While I also prefer companies that don't care what the client I'm using is, (part of) the issue is that alternative software was often inefficient with caching, at least up until recently (not sure whether it might have been patched).
OpenClaw heartbeats (essentially idling) could cost single-digit dollar amounts of LLM inference per day, _before any actual user activity_. Another example was IIRC the Pi agent harness sending a new timestamp at the start of every message turn (which sends along the entire chat + tool call history up until that point as context), which of course also invalidates the cache's hash, causing effectively unnecessary re-compute.
I'm not defending Anthropic per se, but just try to picture yourself in their position as a company desperately strapped for any amount of free compute trying to scale up every service as aggressively as they want/have to… And the caching topics are just one potential issue that could occur with "third-party" software. Not that I like it, but of course they'd be quick to ban such behavior in favor of first-party, "guaranteed behaving" customers.
I prefer flexible companies that allow you to use whatever software you want with their services.
OpenClaw heartbeats (essentially idling) could cost single-digit dollar amounts of LLM inference per day, _before any actual user activity_. Another example was IIRC the Pi agent harness sending a new timestamp at the start of every message turn (which sends along the entire chat + tool call history up until that point as context), which of course also invalidates the cache's hash, causing effectively unnecessary re-compute.
I'm not defending Anthropic per se, but just try to picture yourself in their position as a company desperately strapped for any amount of free compute trying to scale up every service as aggressively as they want/have to… And the caching topics are just one potential issue that could occur with "third-party" software. Not that I like it, but of course they'd be quick to ban such behavior in favor of first-party, "guaranteed behaving" customers.