Every time I hear someone say that software is successful in spite of something I find that looking harder shows some interesting choices.

If this software succeeds despite the manifest failures that are pointed out here, that’s a sign that something is working. We could argue that something is just access to the model, but plenty of other companies sell that and they don’t seem to do as well.

In this case it's because they gate subscription access to their agent. If not for that, I wouldn't be using Claude Code. I like Anthropic overall, but it disappoints me that they didn't make CC open source and that they insist on tying subscription use to CC.