Claude may be arguably the best model, but why decide unilaterally for your users that they _have_ to use it?

If there's no particular feature that only Claude offers, this is just needless vendor lock-in. And what happens if another lab releases a model that suddenly trounces Claude at coding? Your users will leave for an app that supports the new hotness, and you won't be able to keep them because of a short-sighted architecture that cannot swap model providers.

The situation with models right now is that to eke out that last bit of performance, you have to do some things in ways that are specific to the model in question - wording of prompts, when and where to introduce relevant parts into context etc.

Because Claude code does offer particular features. More important than “features” is the fact that it works and does the things you want like 60-70% of the time, with guardrails and practice and attention. Which is way better than competing tools.

Besides that. These tools are changing so fast that to build an agent agnostic tool would be insane given the speed and market pressures right now. Why support roo or cline or cursor cli if it adds 3x engineering cost for 20% more market reach? The reality is there are no standards around the way the actual leading tools work if you wanna build something on Claude/codex/(insert flavor of the week).

Gotta pick your horse and try to hang on, and hope you picked right.

> Claude may be arguably the best model, but why decide unilaterally for your users that they _have_ to use it?

What a ridiculous proposition. It’s me making the app right? You getting to use it (if you want) is purely incidental. If you never use it because it doesn’t support anything but claude, that’s not something I consider a problem.

There’s value in Anthropic being able to optimize their model’s front end to fulfill whatever features they plan for CC - like tool calling. You point out a valid risk of lock-in, maybe this signals they are committed to being at the forefront of coding models (part of enterprise play)?

While I prefer Cline/Roo at work where I have multiple API plans for AI models, for personal I have Claude Pro and that really only works with Claude code. The benefit is that I can use it on a $20 a month plan.