Use of third-party tools that misrepresent their identity to Anthropic’s servers, attempt to route third-party traffic against subscription limits, or otherwise violate applicable terms or policies is prohibited and such use may be enforced against.
dario uses your own OAuth token to access your own subscription. It doesn't bypass any limits — it ensures your requests are correctly classified under the budget you already paid for.
Without the billing tag, third-party tools get silently reclassified from your plan allocation to overage (pay-per-token) after ~1 hour. You're not getting free access — you're getting charged extra for access you already paid for.
The fingerprint injection exists because Anthropic's infrastructure uses it to route billing. If they exposed a proper API for Max subscribers, this wouldn't be necessary.
I understand you want really hard to believe in what you're saying. But you should believe them when they say "no third party applications using OAuth".
It's irrelevant if you're paying them. They say clearly 1P apps are ok; 3P apps are not. Yours is 3P, so you're breaking the ToS.
Will they care? Probably not. At least not until you become popular enough to show up in their dashboards. So you should be fine for a whole, until you cross some threshold and they decide it's time to close the loophole.
For this to stop working, they'd have to block the json streaming mode or the custom system prompt mode entirely. The system prompt can be changed however you want. It's cat and mouse. This doesn't go against any TOS we'll see how they respond.
Yes, cat and mouse, except that each user who gets caught will have their account and credit card banned for life. Good luck dealing with the hassle of losing your account history.
Look, I would love to pay a fixed amount per month ($20, $200, whatever) and have an all-you-can-eat token buffet. But that is (today) a commercial impossibility.
Maybe one day inference will become so cheap that we'll all have a single subscription, and assisted by powerful local models. But today the token consumption is outpacing the reduction in inference cost, so we're nowhere near this becoming a reality.
Same reason you invest in any seed stage startup: the founder has a vision, you believe they have researched the topic more than anyone else, there's a meaningful total addressable market, and they have the focus and ability to get there. More importantly, you believe they have the resilience to endure for the next 10-15 years, even if they have to pivot a dozen times until they succeed.
Software - at seed stage - was never a moat. It was just a prerequired (and scarce) resource. Classic example: Dropxbox in 2007 [1].
That's not the case anymore (or won't be, at some point soon).
good software (and hardware) was a moat in many cases, google had the best software, others tried to copy pageRank, but google scaled better and faster and killed them. Amazon, youtube, netflix. Many such cases. OSs, Browsers, those are huge moats and moneymakers.
If it can be commoditized, why not just steal the idea and give it to a tried-and-true professional CEO
We're talking about different stages of evolution. Scale is rarely a factor during your first few years. Of course software can be moats, but much, much later.
Anyone could have used Markov Chains to implement PageRank in 1997, but no one did. And Dropbox was laughed at here on HN for being a simple python wrapper for ftp. Any "tried-and-true professional CEO" had the resources to implement something 10x better, but they didn't. It happens that CEOs are usually busy delivering quarterly results, and won't chase every shiny opportunity.
My point (and the article's) is that until recently it was nearly impossible for startup founders to go from 0 to 1 without strong technical skills. Non-technical founders were almost always DOA: too costly to get to an MVP, and no VC would fund someone who doesn't have something concrete to show. Brian Chesky (Airbnb) comes to mind as one of the few counterexamples.
That barrier is now drastically reduced. I'd go as far as to say that the new stereotypical startup founder for the next decade is someone coming from a product / design background, and not engineering / computer science.
I don't understand what your comment is about. You don't like his style, you disagree with the evidence, or the conclusion?
The author is Brad Feld [1], who wrote checks to thousands of startups, wrote a dozen books, and advises a bunch of founders. He's talking about his personal experience observing the shift in the typical profile of a startup entrepreneur.
I think his perspective is very valid. For the past 20 years we assumed (and confirmed through empirical evidence) that having a technical co-founder was critical for the success of a startup.
This era is getting to an end, and the next 20 will be radically different in the next 20. You'll probably still need human engineering skills to scale, but getting from 0 to 1 will depend much more on taste than how good you are in <language X>.
In the author's defense, I just read a chapter, and it doesn't feel like AI slop. I think they were just being brutally transparent with disclaimers. The author has "two decades of experience teaching creative coding".
Also the book is beautifully designed. Clearly a lot of effort and taste was put into it (as you'd expect from a Creative Coding book).
I'm not the target audience, but if this work was only possible because of AI, I'd say this is a win for the world.
Full disclaimer from the pdf:
> AI ASSISTANCE
> This book was created through an extended collaboration between the author, Claude (Anthropic), and ChatGPT (OpenAI). The structure, pedagogical framework, and frustrations catalog emerged from the author’s two decades of teaching creative coding. AI served as writing partner, generating draft content based on detailed prompts while the author provided direction, critique, iteration, and editorial control. AI was also used to generate specific images. All teaching insights, personal anecdotes, and educational philosophy originate from the author’s experience.
Oh, how insensitive from my part. I didn't realize this was done to memorialize Sir Tony Hoare. Thanks for the answer, and apologies for such a frivolous question.
And how do you actually identify who should pay that $0.000713? And who should receive it? How do you make the process effortless, so the user doesn't have to spend 5 minutes registering on a website, just to send $0.000713?
Now make it work 10,000 times per day, for every page you visit, posts, news, short form content you scroll, long form video you watch. And multiply this by billions of users.
And once you've done that, how do you deal with spam, bots? How do you prevent invalid traffic? Fraudulent chargebacks? And how do you take quality into consideration (NYT prob want to charge more than my crappy personal blog)?
Transferring money is one small element of large and complex equation.
Advertising is not perfect, but it's the best alternative for a free and open web I have seen in my 30+ years online. Subscription works for large ticket items (and for the affluent minority), but it doesn't solve the other 95% of cases.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47733345
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