I'm honestly happy with them starting local-first, because... imagine what it would look like if they did the opposite.

> It would be a lot more interesting if I could connect this to my github in the web app and claude automatically has access to my code repositories.

In which case the "API" would be governed by a contract between Anthropic and Github, to which you're a third party (read: sharecropper).

Interoperability on the web has already been mostly killed by the practice of companies integrating with other companies via back-channel deals. You are either a commercial partner, or you're out of the playground and no toys for you. Them starting locally means they're at least reversing this trend a bit by setting a different default: LLMs are fine to integrate with arbitrary code the user runs on their machine. No need to sign an extra contact with anyone!