I've installed Obsidian a while ago to play with it. This is a reminder that this thing is still on my devices. I'm getting rid of it now. I recall reading the forum posts and all the excuses for not making it open source. Oh, please, say you want to keep it closed source because you're afraid you'll lose money and control. Leave it at that. Don't make up excuses.
I've been using open source alternatives for different purposes for some time.
Obsidian would've been a great choice as open source note taking software. As it is now, it's just one sale, one exploit or one corporate rug pull away from being turned into something else.
Third party audits are meaningless. They were done for one specific version of the code at one point in time. There's literally nothing preventing a malicious version of the software from being shipped. The same goes for plausible deniability on security vulnerabilities in the context of plugins (even with these alleged prompts that the user has to skip on purpose).
This is pearl clutching. This feels like a massive overreaction. If you don't want to use it because it's not open source, that's fine, but you're spreading a lot of snarky FUD about the creators.
They are not making excuses, they stated clearly why open sourcing it is tangential to this problem at best, and they're not the only user to call out the hijacking of the thread. They have been quite clear about why they keep it closed source, so I don't know why you're making it sound like they are lying to their users.
Your rant about audits has little to do with the article too. Telling everyone we're going to get rug pulled is exactly the kind of performative FUD that is meant to get a reaction more than anything.
Speaking for myself, I'm going to keep using it, because nothing has come close to the convenience and performance. Would love an open source alternative to prove me wrong, but I haven't seen it.
"Oh, please, say you want to keep it closed source because you're afraid you'll lose money and control."
That's not good enough for open source zealots. That's when you end up being the headliner in an endless flood of blog posts and detailing comments telling everyone you're a 'proprietary evil man'.
It's open source or nothing. And how dare you make money.
Claude Code and the subscription are now less useful than a few months ago. Claude Code and the service seem to pick up more and more issues as time goes by: more bugs, fast quota drain, reduced quota, poor model performance, cache invalidation problems, MCP related bugs, potential model quantization and other problems.
Claude Code was able to implement something in one shot. It was decent for a proof of concept initial implementation. It's barely able to do work now with full specs and detailed plans.
ChatGPT is also being watered down.
It seems obvious that Anthropic and OpenAI aren't the solution to any problem.
Every single one of these AI services are running at loss, they are subsidized. Anybody who is surprised that these services are going to get degraded and their cost go up substantially learned nothing from the last 20 years of SAAS. It never gets cheaper.
Use cloud AI hoster with open model. Can't get more transparent and reliable than that. They won't subsidize anything, because the whole point of their business is to rent hardware. Open models won't go anywhere, they're there to stay.
The quality will be a bit behind frontier proprietary models. You gotta pay for what you use, no way to cover your expenses from peers underusing their subscription. But otherwise it should be a reasonable middle ground, with very little risk of rug being pulled out from you.
I caught up with a friend who said he's really happy with Cursor (currently using the multi-model option where it composes, and reserving use of Opus 4.6 for only when he actually needs the extra power).
Quite interesting considering all the claims that Cursor was dead a few months ago.
I wouldn't trust another company either. Some people have reported some issues with Cursor. The solution is probably not a cloud API with unknown quotas or pay as you go pricing.
An advantage with Cursor, though, is you're paying for your own tokens since Cursor doesn't run their own foundational models. So the incentives are more closely aligned with the customer.
Claude Code and Opus used to do a great job a few months ago. It seemed to get it right more often than not. It seemed to be far better at figuring out what has to be done and getting it right on the first attempt. This is likely model related since Claude Code has received some bug fixes since.
The list of bugs and performance problems appears to keep growing: reduced usage quotas, poor performance with numerous attempts at getting things right, cache invalidation bugs, background requests which have to be disabled explicitly to avoid consuming the quota too fast, Opus appears to be quantized even with high thinking mode, poor tool use with tool search disabled, broken tool search with tool search enabled, laziness, poor planning, poor execution, gets stuck when debugging simple code issues, writes code which isn't required, starts making changes and executing whatever it wants when told to simply prepare a plan for something, it doesn't follow instructions to use agents as told and numerous other issues with following the instructions.
The quota story is atrocious. It's difficult to get anything done with Claude Code due to the quota reduction. The cache invalidation bugs don't help either.
The tool use is also a pain to deal with. It appears to choose tools randomly with or without tool search. It keeps running custom CLI commands when it has instructions to use Makefile targets. It often ingests the output of some command with hundreds of lines of output without discrimination. It often uses lots of bash grep and find commands when it has better tools available to search across files and to use MCP tools which are far more efficient. It ignores MCP tools most of the time.
This doesn't appear to be an issue with the prompt itself. I'll try to fix the system prompt next to work around some of the issues. It seems to not follow instructions and to do whatever it feels like doing. It comes off as one of those Q2-Q3 quantized models from huggingface.
The impact of the cache invalidation issue, reduced quota, poor model performance and Claude Code bugs together have rendered this service almost entirely useless for me. The poor model performance means that many more attempts are required and more requests are made to the Anthropic API. The Claude Code bugs and design lead to cache invalidation more often. This makes the impact of the reduced quota even worse. It makes a lot more API requests because the model doesn't get it right on the first 1-2 attempts or because it chooses less than optimal strategies to find what it's looking for.
The communication and Anthropic's overall handling of the reported bugs and problems hasn't been that good either.
As for the session ID and other things you might request for debugging, there's nothing special here that's not reported widely on every Reddit thread from several subreddits. I use 200k context with Opus and Sonnet. I use high thinking mode because anything less appears to be complete garbage with extremely poor results. I avoid compact in favor of knowledge transfer markdown files.
It'd be great to see Anthropic fix the caching issues, to improve the quality of the model, to address the Claude Code bugs, to sort out the quota fiasco, to improve their communication skills, to communicate more with their customers and to be more proactive overall. I'll take my money elsewhere otherwise.
They don't ship to most countries from the European Union. What makes it so difficult to ship to all countries from the EU? They don't even ship from the EU. They ship from China, Taiwan or some other country from Asia.
They now have notices for using forwarding services on their site. Why would anyone bother to spend so much time and money to be able to give them money? It doesn't make sense.
I'm sure they're reasonable, talented and intelligent people. I'm not going to take their company seriously until they start shipping to the entire EU and to more countries.
You more or less can’t reject people from, I don’t know, Lithuania once you’re shipping to, say, France. It’s either all of the countries or none. (Only took three years to convince Framework their freight forwarding ban was illegal in this case...) Good news is, most things that are legal to ship to France will consequently be legal to ship to Lithuania as well. So no, this does not make sense and never did.
A nice experience, with local payment providers and localized keyboard layouts and everything, is of course much more work. But this has never been what their (prospective) customers were asking for.
I've been using open source alternatives for different purposes for some time.
Obsidian would've been a great choice as open source note taking software. As it is now, it's just one sale, one exploit or one corporate rug pull away from being turned into something else.
Third party audits are meaningless. They were done for one specific version of the code at one point in time. There's literally nothing preventing a malicious version of the software from being shipped. The same goes for plausible deniability on security vulnerabilities in the context of plugins (even with these alleged prompts that the user has to skip on purpose).
reply