How can you dismiss the value of the tech so blatantly? Have you used Opus for general questions and coding?

> no idea whether it's actually benefiting someone "on the ground"

I really don't get it. Before, we were farmers plowing by hand, and now we are using tractors.

I do totally agree with your sentiment that it's still a horrible development though! Before Claude Code, I ran everything offline, all FOSS, owned all my machines, servers etc. Now I'm a subscription user. Zero control, zero privacy. That is the downside of it all.

Actually, it's just like the mechanisation of farming! Collectivization in some countries was a nightmare for small land owners who cultivated the land (probably with animals). They went from that to a more efficient, government controlled collective farm, where they were just a farm worker, with the land reclaimed through land reform. That was an upgrade for the efficiency of farming, needing fewer humans for it. But a huge downgrade for the individual small-scale land owners.