I know, I get it. We probably need a new
counter guy at this point. I can't shut
up about all of these anthropic things.
I don't want to do this video. Believe
me, I pulled my audience asking if they
thought I should do it, and enough of
them said yes, that here we are. Because
despite all of the drama last week,
Enthropic is still causing problems. And
today, those problems went far enough
that I would go as far as to say that
for my use cases, Claude Code is no
longer usable. There are two things I
want to talk about in this video. The
first is how I specifically use cloud
code and the things they've done to
destroy it. And the second is about
system prompts. There's a reason for
this. Trust me, the system prompt thing
in particular is very, very dramatic.
Just to make my point about the
unusability here, I have Claude set up.
I'm paying the 200 bucks a month. Yeah,
still. And I'm going to run a Claude
command here where I just pass it a
prompt, but I'm going to add a little to
the system prompt. Just going to mention
that this is a personal assistant
running inside of OpenClaw. I'm going to
ask a simple question. Is Claude here
and I get an API error? I am far from
the only one who has a problem now. And
I wish this was my only problem. Believe
me, like just mentioning open claw in
your system prompt being enough to cause
your request to get rejected.
As always, Anthropic obviously doesn't
pay me. I pay them a lot of money and
neither does any of their competition.
In fact, I pay them a lot of money, too.
I am being paid by one person today,
though, today's sponsor. It's kind of
crazy how AI has made so much stuff
easier, but O is still obnoxious.
Getting all of the details right,
setting things up so the off flows work
and then trying to get preview builds
working. God forbid you have to add
billing to your service. All of this
stuff is obnoxious no matter how good
the AI gets. Unless you're using today's
sponsor, Clerk. Whenever I'm not using
Clerk, I honestly miss it. Their DX is
unmatched. Not only do they have all of
the components and libraries you would
need for any modern tool you might find
yourself using, they make it incredibly
easy to integrate by literally just
copying a prompt, going into your
project, hitting paste, and it's
implemented. I pushed this to the limit
a little bit. I had a project I was
working on that y'all might have seen.
It's called T3 Canvas. We ultimately
folded this into the T3 chat product.
When I was working on it, I did a lot of
experimentation. I had both a web and
mobile app and they were working great,
but I had no off experience cuz they
were built just as an experiment for me.
As more people wanted it, I wanted to
add Oth. So, I decided to push the
limits of Opus 4.5, not even 4.6. And I
asked to add Oth to my mono repo using
Clerk. I [ __ ] you not got it first try
across both web and mobile with fully
synced experiences across both platforms
with all of the integrations you would
expect from Clerk, including their super
helpful user component that lets you
manage your account and do all of the
things a user would want to do. This
also includes organizations for
companies that want to have everybody on
their team in a single group. That's
just built into Clerk. And yes, they
even give you a component you can mount
in your React app to do it. And if I was
to tell you how much I love the billing
product, I would need a lot more than
the ad time here. So keep an eye out for
the next one because Clerk has some
really cool stuff cooking. Add off that
agents love at soy.link/Clark.
Before we go any further, I want to make
one thing super clear. the thing that's
making me no longer use cloud code and
the thing that I just showed here with
the system prompt. These are two
different things, but they are both
touching on system prompts and how these
are affecting cloud code. First, we have
to talk a bit about how Anthropic is
changing Claude code and the usage that
you get on the usage plans that you can
subscribe to. Anthropic in a GPU crunch.
They want to save GPUs and have more
available for their researchers, for
their enterprise customers, and for many
other things. As such, they do a lot of
different stuff to reduce how much GPU
usage is happening. As I've mentioned
many times by now, you're probably tired
of it. You can get up to $5,000 of
inference from the $200 a month plan in
Cloud Code. You pay 200 a month, you use
Claude Code, and if you measure the
tokens in and out, you can get up to the
$5,000 plus range, which is an insane
number. Anthropic is willing to eat that
for two reasons. The first is because
the average user of these plans isn't
getting near that, so it balances out.
And the second is those power users are
using Claude code. They might be using
it a lot more than they're paying for,
but they're now locked into the
ecosystem. They're sometimes posting
about it. They're helping grow the
success of Claude. If you're the type
who is spending 200 bucks a month and
doing 5K a month of inference, you
probably also have a job or people who
care about what you say and can start to
convince other people to do it. Maybe
ones who won't do the 5K a month. They
will do $50 a month, but they're paying
200. The people who overuse clawed code
end up growing the pie enough that it's
a beneficial marketing spend for
anthropic. Open claw users don't fall
into this though. Open claw users
generally speaking are not a great
source of information. They're not a
great source of things you should learn
and follow and go do. Open claw itself
is awesome. I use it. I know a lot of
people who use it. But heavy openclaw
users are rarely the people you want to
learn things from. And those power users
of OpenClaw, how do I describe them?
They use a lot of inference. They think
they need the smartest model to
summarize their emails. They always
leave it on the highest version. Open
Claw will ping every 5 minutes a
heartbeat with way too much context in
it, sometimes doing multiple back and
forths each time. Open Claw can burn
tokens even if you're barely using it.
And if Anthropic saw a surge of Claude
Code subs because people were just using
it for OpenClaw, there's a good chance
that bucked up their economics. If the
average $200 a month Claude Code user
does $100 of inference, I would bet the
average $200 a month OpenClaw user is
doing $400 of inference. It's [ __ ]
over their economics. Some of that is
because of the implementation of
OpenClaw not being great. In fact,
Mario, the creator of Pi, one of my
favorite agents, I much prefer it to
Claude Code, pointed out that Boris, the
creator of Claude Code, actually filed
multiple PRs to OpenClaw, where he made
a bunch of changes to fix caching to
reduce the cost for people who are using
OpenClaw with anthropic models. This
happened after the change that I already
covered a lot on Twitter and promised
YouTube I wouldn't do a video on, but
here we are cuz it's not necessarily
about that. While I think a lot of the
anthropic bands of claude code usage and
other things are stupid, in particular
open code, I can hear the argument for
why you shouldn't be able to use your
cla code sub and open claw primarily out
of incompetence for anthropic though
because if they were competent, they
could do better rate limiting such that
claude code users would get a really
good value for their money and opencloud
users would hit limits faster because
they're not caching right. They're
burning inference. but it just did not
align with how they had set up usage in
claude code and as such they found it
easier to just kill off. I think that is
stupid considering how successful a
company Enthropic is. I think they could
have figured out a better way but they
chose not to. They did do this one good
thing where they made the usage of
tokens more efficient in openclaw. I
appreciate them for that. Three of the
four merging is cool. But on the other
hand, they should have reought things a
bit to prevent needing to kick them out
in the first place. And here's where we
get into the fun implementation details.
When open code got banned, they did it
through the headers because when you
send a web request, you have the body of
the request, which in this case is the
chat. It's the thing you want it to
respond to. We also have the headers,
which are like where this came from and
other properties, your O and whatnot. If
any of your headers mention open code,
Anthropic will just fail it at the API
level. They'll just refuse to process
it. You get an error. They did the same
for OpenClaw, as was expected. They even
sent out an email warning claude code
subs that used it with openclaw, which I
got because it's one of the four things
I use my claude code sub for. We'll go
through the other three momentarily. I
like how Opus models talk. I still like
them more than GPT for interacting. And
since OpenClaw is a thing that I text
back and forth, I liked it for that. I
found it nice for that. So, I used my
claw code sub for this. And I was under
the assumption they were going to check
my headers to prevent that. Don't worry
though, there's a workaround. Obviously,
Open Claw is its own harness. It has its
own tools, its own stuff. So, you have
to use that just with your O token. All
makes sense. Banning that should be
easy. Just ban the headers, ban the
shape of those requests. It'll be hard
to work around. But devs are clever. The
Open Claw maintainers in particular are
quite clever. If you're allowed to use
your sub through the Cloud CLI, but
you're not allowed to use it in other
CLIs or harnesses, well, that's easy.
Just call the Claude CLI then. And that
was a workaround that the OpenClaw team
had available. A binding where you would
not use OpenClaw's harness directly.
Instead, OpenClaw would programmatically
call Claude code not through agent
client protocol, just cla-p in your
terminal to trigger the thing and get
back a response. But in order for that
to work, they have to append some things
to the system prompt because obviously
for OpenClaw, the system prompt is nuts.
Which means in order for OpenClaw to
work, right, you need that system
prompt. Even if you have another
workaround to use the CLI, you have to
sneak that in. So, not only did
Anthropic ban all of the headers and
things to make their harness stop
working with the Claude sub, they banned
the mention of OpenClaw in your system
prompt so that you can't do it. And
ready to see just how nasty this gets.
In the Claude dashboard, you can choose
to turn on extra usage. This means that
when you go over your limits, you can
spend money out of whatever budget you
have to keep going. Right now, I have
extra usage off. If I try running this,
I get the 400 error. Ready for just how
nasty this gets? I just turned on extra
usage. Now, they're willing to respond.
They put a special flag in their routing
where you are build differently if you
have the mention of open claw in your
system prompt. I get how they got here,
but this is still so [ __ ] dirty. It's
insane. This is all fact. Nothing I have
said thus far is outside of the realm of
just obvious correct information. I am
saying this now because I'm drawing a
line because I'm about to get into some
conspiratorial thinking. And I hate
this. If you watch me for a while, you
know there's nothing I hate more than
going into theories that aren't
provable. I always prefer going with
real information where and when and how
I can. But I am not the only one that's
been pushed past this point. I'm going
to actually raid a post for Matt Pocco,
who if you're following me since the
TypeScript days, you know Matt is like
the much nicer, British, smarter, better
at Typescript Theo. Reminder, one of the
nicest people I know. Matt has been
incredibly polite and patient with
Anthropic trying to figure out if the
course he just made and put out for
money that is built entirely around
Claude Code, yes, he made a course,
which is his living, that's how he makes
money, that is primarily about Claude
Code. and he made some rapper stuff for
Claude Code to do the things he likes
and he doesn't know if he can put it out
or not and he's just trying to get an
answer. He's been trying to get an
answer for over a month and when all of
the drama happened last week, he made
this post that I think will go down in
history at this point. I don't know what
all the fuss is about. Anthropic's rules
on using subscriptions are very simple.
Claude Code, okay. Claude Codes online
platform, also okay. Asian SDK running
in personal software, okayish. Asian SDK
running in commercial software. Not
okay, obviously. I mean, come on. Cloud
code running in CI. Hm. Maybe it's not
so simple. Asian SDK running in CI.
Claude-P running in CI. Claude-P running
in personal software is okay. Cloud-p
running in open source software but run
on my personal computer.
Claude-P running on distributed
sandboxes kicked off by me. Distributing
open source software which relies on
cloud-p and documenting how to use it
with your subscription. M how about all
of the thousands of other edge cases?
Let me be clear. I have never before
experienced from any developer tool such
a frustrating lack of clarity over the
basic terms of usage. I personally asked
3 weeks ago and have received nothing
but delays. The recent Boris
announcement did absolutely nothing to
clarify things. I say this as someone
who just released a Claude Code course.
My incentives all align with supporting
Anthropic. This is somebody who very
clearly wants to support Anthropic. He
wants to be the Claude Code fanboy and
they are making it incredibly hard for
him. Just to emphasize how bad things
are here, remember Matt's like one of
the nicest people I know. I can't
remember the last time I saw him swear.
Anthropic subscription rules are more
complicated than Typescript generics.
That's [ __ ] up. Yeah, hilarious. Even
the anthropic defenders have been coming
out and saying the system prompt thing
changing the behavior is absurd. So,
what can we do now other than make
conspiracy theories? And now I'm going
to get into my own. And I'm getting into
this because I still do use claw code,
believe it or not. And not just through
T3 code, which by the way, if you don't
know, T3 code is the only UI that is
actually performant and a pleasant way
to work with lots of different projects
at once. It's also fully open source and
free. and it uses your cloud code sub by
calling claude code with your O from
your local install through the Asian SDK
which we think is okay. We are under the
belief it is okay from my contacts at
Anthropic from the people I have
discussed this with online offline all
around the world. I would be very very
surprised if they were not okay with
this but I am secretly hoping they do
something to ban it because I will tear
them to [ __ ] pieces if they do. I
could probably win in court. I do
legitimately believe that. Anyways, if
you want to use models from a company
that isn't evil, we also support codecs
with your codec sub. We don't charge any
money. You can't even bring your own
keys. You got to use your codec or
claude. However they're set up, we'll
just give you a good UI for. We added
Claude because again, I still use the
models. I use Claude and specifically
Claude code either through T3 code or
believe it or not sometimes through the
terminal still for three things. I use
it for front end because it's still my
favorite model for doing UI. So, I'll
sometimes get a bunch of work done in
GPT 5.4 for and then move over to Claude
in order to get some UI fixes out. I use
it for setting up new machines, which I
have to do painfully often. I just like
using Claude for quick one-off things
like, "Hey, I have SSH connections to
this other machine on my network. Copy
over all my configs." I like it for that
type of stuff still. And then thing
three, which I did still genuinely
really like using Claude for until
today, and I was so frustrated I went
live on Easter to film this particular
video. I use it for debugging random
[ __ ] on my machine. I don't mean code. I
mean things that aren't working how I
expect. Maybe a video in code didn't go
right or a video file isn't playing
correctly. Maybe this file is too big
and I don't know why. Maybe this program
isn't launching the way it should. Since
Cloud Code itself is kind of a black
box, I find it to be fun to use. Not
somewhat ironically, but also just cuz I
like using it and talking to it. I like
using it for that type of debugging. I
have never had a more painful back and
forth with a model than I did today when
I had Dropbox failing to work on my new
laptop. I still use Dropbox for managing
media assets with my team. And I wanted
to use it to make a thumbnail for today.
I noticed that it wasn't appearing in my
top bar. It is now, but it wasn't at the
time. And whenever I typed in Dropbox in
Finder or whatever else, like typing in
Dropbox and enter to try and launch it,
it would launch and then nothing would
happen. I wouldn't see it. It wouldn't
appear. It wouldn't do anything. So, I
do what I normally do when I have these
things happen. I open Claude Code.
Honestly, the more I think about it, I
think the reason why I do this is I have
an alias for claude code that hides my
email in it and also turns on yolo mode.
With codeex, I type out codex- yolo
every time. With cla code, I just type
cc and it's in there. So, that's
actually a legitimately big part of why
I do it. So, I do what I always do. I
open cloud code and I asked it to fix
the problem. I can't get my Dropbox app
to open. I think it's hung in the
background. Kill it and relaunch it for
me. It did. It relaunched. I signed in
and nothing worked. I couldn't get it to
pop up. I couldn't get it to behave. So
I asked working now, but I don't see it
in my menu bar. They make a change where
it doesn't show anymore. That's outside
my area. I'm built for software
engineering tasks like writing code,
debugging, and working with repos. I
wouldn't know about recent Dropbox UI
changes. I'd suggest checking Dropbox's
settings for a show Dropbox and menu bar
option or checking their support site
for recent updates. Do you know what you
can do, Claude? Because you have a tool
for search. Yeah, I was pissed. So I
then asked, can you do some research for
me? Sure, but keep in mind I'm best
suited for software engineering
research, code bases, APIs, libraries,
architecture, etc. What did you want me
to look into? Why I can't see the
Dropbox menu icon? That's really a
Dropbox support question, not something
I can reliably help with. What the [ __ ]
I know I put a question in the random
number generator and got back numbers I
didn't like. I understand. I've already
been gaslit by anthropic employees being
told that this is just what happens with
non-deterministic models. Nobody can be
blamed when things don't work how
they're expected to. [ __ ] you. It never
did this before. And here is where we
start the conspiracy theory. I genuinely
believe that part of this effort they
have been putting in around the system
prompt blocking is making it so you
cannot use the claude-p command, which
reminder I used earlier. It lets you run
claud code without having the whole cla
code interface. It just runs the prompt
and gives the response. My conspiracy
theory is that they want to make it so
you cannot use this for openclaw. So the
first thing they did was ban the
openclaw phrase on the API level. And
the second thing they did, and here's
the conspiracy, they edited the system
prompt to make it very clear to Claude
code, you are just here for doing
software development tasks. You are not
meant to assist the user with general
computer stuff. Because [ __ ]
yesterday this worked and today it
doesn't. The only explanation is the
system prompt. That is how things about
software engineering leak in where it
will say that's outside of my area. And
until somebody at Anthropic comes out
and says for a fact with receipts that
they did not change the system prompt
between releases, I am fully believing
my [ __ ] conspiracy. And they are
[ __ ] lying. And just for the record,
here is me asking the same thing to our
friends over at Codeex, which did it
perfectly first try. I copy pasted the
first message. I can't get my Dropbox
app to open. I think it's hung in the
background. Kill and relaunch it. It
did. I then said I don't see the menu
icon or the window. It just opens the
folder that's syncing. The background
process is running, but the UI isn't
servicing while trying to activate the
app directly and bring its frontmost
window forward. It ran through a bunch
of stuff. It was getting close, but it
didn't quite figure it out. So, I did a
steering prompt while it was still
running telling it, hey, you should also
do some research online to see if others
are having the same problem. And it
immediately started searching, found
some stuff. Specifically, it found that
it should still show it. found other
user reports reporting the same
behaviors, saying it doesn't look like a
one-off. It's a recurring Dropbox on Mac
OS tray issue. It made some proposals on
how it could possibly find the problem.
It hinted that there might actually be a
second Dropbox install causing the
problem, which would make sense because
I did install it through Brew. Honestly,
funny enough, I installed it through
Brew via Claude Code is my other
machine, seeing I had it and then
installing it, which it might have done
wrong. So, I installed it. Nuke all the
Dropbox installs. I don't mind losing my
sync folders. When you're done, give me
a to-do list on how to safely reinstall
to minimize issues. And it did. It went
and nuked it. It had to run commands and
information for it. Asked me to fix
that. I did. And then it gave me this
to-do list of all the things I should do
after I reboot. So, I did it. And now
Dropbox is working again. All without
opening a browser. Even people who have
previously been okay with these changes
think this is absurd. As Simon Willis
says here, "Billing differently based on
text contained in the system prompt is a
really bad look." or Dex here, who I
tore apart before for being way too
defensive of anthropic and trying to
figure out some good faith reason
they're being so shitty, saying that his
previous narrative is entirely out the
window now because they build
differently based on your system prompt.
I was previously a little to the
anthropic side of the spectrum on this
because of exactly one argument. Third
party harnesses don't use caching
properly and they can't be controlled
with feature flags. If they're blocking
use of cloud agent SDK wholesale and
open claw at a system prompt level, then
this completely invalidates that
argument and I desire an answer as to
what is allowed and why. I am
disappointed that the communications
thus far have failed to articulate the
reasons here and it does make it harder
to trust whatever they say next. Yeah,
one of the few people who could ever
convince me on my conspiracy theory here
being wrong is here. Bad Logic Games,
who is the creator of Pi, which I've
already cited in this video, funny
enough. Apparently, he actually tracks
the system prompt in Claude code to see
how it changes over time. And it looks
like there was no meaningful change
here. Thank you immensely. Bad logic.
It's totally Don't be sorry for giving
me the factual information. For what it
is worth, I have heard that claude code
requests get some more system prompt
injection happening on the API level.
So, I would not be surprised there. But
this puts a huge pile of speculation
into my conspiracy theory for sure. But
I will emphasize again, I've never had
such a bad experience with cloud code in
my life since like the 3.5 days. Well,
37 I think is when it came out. Never
had this bad an experience with it. It's
got to be API injection. Thankfully,
chat seems to agree cuz this is just
absurdity. I've never seen anything like
this. I'm going to do a thing that hurts
me a bit. It's time to change my habits.
I could go performatively cancel my
subscription, but that doesn't do that
much. I'm going to do something else. I
have an alias in my zish rc CC. It opens
cloud code with a few custom flags.
Replace it with one that opens codecs
with- yolo on. I already preferred
codecs for coding. I already preferred
codecs for research. I already preferred
codecs honestly in general and I love
that the CLI is open source. I like the
model more overall. It's smarter. It's
more capable. I can trust it to do
things for longer. But I still reached
for cloud code for just doing quick
things on my computer. And that is now
over. The directory for my sandboxing on
my computer is literally CC sandbox and
the CC stood for quad code. In December,
Cloud Code changed the way I build
software and the way I think about
software on a fundamental level. I know
I give it a lot of [ __ ] and I know most
people think of me as Cloud Co's number
one hater, but if you ask the people I
know IRL, I've been known to defend it.
I've called it a more than good enough
solution and a phenomenal gateway into
new ways of thinking and building. I was
hoping throughout all of this that they
would [ __ ] wake up and do anything
right. And every single time I think
we're getting a taste of that, of them
doing the right thing, they literally
contradict it in my [ __ ] replies.
Even just two days ago when I saw Boris
specifically say yep to someone asking
if we can use the models and the
subscriptions for personal local tools
that are wrapping cloud harnesses like
cloud code and cloud code headless with
agent SDK. Boris said, "Yep, working on
improving clarity here." I thought we
were in the clear. I was so excited. I
thanked him publicly. I blasted this
publicly. I was ready to defend them. I
was ready for this all to be [ __ ]
over. And then poor Thoric, again, just
doing his job in efforts to prevent
misinformation, replied to me, to be
clear, this is not guidance or an update
on the agent SDK. We're still working on
clarity there. Nothing has gotten
better, and everything has continued to
get worse. But despite all of that,
Claude Code was still usable, and I
didn't have enough reason to stop using
it. That changed today. Today is the
last day I intentionally open Claude
Code for anything other than content.
And now my binding officially points to
a CLI that doesn't hate you, that is
transparent about what you can and can't
do with it, that has humans that answer
hard questions with harder answers, that
is trying, and that for whatever [ __ ]
reason, despite being worth 800 billion
plus dollars, seems to care. I'm done
telling Anthropic what they can do to
fix things because they're not [ __ ]
fixing things. They're making them worse
and I'm tired. So, I'm gonna focus my
energy on the team that is listening,
the team that is excited to do better,
the team that hangs out in my Twitch
chat, the team that makes jokes when I
call them out for their [ __ ] the
team that is actually trying to win, and
the team that's going to win. If you
haven't tried Codex yet, I highly
recommend it. It is a better CLI. It has
access to better models. It's open
source. It's easier to build on top of,
and you can use the O other places. If
you don't like the CLI, go use your Roth
in Pi. Go use it in Open Code. Go use it
in T3 Code. Go use it somewhere better
because OpenAI aren't [ __ ] [ __ ]
And I'm done. I really am. That's all I
got to say on this one. My last reasons
for using Cloud Code died in front of me
this morning and I had to make one last
video. I will do my best to make this
actually the last one and I will hope
the next model doesn't bring me back
with my tail between my legs. This is my
honest takes. And if you see this video
and you're still thinking that I'm being
paid by one of these labs to talk about
things, I don't know what the [ __ ]
you're asking for at this point. I
couldn't be more honest here. I was
still using Cloud Code until today and I
no longer am. I am done and I encourage
you to explore other options, too. And
until next time, peace nerds.