Claude Code is unusable now

TL;DR

Anthropic's billing changes, system prompt restrictions, and degraded Claude Code behavior pushed this developer to permanently switch to OpenAI Codex.

Key Points

• 1.Anthropic blocks API requests containing 'OpenClaw' in the system prompt. Mentioning OpenClaw in a system prompt causes a 400 error — unless extra usage billing is enabled, revealing that Anthropic routes and bills these requests differently based on system prompt text.
• 2.The OpenClaw workaround was killed at two levels. First, Anthropic banned headers identifying OpenClaw's harness; then they banned the phrase in system prompts, blocking even the workaround where OpenClaw called the Claude CLI directly.
• 3.Claude Code now refuses general computer troubleshooting tasks it previously handled. When asked to fix a Dropbox menu bar issue, Claude Code repeatedly deflected saying it's only for 'software engineering tasks,' a behavior the creator believes was injected via API-level system prompt changes.
• 4.Codex solved the same Dropbox problem end-to-end without refusals. It searched online, found other users with the same macOS tray bug, identified a conflicting Brew install, nuked all Dropbox instances, and provided a safe reinstall checklist — all in one session.
• 5.Matt Pocco's situation illustrates the broader clarity crisis. The TypeScript educator who built a paid Claude Code course has waited over a month for Anthropic to clarify whether his course tooling is permitted, with no clear answer despite Boris's public 'Yep' being immediately walked back by another Anthropic employee.
• 6.Bad Logic Games, who tracks Claude Code's system prompt over time, found no meaningful change. This undercuts the conspiracy theory but the creator maintains something changed at the API injection level, pointing to server-side prompt augmentation rather than a client-side update.
• 7.The creator is replacing his 'cc' terminal alias — which opened Claude Code — with Codex. He cites Codex as smarter, more capable, open-source, and backed by a team that communicates openly, declaring this the last day he intentionally uses Claude Code outside of content creation.