate users will probably leave.
Openclaw users are a small percentage of their user base but take up a lot of their compute. Given the cost is subsidized it’s not surprising they would target it. Getting these users to leave is probably the point. These aren’t profitable users.
"Adoption" like 2000's internet companies losing money on every sale to get market share?
For SaaS, use the SaaS API. For product, use the product.
They subsidize the product with "don't care how much" pricing so they have users to build out features without users worrying about cost. If it's not actual users using the product, then features will be built in OpenClaw instead of Claude.
The earlier they draw this line, the better.
However, announcing it the day before it is effective is a huge unforced error, even if it were just a consequence of the TOS. They gain nothing by making people scramble.
Also better to announce at the same new ways to support plugging in to Claude Code - something to encourage integration/cooperation. No fences unless the field inside is flowering.
They have so much mindshare right now that they can’t lose, and the number of users that use opencode and would be affected is miniscule—-on the level of complaining about your online bank not supporting Konqueror.
Honestly I suspect they're just getting ready to release a new feature for autonomous usage. I mean it was one of the leaked feature toggles. If I'm right it'll likely mean we'll get an announcement within the next 2 weeks for "long running prompts/agents"
I mean, it is easy to understand once you realise that there is no spoon.
Despite their power, frontier models are threatened by open-source equivalents. If AGI is not on the horizon and model performance is likely not going to be enough of a differentiator to keep the momentum going, the only other way is to go horizontal - enterprise solutions, proprietary coding agent harnesses, market capture, etc.
If AGI is in sight, none of these short-term games really matter. You just need to race ahead.
They have plenty of high paying users that will soak up what the claws are consuming in capacity. They are thinking about those customers and delivering them a better experience
I do very much dislike that the concerns of the domesticated bee are brushed aside in this piece, as they are quite legitimate.
It, of course, is trying to espouse that we protect the solitary and other wild bees, and I agree with them about that. It’s very, very important.
Nevertheless, this is a case of both not either / or being the right position. Why should we be advocating for one and not the other, or really in fact all flying insects, especially given their recent catastrophic declines.
We bought and tried their products several times only to find they were no different than a basic veggie burger or whatever. We couldn’t figure out what the hype was even about. And then I started reading about how their ingredient list wasn’t the healthiest.
Just seemed like just another weird Silicon Valley money bubble built on hype and vc cash instead of any kind of meaningful product differentiation.
Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s our genuine experience.
I know this is only a partial answer, but I feel like Google is once again trying to build a product based on internal priorities, existing business protectionism, and internal business goals, rather than building a product that is listening actively to real use feedback as the primary priority.
It is the company’s constant kryptonite.
They seem to be, from my third part perspective, repeating the same ol’, same ol’ pattern. It is the “wave lesson” all over again.
Anthropic meanwhile is giving people what they want. They are really listening. And it’s working.
If you're looking it through the lens of "agentic coding", then sure, Anthropic might be better than Gemini. But I use Gemini heavily for batch processing / web scraping workloads, and it's the only show in town there, really (because it's directly integrated into Google Search).
The thing is that this is genuinely useful to Googlers as well. If they’re internally dogfooding their tools and models for coding, it seems likely that things will improve.
I’m learning about the “era of the nations” thinking from Hungary’s Balázs Orbán, via an episode of a podcast called the Winston Marshall show. YouTube just randomly suggested it to me.
I just rebuild a speed queen dryer that broke with spare parts from Amazon, which revealed a remarkably simplistic engineering. Very surprised by how simplistic the mechanism was. It’s incredible how over engineered most laundry systems have become.
Also spent some time digging into the integrations between Tesla FSD and rideshare services today. It’s remarkable how much progress has happened.
Be careful what you believe from Balázs Orbán, as a Hungarian I can say he is mostly concerned to come up with a ideology to explain whatever Viktor Orbán is doing and not building a consistent model of world politics that drives actions.
Indeed. I think that’s an astute assessment. I listen to a massive variety of perspectives, and as a NATO member I think what they have to say is worth hearing at least. Thanks for your comment — appreciate it.
This is a case study in the failure of product market fit.
There is tons of room for a low cost, high quality small electric or hybrid pickup in today’s market.
Ford Maverick sales have been exceptionally strong, setting records in 2025 with 155,051 units sold in the US of A, up almost a fifth from last year.
Tesla needs to make a product that people want, and continuing to try to sell one they don’t want just won’t work. Why not pivot and build the truck people are asking for? Otherwise, this program will fail.
They should’ve released the electric tuck for the segment that wanted the maverick. Even better would e been an electric lei truck, but I don’t know if you’d be able to stack enough batteries on one of their tiny li’l frames
Is it infrastructure? Are they unable to control costs?
Everyone else is spending like money is water to try to get adoption. Claude has it and is dialing back utility so that its most passionate users will probably leave.
I don’t understand this move.
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