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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

#41

Post by malfist »

ghuntley wrote: post #23
m00dy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs absolutely don't replicate staff+ engineers.

If your staff engineers are mostly doing things AI can do, then you don't need staff. Probably don't even need senior

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#42

Post by ghuntley »

malfist wrote: post #41
ghuntley wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs absolutely don't replicate staff+ engineers. If your staff engineers are mostly doing things AI can do, then you don't need staff. Probably don't even need senior

That's my point.

- L3 SWE II - $193,712 USD (before overheads)

- L4 SWE III - $297,124 USD (before overheads)

- L5 Senior SWE - $377,797 USD (before overheads)

These tools and foundational models get better every day, and right now, they enable Staff+ engineers and businesses to have less need for juniors. I suspect there will be [short-to-medium-term] compression. See extended thoughts at https://ghuntley.com/screwed

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#43

Post by danenania »

peterldowns wrote: post #19
manojlds wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://aider.chat/

Thanks! Any others, or any thoughts you can share on it?

Hey, I'm the creator of Plandex (https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex), which takes a more agentic approach than aider, and combines models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. You might find it interesting.

I did a Show HN for it a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43710576

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#44

Post by jdance »

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…

This would put anthropic in the business of minimizing the context to increase profits, same as Cursor and others who cheap out on context and try to RAG etc. Which would quickly make it worse, so I hope they stay on api pricing

Some base usage included in the plan might be a good balance

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#45

Post by zomglings »

dist-epoch wrote: post #28
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.

I would accept a higher-priced plan (which covered both my use of Claude.ai/Claude Desktop AND my use of Claude Code).

Anthropic make it seem like Claude Code is a product categorized like Claude Desktop (usage of which gets billed against your Claude.ai plan). This is how it signs off all its commits:

     Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.ai/code)
At the very least, this is misleading. It misled me.

Once I had purchased the $200/month plan, I did some reading and quickly realized that I had been too quick to jump to conclusions. It still left me feeling like they had pulled a fast on one me.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#46

Post by sqs »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #37
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #32

Surprised that "controlling cost" isn't a section in this post. Here's my attempt. --- If you get a hang of controlling costs, it's much cheaper. If you're exhausting the context window, I would not be surprised if you're seeing high cost. Be aware of the "cache". Tell it to read specific files (and only those!), if you don't, it'll read unnecessary files, or repeatedly read sections of files or even search through f…

If I have to spend this much time thinking about any of this, congratulations, you’ve designed a product with a terrible UI.

It's fundamentally hard. If you have an easy solution, you can go make a easy few billion dollars.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#47

Post by zomglings »

cypherpunks01 wrote: post #11
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 Pro and other website/desktop subscription plans are subject to usage limits that would make it very difficult to use for Claude Code. Claude Code uses the API interface and API pricing, and writes and edits code directly on your machine, this is a level past simply interacting with a separate chat bot. It seems a little disingenuous to say it's "hostile" to users, when the reality is yeah, you do pay a bit mo…

The writing of edits and code directly on my machine is something that happens on the client side. I don't see why that usage would be subject to anything but one-time billing or how it puts any strain on Anthropic's infrastructure.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#48

Post by Wowfunhappy »

> Use /clear to keep context focused

The only problem is that this loss is permanent! As far as I can tell, there's no way to go back to the old conversation after a `/clear`.

I had one session last week where Claude Code seemed to have become amazingly capable and was implementing entire new features and fixing bugs in one-shot, and then I ran `/clear` (by accident no less) and it suddenly became very dumb.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#49

Post by zomglings »

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

$100/day seems reasonable as an upper-percentile spend per programmer. $500/day sounds insane.

A 2.5 hour session with Claude Code costs me somewhere between $15 and $20. Taking $20/2.5 hours as the estimate, $100 would buy me 12.5 hours of programming.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#50

Post by dist-epoch »

zomglings wrote: post #45
dist-epoch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would accept a higher-priced plan (which covered both my use of Claude.ai/Claude Desktop AND my use of Claude Code). Anthropic make it seem like Claude Code is a product categorized like Claude Desktop (usage of which gets billed against your Claude.ai plan). This is how it signs off all its commits: Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.ai/code) At the very least, this is misleading. It misled me. Once I had…

Maybe you can cancel your subscription or charge back?

I think it's just oversight on their part. They have nothing to gain by making people believe they would get Claude Code access through their regular plans, only bad word of mouth.

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