OpenAI won a lot of good favor for the generous Codex subscription and the efficiency of their models, but now that many people have switched over from Claude, they think they can leverage their position to peddle a stream of unnecessary products, and crack down on the generous limits[1] that brought everyone to Codex in the first place.

Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.

AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.

[1] https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713

Nerds suck. They are smelly, have bad posture, manners, never leave their rooms and are generally unappealing.

They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data, or lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.

Plus there is only so many of them.

People jumped ship from OpenAI because of their involvement with the US Government / military / Department of War / what have you. That spike was enough that Anthropic was starting to noticeably struggle, which is why they had to rent compute from X AI to get their compute back up to normal, I honestly think if they didn't hit this wall they might have IPO'd much sooner, before they bought extra compute from X AI they downscaled how much compute you can use, but it was poorly done because people got used to much higher limits, they should have explored more strategic options, their changes also broke my workflow several times over. As a result of anthropic trying to deal with the bleeding some users left for OpenAI because it was "unlimited" for some time, then they added limits too.

> AI companies are bad at making software

They should try using agents. I hear they can write great software.

"AI companies are bad at making software"

Claude Code and Claude Design would like to have a word. Absolute killer products.

Claude Tag could actually be really useful. Unfortunately, it's too much of a black hole for money. I tried adding it to incident channels, but if a channel gets left open for a few days, Claude will find ways to burn tokens waking up with empty prompt caches and doing nothing. $400 burned by Sonnet 5 on a single incident created because some alarms were oversensitive and didn't distinguish faults from errors. And I still had to prompt it like 5 times to get it to adjust metrics and tweak alarms correctly. Absolutely insane for a change that I could've made as a human in 10 minutes or had a directed Claude session under me do it in 2.

> unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack),

Hey, I never asked for it, but Slack Claude (ie. Claude Tag) has actually turned out to be a useful tool for a few things.

We should be grateful there are at least two serious competitors, and hope for more. (Come on Europe/Mistral, please do something interesting . . . )

If ever the competition reduced it would turn into an absolute shitfest of nonsense very very fast, and that is a prime reason not to allow them to "pace the frontier".

They're just trying things. It's not a conspiracy to "distract" anyone.

Did Claude actually lose the lead? They definitely lost a lot of good will but the only people I hear talking about actually switching away are people on message boards. Hermes/Openclaw users did as well but it was always reluctantly to something worse. At work it's still very much Claude first and only sometimes others if Claude fails, which is increasingly less often

The "generous subscription" was actually just heavily subsidized usage.

People seemingly ignore how ruinously unprofitable those companies are.

Codex is for a small software/programming market.

To survive they need to capture different wide population markets. Can't really fault that logic. The whole point of "SI", is general purpose right? So that would imply being used by multiple markets with multiple products.

The generous subscriptions are wildly unprofitable and both companies are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, it's that simple.

This is the standard VC enshittification playbook, people predicted this years ago. You subsidize prices with funding until you establish a monopoly, then you raise them as high as your customers can afford. It’ll continue to get worse from here.

The bitter lesson