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Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#21

Post by dist-epoch »

sbszllr wrote: post #15

The issue with many of these tips is that they require you use to claude code (or codex cli, doesn't matter) to spend way more time in it, feed it more info, generate more outputs --> pay more money to the LLM provider. I find LLM-based tools helpful, and use them quite regularly but not 20 bucks+, let alone 100+ per month that claude code would require to be used effectively.

> let alone 100+ per month that claude code would require

I find this argument very bizarre. $100 is pay for 1-2 hours of developer time. Doesn't it save at least that much time in a whole month?

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#22

Post by fcoury »

cypherpunks01 wrote: post #17
fcoury wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... usage limits that would make it very difficult to use for Claude Code. Genuinely interested: how's so?

Well, I think it'd be pretty irritating to see the message "3 messages remaining until 6PM" while you are in the middle of a complex coding task.

No, that's the whole point: predictability. It's definitely a trade off, but if we could save the work as is we could have the option to continue the iteration elsewhere, or even better, from that point on offer the option to fallback to the current API model.

A nice addition would be having something like /cost but to check where you are in regards to limits.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#23

Post by ghuntley »

m00dy wrote: post #18
ghuntley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$200/month isn't that much. Folks, I'm hanging around with are spending $100 USD to $500 USD daily as the new norm as a cost of doing business and remaining competitive. That might seem expensive, but it's cheap... https://ghuntley.com/redlining

Seriously? That’s wild. What kind of CS field could even handle that kind of daily spend for a bunch of people?

Consider L5 at Google: outgoings of $377,797 USD per year just on salary/stock, before fixed overheads such as insurance, leave, issues like ramp-up time and cost of their manager. In the hands of a Staff+ engineer, these tools enable replication of Staff+ engineers and don't sleep. My 2c: the funding for the new norm will come from either compressing the manager layer or engineering layer or both.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#24

Post by replwoacause »

m00dy wrote: post #10

well, the best practice is to use gemini 2.5 pro instead :)

Yep I learned this the hard way after racking up big bills just using Sonnet 3.7 in my IDE. Gemini is just as good (and not nearly as willing to agree with every dumb thing I say) and it’s way cheaper.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#25

Post by [deleted] »

cypherpunks01 wrote: post #17
fcoury wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... usage limits that would make it very difficult to use for Claude Code. Genuinely interested: how's so?

Well, I think it'd be pretty irritating to see the message "3 messages remaining until 6PM" while you are in the middle of a complex coding task.

[deleted]

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#26

Post by mmikeff »

m00dy wrote: post #18
ghuntley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$200/month isn't that much. Folks, I'm hanging around with are spending $100 USD to $500 USD daily as the new norm as a cost of doing business and remaining competitive. That might seem expensive, but it's cheap... https://ghuntley.com/redlining

Seriously? That’s wild. What kind of CS field could even handle that kind of daily spend for a bunch of people?

The kind of field where AI builds more in a day than a team or even contract dev does.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#27

Post by bugglebeetle »

Claude Code works fairly well, but Anthropic has lost the plot on the state of market competition. OpenAI tried to buy Cursor and now Windsurf because they know they need to win market share, Gemini 2.5 pro is better at coding than their Sonnet models, has huge context and runs on their TPU stack, but somehow Anthropic is expecting people to pay $200 in API costs per functional PR costs to vibe code. Ok.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#28

Post by dist-epoch »

zomglings wrote: post #6

If anyone from Anthropic is reading this, your billing for Claude Code is hostile to your users. Why doesn’t Claude Code usage count against the same plan that usage of Claude.ai and Claude Desktop are billed against? I upgraded to the $200/month plan because I really like Claude Code but then was so annoyed to find that this upgrade didn’t even apply to my usage of Claude Code. So now I’m not using Claude Code so mu…

Claude.ai/Desktop is priced based on average user usage. If you have 1 power user sending 1000 requests per day, and 99 sending 5, many even none, you can afford having a single $10/month plan for everyone to keep things simple.

But every Claude Code user is a 1000 requests per day user, so the economics don't work anymore.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#29

Post by zoogeny »

So I have been using Cursor a lot more in a vibe code way lately and I have been coming across what a lot of people report: sometimes the model will rewrite perfectly working code that I didn't ask it to touch and break it.

In most cases, it is because I am asking the model to do too much at once. Which is fine, I am learning the right level of abstraction/instruction where the model is effective consistently.

But when I read these best practices, I can't help but think of the cost. The multiple CLAUDE.md files, the files of context, the urls to documentation, the planning steps, the tests. And then the iteration on the code until it passes the test, then fixing up linter errors, then running an adversarial model as a code review, then generating the PR.

It makes me want to find a way to work at Anthropic so I can learn to do all of that without spending $100 per PR. Each of the steps in that last paragraph is an expensive API call for us ISV and each requires experimentation to get the right level of abstraction/instruction.

I want to advocate to Anthropic for a scholarship program for devs (I'd volunteer, lol) where they give credits to Claude in exchange for public usage. This would be structured similar to creator programs for image/audio/video gen-ai companies (e.g. runway, kling, midjourney) where they bring on heavy users that also post to social media (e.g. X, TikTok, Twitch) and they get heavily discounted (or even free) usage in exchange for promoting the product.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#30

Post by sbszllr »

ghuntley wrote: post #12
zomglings wrote: post #6

If anyone from Anthropic is reading this, your billing for Claude Code is hostile to your users. Why doesn’t Claude Code usage count against the same plan that usage of Claude.ai and Claude Desktop are billed against? I upgraded to the $200/month plan because I really like Claude Code but then was so annoyed to find that this upgrade didn’t even apply to my usage of Claude Code. So now I’m not using Claude Code so mu…

$200/month isn't that much. Folks, I'm hanging around with are spending $100 USD to $500 USD daily as the new norm as a cost of doing business and remaining competitive. That might seem expensive, but it's cheap... https://ghuntley.com/redlining

All can be true depending on the business/person:

1. My company cannot justify this cost at all.

2. My company can justify this cost but I don't find it useful.

3. My company can justify this cost, and I find it useful.

4. I find it useful, and I can justify the cost for personal use.

5. I find it useful, and I cannot justify the cost for personal use.

That aside -- 200/day/dev for a "nice to have service that sometimes makes my work slightly faster" is much in the majority of the world.

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