Claude Code used to be the obvious choice

I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed creating folk software over the past few months. You can see a bunch of apps over at dynamicskillset.com/toolsI created the vast majority of these with Opus 4.6, paying $100/month for the Claude Max 5x plan. It was fast, capable, and had defaults like /handoff and /catchup making it really easy to use. While I had already experimented with alternatives (no-one likes vendor lock-in!) I have to say that I've been disappointed by Opus 4.7. It feels slower and less capable than 4.6. Enough so that the convenience I was getting from Claude is no longer enough to compensate for my discomfort about depending so heavily on one US platform. That's particularly true given that, through TechFreedom, I've been helping organisations move away from US-based Big Tech. I started to feel a bit like a potentially-boiled frog. Risk profile generated from the "go deeper" part of the TechFreedom Risk AssessmentTom and I came up with these lenses for social purpose…