Nobody owes you anything

If you follow this blog for a while, you might know that I focus on tech topics and try to be very rational and neutral in my writing. I usually am too afraid of "pissing off". Maybe, it's the current state of the world or that I'm just getting older, but certain things just get to me and I want to establish writing as a healthy coping mechanism.

So! I've just read a post about Anthropic's recent pricing changes. For context, you can't use the Claude flat rate for the Anthropic API anymore. If you want to use the simple (and reasonably cheap) Claude Code pricing you must use Anthropic's products and can't use other agents/products/tools with the one-fits-all offer.

Anthropic is now enforcing and limiting people to use their products as intended. Outrageous, right?

I won't link to the post, but the author is very upset about this change. However, there are things that stand out.

And have you even seen Dario speak with reporters? Like, he doesn't make eye contact, and he talks really fast. I don't know. I just don't like him. It's an absolute disgrace.

The author mocks Anthropic's CEO for how he looks and speaks. Honestly, you can think of AI and the new world whatever you wish, and I'm also not aligned with all the content theft, ethical problems and the overall economic shift. Frankly, I'm beyond scared about the future. But blogging about not liking how someone speaks or looks is just a very low low. I get that the author is furious and frustrated, but sitting down to write a blog post explaining how and why you don't like how a person looks tells more about you than the person in question.

The following paragraph triggered me to write this post.

I want Anthropic's product at other companies' prices, and I want to be able to use it how I want to use it. Anthropic owes me that.

That's a lot of demands and I really don't understand how people can feel like a company owes them something...

I've been watching this privileged tech community entitlement for a while and it has always been rubbing me the wrong way. Regardless if it's about Tailwind, Anthropic or any other free or paid project. Things are simple: nobody owes you anything.

Let me give a few examples:

If you use free software, nobody owes you a new feature or "critical" bugfix. You can't get a free sandwich and then make demands. Surely you can provide feedback, but no one is obliged to act on it. It's a free sandwich after all.

If you take the time to open a PR in a GitHub repo, nobody owes you a review. Life's busy. Maintainers burn out. If your PR is stale you can easily fork the project, republish (if the licence permits it) or use something else. That's what open source is about.

If you tag or reply to someone on social media, nobody owes you a reply. Especially, if you don't know each other, why would someone owe an internet stranger mental capacity?

If a company offers a free tier, nobody owes you keeping it free. Building products is hard. Maintaining products is even harder. People need to make a living. Of course, this situation sucks if you relied on something being free, but again, nobody owes you anything. Especially, if it's free.

If a company requires you to follow their terms of service, the company doesn't owe you anything. You pay for a service. If the service doesn't meet your expectations, use something else. Nobody forces you to use a paid product.

I totally understand that all these scenarios suck on very different scales. Sometimes things aren't black and white, either, and everybody has the right to be angry about anything.

But in a world where nothing is guaranteed anymore, why do people think they're owed something? I just don't get it.