The people defending Anthropic because “muh terms of service” are completely missing the point. These are bad terms. You should not accept these terms and bet the future of your business on proprietary tooling like this. It might be a good deal right now, but they only want to lock you in so that they can screw you later.
But switching cost to a different CLI coding tool is close to zero… I truly don’t understand the argument that using Claude Code means betting your business on that particular tool. I use Claude Code daily, but if tomorrow they massively raised prices, made the tool worse, or whatever I’d just switch to a competitor and keep working like nothing happened.
To be clear, I’ve seen this sentiment across various comments not just yours, but I just don’t agree with it.
They wouldn’t require you to use their closed source client if they weren’t planning on using it to extract value from you later. It’s still early & a lot more capabilities are going to be coming to these tools in the coming months. Claude Code or an equivalent will be a full IDE replacement and a lot of the integration and automation mechanisms are going to be proprietary. Want to offload some of that to the cloud? Claude Code Web is your only option. Someone else drops a better model or a model that’s situationally better at certain types of tasks? You can’t use it unless you move everything off of that stack.
As an example, this is the exact type of thing Anthropic doesn’t want you to be able to build with Claude & it’s why they want you on their proprietary tooling:
https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-a...