#36 Rain That Never Fell

#36 Rain That Never Fell It was an overcast day. No rain falling. But no sun visible either. That day, $200 in credits fell from the sky. From Anthropic. I didn't understand why, so I looked into it. When I did, the contours of what we've been working on were illuminated from an unexpected angle. The Truth Behind $200 On April 4, 2026, Anthropic changed its policy. Third-party tools could no longer be used with Claude Pro/Max subscriptions. At the center of it was OpenClaw, an open-source agent framework. Built by a single developer "for fun" in November 2025, it ballooned within weeks to 196,000 GitHub stars and 2 million weekly users. An estimated 135,000 instances were running, roughly 60% of them powered by Claude's flat-rate subscriptions. The problem was price asymmetry. Claude's subscriptions subsidize compute resources for its own products. Compared to pay-per-use API pricing, the same amount of inference was over five times cheaper. Third-party tools were using that subsidized