The night Claude Code banned OpenCode, co-founder Dax Raad messaged OpenAI. How @thdxr turned a platform ban into a major deal:
OpenCode understood that Claude Max users were a smaller subset of users:
“We knew this day would happen at some point. For some reason, when it happened we all just felt excited because we were thinking about this for a while and we knew this would happen.
We live in this crazy bubble, especially on Twitter, where everyone has a $200 Claude Max subscription. At that point, we were at 650,000 monthly actives. There's no way 650,000 of them have Claude Max subscriptions. It's crazy for the average person to spend $200 a month on anything. So we knew it was a smaller subset.”
They had been quietly building up their bank of supported subscriptions:
“At the time we had been working on deals with pretty much every other company to officially support their subscription in OpenCode. So the previous weeks leading up to that, we got Microsoft to agree for GitHub Copilot to be officially blessed by OpenCode. We got a bunch of different companies in the works.
We hadn't announced any of them yet and the big one we hadn't gotten, or we haven't even approached, was OpenAI.”
The ban became leverage for their biggest deal yet:
“When I got like a hundred tags on X being like, "Oh, they banned it, they banned it", I was like, "All right, it's go time."
I messaged OpenAI being like, "Hey, tomorrow everyone's going to wake up and everyone's going to be really angry at Anthropic. You guys have a chance to score a PR win by taking the opposite stance and officially supporting OpenCode."
And they were like, "Huh, interesting. Okay, we’ll think about it."
I was like, "Okay, it's a long shot. I doubt they'll go for it." The next morning they confirmed: "Yeah, let's do it."
So in the morning everybody was saying, "Oh, Anthropic blocked OpenCode. They're screwed." I saw a bunch of people being like, "They're worth nothing now. They're going to go to zero, whatever." And I was laughing to myself, like: "Okay, just wait till the end of the day."
And then we figured out the integration, we implemented it and, at the end of the day, we announced OpenAI is officially supported in OpenCode.”
i’ve started sponsoring young indian builders / devs / security researchers who are doing genuinely cool work. only sponsored @amanvarshney01 and @ni5arga so far, but i want to scale this up over time
there are so many young indian devs doing insanely cool shit with basically zero support. i want to help with that
more of this soon