Claude Code and Codex are subsidizing tokens — and that's a trap
Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex are currently funding token costs heavily, making their products appear cheap or even nearly free. The expert's argument is that this is not sustainable long term and is a deliberate lock-in strategy. Because frontier labs are incentivized to tie you to their models and their processes, building your entire engineering workflow inside Claude Code or Codex means you are not building on a system that is optimized to keep costs reasonable for you over time — you're building inside a walled garden. The subsidized pricing feels great today, but the moment those subsidies shrink, your engineering costs explode and you have no leverage.
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