[HN Gopher] Claude Managed Agents
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Claude Managed Agents
Author : adocomplete
Score : 134 points
Date : 2026-04-08 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (claude.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (claude.com)
| lifecodes wrote:
| MANAGED AGENTS sounds like progress, but also like we're
| standardizing around the current limitations instead of solving
| them.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| And now OpenClaw is dead because serious people have a less janky
| option!
| lambdanodecore wrote:
| The next $100B buisness model in 2026 is AaaS (Agent as a
| Service).
| dennisy wrote:
| Let's just shorten it to AaS?
| woah wrote:
| agentic software services
| marknutter wrote:
| Agent Solution Services
| bnchrch wrote:
| Happy to see this launched, particularly today.
|
| I own a stake in a small brewery in Canada, and this feature just
| saved me setting up some infrastructure to "productionize" an
| agent we created to assist with ordering, invoicing, and
| government document creation.
|
| I get paid in beer and vibes for projects like these, so the more
| I can ship these projects in the same place I prototype them the
| better.
|
| (Also don't worry all, still have SF income to buy food for my
| family with)
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| i get paid in vibes and chilling as well for some similar agent
| stuff i do for content creators.
|
| quick question, how do you manage these side projects that
| kinda need to be production ready but aren't you are actual SF
| job lol?
|
| some of these people think they are my actual customer/client
| but like i do it for fun and to help them out.
| emvideo wrote:
| As a video content creator, I'm curious if you would mind
| sharing the agentic stuff you're doing for others?
| ziml77 wrote:
| Those agents did such a wonderful job making and deploying this
| page that the testimonials are unreadable because each spot has
| two of them overlapping.
| Revisional_Sin wrote:
| I just have a black page.
| llmslave wrote:
| This is going to grow into a sophisticated platform, and is what
| will eventually compete head on with saas. I dont think companies
| will build their own agents, aside from looping in tools. As the
| models improve, there will be less hand holding. This could end
| up competing with AWS/GCP
| siva7 wrote:
| What exactly makes you think that AWS & co. don't have already
| two competing Agents-as-a-Service Platforms at any time?
| llmslave wrote:
| Anthropic is very far ahead on agentic engineering. There is
| more to getting it to work than it looks, and their models
| might be directly trained to know how to use the claude code
| harness.
|
| But beyond that, AWS is a very complex platform. Agents
| simplify saas, the agent itself manages the api calls, maybe
| the database queries, more of the logic. As software moves
| into the agent, you need less cloud capability, and a better
| agent harness/hosting. Essentially, this makes the AWS
| platform obsolete, most services make much less sense.
| lurker919 wrote:
| Exactly my thoughts, AWS is due for a large rewrite/ground up
| rewrite from first principles to be able to fully utilize
| LLMs/agentic capabilities.
| llmslave wrote:
| yeah, alot of the services dont make as much sense
| mrbungie wrote:
| They need to offer more 9s of availability before this happens
| though.
| JLO64 wrote:
| As someone who spins up docker containers where I use the
| Anthropic Agentic SDK to build Jekyll websites for customers, I
| don't see much of an appeal. I didn't find it that difficult to
| set up the infrastructure, the hard part was getting the agents
| to do exactly what I wanted. Besides, eventually I might want to
| transition away to another provider (or even self hosting) so I'd
| prefer having that freedom.
| codinhood wrote:
| I wonder how long until Claude/OpenAI eat a lot of the current
| AI/Agent SaaS's lunch.
|
| Originally I thought they would stick towards being a model
| provider mainly, but with all the recent releases it seems they
| do want to provide more "services."
|
| Wonder what part of the market 3rd party apps will build a moat
| around?
| ergocoder wrote:
| Probably never. There are a couple reasons:
|
| 1. We pay for saas, so we don't have to manage it. If you vibe-
| code or use these AI things, then you are managing it yourself.
|
| 2. Most Saas is like $20-$100/month/person for most Saas. For a
| software engineer, that maybe <1h of pay.
|
| 3. Most Saas require some sort of human in the loop to check
| for quality (at least sampling). No users would want to do
| that.
|
| Number 2 is the biggest reason. It's $20 a month.... I'm not
| gonna replace that with anything.
|
| Writing this message already costs more than $20 of my time.
|
| I predict that the market will get bigger because people are
| more prone to automate the long-tail/last-mile stuff since they
| are able to
| codinhood wrote:
| Interesting, so you're saying Anthropic/Openai/etc will get a
| general solution that won't be hands off. The moat for other
| companies will be creating the specific, managed solution.
|
| I can see that, assuming models don't make some giant leap
| forward.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Your vision on the market for this is skewed by the fact that
| you're probably overpaid.
| alwillis wrote:
| > 1. We pay for saas, so we don't have to manage it. If you
| vibe-code or use these AI things, then you are managing it
| yourself.
|
| > 2. Most Saas is like $20-$100/month/person for most Saas.
| For a software engineer, that maybe <1h of pay.
| |Segment |Median Enterprise Price
| | |--------------------------|-----------------------
| -------------------| |Mid-market
| |~$175/user/month |
| |Enterprise (<100 seats) |~$470/seat/month implied (~$47K
| ACV) | |Enterprise (100-500
| seats)|~$312-$1,560/seat/month range (~$156K ACV)|
|
| Enterprise contracts almost always include a platform fee on
| top of per-seat costs (67% of contracts), plus professional
| services that add 12-18% of first-year revenue.
|
| So for a lot of companies, it's worth using AI to create a
| replacement.
| mrbungie wrote:
| > So for a lot of companies, it's worth using AI to create
| a replacement.
|
| I'll add the nuance that those might be big companies with
| slack capacity, or at least firms that already are at a
| point in their effort/performance curve where marginal
| effort injections in their core business are not worthy
| enough (a point that, without being big companies, would be
| actually weird). Even with AI and as processes become more
| efficient effort is at premium, and depending on your firm
| situation an man-hour used in your business might be a
| better use of effort and time that using it on non-core
| services.
| alwillis wrote:
| AI is predicted to continue eating SaaS:
| https://www.bain.com/insights/why-saas-stocks-have-
| dropped-a...
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| I cloned a product today that does the 20% of a product my
| client needed. It took 8 hours and will save my client 2k a
| month in licensing fees. Plus, I can now add the features they
| were missing in the original product.
|
| There's a lot of money to be made in small business automation
| right now.
| cedws wrote:
| I saw this coming. Anthropic wants to shift developers on to
| their platform where they're in control. The fight for harness
| control has been terribly inconvenient for them.
|
| To score a big IPO they need to be a platform, not just a token
| pipeline. Everything they're doing signals they're moving in this
| direction.
| aoliveira wrote:
| They keep calling this the first solution of this
| kind...obviously Anthropic is a much larger company, but
| https://smith.langchain.com/ has this...and had for a while, or
| am I missing something?
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| This was inevitable, I called this a few weeks ago [1]. It's an
| easy way to increase revenue without making the models smarter,
| and lock you in harder
|
| https://danthegoodman.substack.com/p/where-agents-converge
| 0o_MrPatrick_o0 wrote:
| I've been building my own version of this. It's a bit shocking to
| see parallel ideation.
|
| FWIW- IMO, being locked into a single model provider is a deal
| breaker.
|
| This solution will distract a lot of folks and doom-lock them
| into Anthropic. That'll probably be fine for small offices, but
| it is suicidal to get hooked into Anthropic's way of doing things
| for anything complex. IME, you want to be able to compare
| different models and you end up managing them to your style. It's
| a bit like cooking- where you may have greater affinity for
| certain flavors. You make selection tradeoffs on when to use a
| frontier model on design & planning vs something self hosted for
| simpler operations tasks.
| TIPSIO wrote:
| FWIW everyone is also building a version of this themselves.
| Only so many directions to go
| rtuin wrote:
| Most definitely. Although I haven't found an (F)OSS project
| that lets one easily ship [favorite harness SDK] to self-
| hosted platform yet.
|
| Which projects are standing out in this space right now?
| jawiggins wrote:
| Shameless self promo but, I've been working on Optio
| specifically for coding, it works by taking any harness you
| want and tasking it to open Github/lab PRs based on
| notion/jira/linear tickets, see:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520220
|
| It works on top of k8s, so you can deploy and run in your
| own compute cluster. Right now it's focused only on coding
| tasks but I'm currently working on abstractions so you can
| similarly orchestrate large runs of any agentic workflow.
| Tarcroi wrote:
| I've been building exactly this. it's Open source, multi-
| model (5 providers with fallback), from now, it runs
| locally but the architecture is designed for self-hosted
| deployment.
| deet wrote:
| Do you think it's unwise for companies to lock in because they
| would be better served and get better results by picking and
| choosing models? Or because by running your business on a
| single closed provider like Anthropic, you're giving them
| telemetry they can use to optimize their models and systems to
| then compete with you later?
| 0o_MrPatrick_o0 wrote:
| I think it's unwise because Model reliability is transient.
|
| When the models have an off day, the workflows you've grown
| to depend upon fail. When you're completely dependent on
| Anthropic for not only execution but troubleshooting- you're
| doomed. You lose a whole day troubleshooting model
| performance variability when you should have just logged off
| and waited. These are very cognitively disruptive days.
|
| Build in multi-model support- so your agents can modify
| routing if an observer discovers variability.
| dakolli wrote:
| Its unwise because they are going to have a 5-10k a month
| bill on enterprise pricing, whereas, for $6-10k a month you
| can rent and run your own hardware and get a solid 3-4
| concurrent sessions for your engineers with a 1T param OS
| model and save thousands per developer a month.
| dakolli wrote:
| I'm the same, and its relatively trivial to build these types
| of systems on top of aggregators like openrouter.
| siva7 wrote:
| > With Managed Agents, you define outcomes and success criteria,
| and Claude self-evaluates and iterates until it gets there
| (available in research preview, request access here). It also
| supports traditional prompt-and-response workflows when you want
| tighter control.
|
| Call me stupid, but this sounds not like they want software
| developers to be around in a year or two.
| baal80spam wrote:
| But that's exactly what Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) wants.
| Sol- wrote:
| In addition to the managed interface for agent configuration and
| so on, is the novelty that all the agents run on Anthropic's
| infra? Sort of like Claude Code on the Web? If so, interesting
| that they move up the stack, from just a provider of an
| intelligence API to more complex deployed products.
| jameslk wrote:
| We're in the early days of agentic frameworks, like the pre-PHP
| web. CGI scripts and webmasters. Eventually the state-of-the-art
| will slow down and we'll eventually have something elegant like
| Rails come out.
|
| Until then, every agent framework is completely reinvented every
| week due to new patterns and new models. evals, ReACT, DSPy, RLM,
| memory patterns, claws, dynamic context, sandbox strategies. It
| seems like locking in to a framework is a losing proposition for
| anyone trying to stay competitive. See also: LangChain trying to
| be the Next.js/Vercel of agents but everyone recommending
| building your own.
|
| That said, Anthropic pulls a lot of weight owning the models
| themselves and probably an _easier_ -to-use solution will get
| some adoption from those who are better served by going from
| nothing to something agentic, despite lock-in and the constant
| churn of model tech
| dmix wrote:
| Completely agree re: AI chatbot/RAG being just like the pre-PHP
| web world. There's a hundred half baked solutions floating on
| blogs and github but not a coherent dominant framework that
| puts it all together properly. Langchain is close but still
| feels a bit abstract and DIY.
|
| That plus everyone is using 5 different vector DBs and
| reranking models from different vendors than the answer models
| etc.
| patrickkidger wrote:
| I'm not sure if I'm about to be the old man yelling at clouds,
| but Anthropic seem to be 'AWS-ifying'. An increasing suite of
| products which (at least to me) seem to undifferentiated amongst
| themselves, and all drawn from the same roulette wheel of words.
|
| We've got Claude Managed Agents, Claude Agent SDK, Claude API,
| Claude Code, Claude Platform, Claude Cowork, Claude Enterprise,
| and plain old 'Claude'. And honourable mention to Claude
| Haiku/Sonnet/Opus 4.{whatever} as yet another thing with the same
| prefix. I feel like it's about once a week I see a new
| announcement here on HN about some new agentic Claude whatever-
| it-is.
|
| I have pretty much retreated in the face of this to 'just the API
| + `pi` + Claude Opus 4.{most recent minor release}', as a surface
| area I can understand.
| esaym wrote:
| The website is solid black on Firefox mobile for android. Maybe
| they should get an agent on that.
| jorl17 wrote:
| Anthropic's website is always completely broken for me on Zen
| (a firefox derivative). I used to think it was an extension,
| but even without extensions it often just shows blank pages.
| raggi wrote:
| Same for me in firefox and chrome. I'm sure it's one of the
| DNS block lists I have and some really crappy marketing
| tracking code.
|
| Edit: confirmed, loads with a public DNS provider that has no
| blocklists.
| tailsdog wrote:
| Looks great, I can't wait to use it. I imagine it could become
| very expensive for certain workflows, it will probably be like
| AWS where if you're not careful with the setup and watching what
| you're doing it will spin up 1000s of agents and rack up huge
| bills! It's going to be a massive money spinner!
| rick1290 wrote:
| Not quite sold on this. I'm going to stick with pydantic ai and
| dbos/temporal/celery. I do not want to be vendor locked into one
| of these players. I want to work with absoluately any llm I
| want... I think we need to keep pushing for best in class open
| source orchestrtion and not get sucked into this platforms.
| mdrachuk wrote:
| It's all good until your production agents deployment has a
| single 9 uptime. I use Claude Code as my main coding harness
| daily but making customers reliant on Anthropic software is a big
| no-no. Quality engineering is just not their thing.
| mccoyb wrote:
| I'm suspicious that this is going to lead to optimal
| orchestration ... or rather, that open source won't produce a far
| better alternative in time.
|
| The best performance I've gotten is _by mixing agents_ from
| different companies. Unless there is a "winner take all" agent
| (I seriously doubt it, based on the dynamics and cost of
| collecting high quality RL data), I think the best orchestration
| systems are going to involve mixing agents.
|
| Here, it's not about the planner, it's about the workers. Some
| agents are just better at certain things than others.
|
| For instance, Opus 4.6 _on max_ does not hold a candle to GPT 5.4
| xhigh in terms of bug finding. It 's just not even a comparison,
| iykyk.
|
| Almost analogous to how diversity of thought can improve the
| robustness of the outcomes in real world teams. The same thing
| seems to be true in mixture-of-agent-distributions space.
| intothemild wrote:
| Yeah this has been my experience too, mixing agents/models from
| different companies..
|
| Having Opus write a spec, then send to Gemini to revise, back
| to Opus to fix, then to me to read and approve..
|
| Send to a local model like Qwen3.5 to build, then off to Opus
| to review ...
|
| This was such an amazing flow, until Anthropic decided to
| change their minds.
| mccoyb wrote:
| Another way to think about it:
|
| For Anthropic to have the best version of this software, they'd
| have to simultaneously ... well, have the best version of the
| software, but also _beat every other AI company at all
| subtasks_ (like: technical writing, diagramming, bug finding --
| they 'd need to have the unequivocal "best model" in all
| categories).
|
| Surely their version is not going to allow you to e.g. invoke
| Codex or what have you as part of their stack.
| sjdv1982 wrote:
| My fear is that this is going to lead to an optimal
| orchestration _language_. For example, that Claude switches to
| Sumerian for all communication between agents. One thing is if
| they try to silo like that, but my real fear is that it may
| actually perform well.
|
| (Not sure if it would be Sumerian, Esperanto or something more
| artificial. As long as it is esoteric enough for one company to
| hoard all the expertise in it.)
| mrbungie wrote:
| I've seen Antigravity outputting chinese characters in its
| thinking traces from time-to-time.
|
| I also remember chinese being discussed as a potential
| orchestrating language but I don't remember the sources, so
| 100% anecdotical.
| yalogin wrote:
| This is actually really nice from anthropic. They are
| aggressively owning the entire development stack for every swe.
| They become the default development platform. Automatic recurring
| revenue too and I am sure they will come up with more categories
| of subscriptions too.
| woah wrote:
| Are they entering their OpenAI throw shit at the wall phase?
| htrp wrote:
| Reminder that Anthropic's goal is to sell you more tokens...
| baq wrote:
| I assume Mythos, if ever released to the wide public at all, will
| only be available in the Claude cloud harness. (Not counting
| special enterprise and government contracts naturally.)
| schappim wrote:
| Folks suspect Mythos is an unaligned Opus 4.7
| _pdp_ wrote:
| I suspect this is effectively programatic access to the same
| infrastructure used by Claude Desktop when it needs to run jobs
| in the cloud on the Anthropic servers... with added
| configurability and observations.
|
| In other words, it is designed for companies to build on top of
| the Anthropic platform. Fo example, you are a SaaS and you want
| to build a way of running agents programatically for your
| customers, they basically offer a solution. It is not for
| personal use although you can certainly do so if you are prepared
| to pay the price for the API.
|
| The downside is obviously this is locked to Anthropic models.
|
| The other downsides is that the authentication story at the
| moment is underwhelming, hacking, and dare I say, insecure. I
| have a few reservations.
|
| We already have this platform and I am putting together and open-
| source example how to create your own version of this.
|
| Anthropic models are great but there are plenty of open-source
| models too and frankly agents do not need to run like claude code
| in order to be successful at whatever they need to do. The agent
| architecture entirely depends on the problem domain in my own
| experience.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| API tokens only. Does allow MCP, so you're not as tied as you
| might think. But mere mortals can't really run many sorts of
| agents on api tokens I don't think.
| thewhitelynx wrote:
| What's the open source alternative?
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