glub

I'm confused. Who would be performing distillation? Surely someone for whom distillation is valuable has enough money not to resort to this sort of crime?

Account farming is one thing, and nobody apart from who's being distilled cares about that, but draining wallets of other people is a whole other thing.

> today paying this debt is getting cheaper and cheaper.

Like before AI, that debt is never going to get paid. Because how exactly are you paying off that debt when the means of paying are debt generators?

And even if you do know how to use the model and the harness, Claude is just generally still a much a better experience overall.

Returned to Claude as my main driver after many months of Codex and my frustration index is in much, much better place. I can't recommend Codex/GPT to anyone, not just normies. It does make for a really nice reviewer though.

Looks like they finally got the solution. Now they won't cause an error at 64k tokens anymore:

> expanding the model’s output token limit to an industry-leading 1M tokens, up from the previous 64K tokens

You could only use it on chatgpt.com

Now you can use it in coding harnesses that call the API.

> People said the same about $200 a month

This is missing an important context. And I actually remember this well, because I was saying that too. And the reason I was saying is that $200 plan didn't come with API usage, it was a chat plan.

It made no sense up until they started including API usage. Just as $500 makes no sense now.

> costs going to 10% of white collar income.

There's a permanent and ever lowering ceiling maintained by open weight models. It makes no sense to justify paying 10% of income permanently for something that will get you unlimited local inference for a 6 month subscription cost.

Interesting thing is that I would have expected Anthropic to do the price hike on the basis that their models are so much better right now. But it's more likely that OAI will have to backtrack regardless of what ANT does. Interesting times ahead.

If ANT does the price hike, OAI will be forced to backtrack because they're just not equal, OAI is behind. ANT would still be a much better value overall, and people will remember that it was OAI that made their ANT subscription more expensive. So the hiatus will happen. There's a lot of users that have $200 plans on both ANT and OAI. $500 leaves the slot for just 1 sub for them.

But I think the price hike is not going to happen. $500 is much, much harder to justify than $200 for the same usage. This is a horrible business decision, so Anthropic may just watch OAI bleed customers.

Yes, either US AI corps reduce the cost of their top tier personal subscriptions down to what people are already paying for other expensive personal apps (e.g. Adobe), so ~$50-100, or open weights are going to eat their lunch very quickly. We're not there yet, as current hardware doesn't allow you to do things like multiple parallel agents, but we'll get there soon enough.

$500 for the old $200 is definitely a fumble.

Yeah, that's not going to happen. They are more likely to lose a lot of customers, unless Anthropic does the same thing.

But $200 is likely the ceiling of what people will pay for a subscription with usage based on vibes.

This day may go down in history as one of the worst in OpenAI's history. It's so bad it's funny.

OpenAI announced they built clones of apps that already exist, codex for normal people, and 2.5x price increase for the product that is already getting decimated by competition.

What is happening at OpenAI?

I can't imagine OpenAI not backtracking this unless Anthropic does the price hike too.

So essentially, another attempt at giving codex to regular people.

Yeah, Anthropic's marketing is shady. But x of y doesn't really give me any information. I have no clue what 1x is on a given day with either OpenAI or Anthropic.

In the end, the only thing that ultimately matters is how much total value are you getting each week. And Anthropic has been dominating OpenAI here for the past 2 months. Even with that 20x-but-really-2x thing.

Codex $200 usage was already lower than $200 of Claude for around 2 months now. Half of that means that subscription is not really worth it unless you max things out all the time. But if you're going to go with API rates, there are better priced options out there than whatever OpenAI provides.

This is a risky strategy for OpenAI, and time will tell how will this work. But my hunch is that this is a catastrophic blunder.

I was listening to Dario's podcast where he was talking about how the entire game is in predicting extremely well how much compute you buy in advance, and if you miscalculate, it's pretty much over.

Looks like OpenAI miscalculated.

> This is not how people write!

While I agree with you that this is likely AI assisted, I think this may be changing now.

People speak in the manner of what they consume. If you consume a lot of claudish, you will eventually start talking claudish too. And I've already noticed people talking claudish in real life.

You can't work on anything in an organization as large as, and with as many eyes on as OpenAI/Anthropic without it becoming publicly known very quickly.

The entire reason why hardware prices are so absurd right now is because manufacturers across the board are doing everything to prevent that crash.

They all collectively chose NOT to increase supply with increased demand. So if the bubble pops, they just go back to previous prices without oversupply driving the prices to rock bottom.

I've developed several plugins for different harnesses, and I needed some upstream change for most of them.

The deciding factor for me whether or not I will work on the feature of the plugin is whether I (or rather, my agent) can look in upstream source and evaluate if it can be done with minimal upstream change, which I then contribute. And generally, even if no upstream change is needed, agents work so much better when they can read the code.

So why not just make Claude code open source? Considering also that source code was leaked once anyway.

That 50k was almost certainly accumulated encrypted reasoning tokens that would have been unreadable by astra.

Also include that all of this comes with full reasoning traces, so if something goes wrong, you know exactly what assumption it started from.

I think what they did was allow resubs for users who already had $200 sub before.

Just checked my toy chatgpt account that only ever had a $20 sub. $200 plan still shows "The 20X plan is temporarily unavailable for purchase".

Not natively, as it's still a ToS violation and adding that in pi would go against pi principles, but there are many plugins/proxies that make it work.

oh-my-pi supports it natively (again, still a ToS violation), by impersonating claude code's fingerprints.

I have been using oh-my-pi with 3 claude subs for the past few months without any issues. Even native server-side OAI/ANT compaction works out of the box.

It's for lock-in - same reason why it took them so long to finally support AGENTS.md.

But to be fair, they don't really enforce the harness rule that much anymore. I guess if your harness doesn't do a lot of weird things like a lot of cache misses, or triggers some distillation attacks, or some broader Chinese fingerprints, they're tongue-in-cheek okay with you using a third party harness.

Added link in edit. OMP maintainer has several claude and codex subs and he's been tracking usage since around July.

I haven't been tracking, but this roughly matches my experience with codex 20x and claude 20x subs. Claude subscription now lasts me 3-3.5 days on average. Codex is 2-2.5 days. This is work on same projects, with similarly sized tasks.

To make matters worse, I've merged a lot more code produced by fable than sol/astra.

Perhaps. But Sol/Astra also likes dumping pages of jargon-packed content at me, so I'm not sure it's that much different. I actually still prefer the way Fable talks to me, even considering the horrible claudisms.

But even if we leave that aside, OpenAI models are also much more eager than Anthropic, which are on the lazier side. Left unsupervised, Sol/Astra will attempt to build a sha256 verified rocket ship if you ask them to fix a race condition in your to-do list app. Anthropic models will do what you asked for, maybe even forget to implement parts of that ask, but they won't generally throw a slop granade at you.

I can leave Fable orchestrator unsupervised for ~2h. Leaving Sol/Astra unsupervised for ~2h means the next user turn will contain a message: "what are you doing and why?".

I think OpenAI essentially executed a bait-and-switch here, and they've lost a lot of goodwill with me, like Anthropic did, before them.

When they started the aggressive campaign, entire X (including myself, sadly) was full of posts about how "unlimited" codex usage is even on a $20 plan. Sam Altman was posting something in line of "we love our users, unlike Anthropic". Got my network to get codex subs because of the value compared to claude.

Then they gradually reduced the limits to the point where even $200 plan only lasts you just 1-2 days and $20 is basically unusable, then the hostage thing.

Yes.

https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2098113585683808624

> Usage limits [...] Winner right now is Codex by a mile

This hasn't been the case since around July. If you measure usage in raw api costs, Anthropic is actually giving more on $200 than OpenAI now. This includes resets. Usage allocation difference would be humiliating for codex subs were it not for resets. But fixing usage limits with resets is ugly, and they're not good for your mental well-being.

> Context window in the harness

Codex now allows 1M for subs with config params. But generally speaking, you shouldn't really be using 1M context. If you accidentally send a request with say, ~700k context already accumulated in a session which is outside cache TTL, you're paying full cost of these 700k tokens.

> I've subscription hopped a bunch

OpenAI actually has a new strategy to prevent subscription hopping after their 2-3 month-long marketing push to get claude-folks to switch over:

you can't buy a $200 sub anymore. So if you cancel, you won't be able to get back in. Hostage situation, essentially.

EDIT: re: usage limits, oh-my-pi maintainer has been tracking this - https://nitter.xitter.cc/_can1357/status/2090075496948060372

Don't forget that Opus 5 was tracking fable on many benchmarks, yet it was borderline unusable for any coding work. My Claude sub usage has been 100% fable, 0% opus 5.

Benchmarks often don't survive contact with reality.

> For users with cybersecurity use cases that may be blocked by our cyber safeguards, we recommend accessing our models with reduced cyber blocking classifiers via our Cyber Verification Program. Claude Opus 5.5 will be available through this program in the near future.

Anthropic has used "in the near future" for Mythos-class models too, but CVP is still Opus 5 only.

Why even have the program designed for trusted access to cyber capabilities if you're not providing access to cyber capable models via the program?

System card: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/fc1b44717c85dc068bc6ba50242199...