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I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

nickyreinert.de

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Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#61

Post by aleqs »

GaryBluto wrote: post #25
janwillemb wrote: post #19

This is what worries me. People become dependent on these GenAI products that are proprietary, not transparant, and need a subscription. People build on it like it is a solid foundation. But all of a sudden the owner just pulls the foundation from under your building.

Luckily local AI is becoming more feasible every day.

Indeed, I feel like we are in the early computer equivalent phase of AI, where giant expensive hardware is still required for frontier models. In 5 years I bet there will be fully open models we'll be able to run on a few $1000 of consumer hardware with equivalent performance to opus 4.7/4.6.

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#62

Post by conception »

siliconc0w wrote: post #37

Shameless self plug but also worried about the silent quality regressions, I started building a tool to track coding agent performance over time.. https://github.com/s1liconcow/repogauge Here is a sample report that tries out the cheaper models + the newest Kimi2.6 model against the 5.4 'gold' testcases from the repo: https://repogauge.org/sample_report .

This is cool - just wanted to note https://marginlab.ai is one that has been around for a while.

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#63

Post by pram »

I’ve noticed most of the complaints are about the Pro plan. Anecdotally I pay for the $200 Max plan and haven’t noticed anything radically different re: tokens or thinking time (availability is still a crapshoot)

I am certainly not saying people should “spend more money,” more like the Claude Code access in the Pro plan seems kind of like false advertising. Since it’s technically usable, but not really.

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#65

Post by cyanydeez »

rectang wrote: post #47

I feel like I'm using Claude Opus pretty effectively and I'm honestly not running up against limits in my mid-tier subscriptions. My workflow is more "copilot" than "autopilot", in that I craft prompts for contained tasks and review nearly everything, so it's pretty light compared to people doing vibe coding. The market-leading technology is pretty close to "good enough" for how I'm using it. I look forward to the da…

Honestly, it sounds like, assuming you have no ethical qualms, you could get by with a Mac or AMD 395+ and the newest models, specifically QWEN3.5-Coder-Next. It does exactly as you describe. It maxes out around 85k context, which if you do a good job providing guard rails, etc, is the length of a small-medium project.

It does seem like the sweet spot between WallE and the destroyed earth in WallE.

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#66

Post by y42 »

drunken_thor wrote: post #20

AI services are only minorly incentivized to reduce token usage. They want high token usage, it makes you pay more. They are going to continually test where the limit is, what is the max token usage before you get angry. All AI companies will continue to trade places for token use and cost as cost increases. We are in tepid water pretending it is a bath pretending we aren’t about to be boiled frogs.

That's what I am thinking, too. It sound's like a conspiracy theory, but at the end Anthropic et al benefits from models that don't finish their jobs. I recently read about this "over editing phenomenon". The machine is never done. It doesn't want to.

It's like dating apps. They don't want you to find a good match, because then you cancel the subscription.

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#67

Post by zzzeek »

drunken_thor wrote: post #20

AI services are only minorly incentivized to reduce token usage. They want high token usage, it makes you pay more. They are going to continually test where the limit is, what is the max token usage before you get angry. All AI companies will continue to trade places for token use and cost as cost increases. We are in tepid water pretending it is a bath pretending we aren’t about to be boiled frogs.

Well that's why threads like this are important to upvote. On hacker news , they're angry !

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#68

Post by echelon »

Someone1234 wrote: post #51
GaryBluto wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily local AI is becoming more feasible every day.

It feels more and more like OpenAI/Anthoropic aren't the future but Qwen, Kimi, or Deepseek are. You can run them locally, but that isn't really the point, it is about democratization of service providers. You can run any of them on a dozen providers with different trade-offs/offerings OR locally. They won't ever be SOTA due to money, but "last year's SOTA" when it costs 1/4 or less, may be good enough . More quantit…

Open Source isn't even within 50% of what the SOTA models are. Benchmarks are toys, real world use is vastly different, and that's where they seriously lag.

Why should anyone waste time on poorer results? I'd rather pay my $200/mo because my time matters. I'm not a poor college student anymore, and I need more return on my time.

I'm not shitting on open weights here - I want open source to win. I just don't see how that's possible.

It's like Photoshop vs. Gimp. Not only is the Gimp UX awful, but it didn't even offer (maybe still doesn't?) full bit depth support. For a hacker with free time, that's fine. But if my primary job function is to transform graphics in exchange for money, I'm paying for the better tool. Gimp is entirely a no-go in a professional setting.

Or it's like Google Docs / Microsoft Office vs. LibreOffice. LibreOffice is still pretty trash compared to the big tools. It's not just that Google and Microsoft have more money, but their products are involved in larger scale feedback loops that refine the product much more quickly.

But with weights it's even worse than bad UX. These open weights models just aren't as smart. They're not getting RLHF'd on real world data. The developers of these open weights models can game benchmarks, but the actual intelligence for real world problems is lacking. And that's unfortunately the part that actually matters.

Again, to be clear: I hate this. I want open. I just don't see how it will ever be able to catch up to full-featured products.

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#69

Post by cyanydeez »

vondur wrote: post #64

Wait, weren't there posts in the not too distant past where everyone was signing the praises for Claude and wondering how OpenAI will catch up?

Wait, are SaaS's fundamentally shifting business models searching to maximize the value of a product at the expense of a customer over time?

Strange how things can change!

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#70

Post by andyfilms1 »

GaryBluto wrote: post #25
janwillemb wrote: post #19

This is what worries me. People become dependent on these GenAI products that are proprietary, not transparant, and need a subscription. People build on it like it is a solid foundation. But all of a sudden the owner just pulls the foundation from under your building.

Luckily local AI is becoming more feasible every day.

Sure, but local AI is still a black box. They can be influenced by training data selection, poisoning, hidden system prompts, etc. That recent Wordpress supply chain hack goes to show that the rug can still be pulled even if the software is FOSS.
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