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

nickyreinert.de

131–140 of 604 posts

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

#131
If someone wants to move off Claude what are the alternatives? More importantly can another system pick up from where Claude left off or is there some internal knowledge Claude keeps in their configuration that I need to extract before canceling?

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, out of the loop. Which ethical qualms are you referring to?

My guess - China.

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

#133
post #88
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…

I also use it this way and I'm overall pretty happy with it, but it feels like they really want us to use it in "autopilot" mode. It's like they have two conflicting priorities of "make people use more tokens so we can bill them more" and "people are using more tokens than expected, our pricing structure is no longer sustainable" (but I guess they're not really conflicting, if the "solution" involves upgrading to a h…

I think the culty element of AI development is really blinding a lot of these companies to what their tools are actually useful for. They’re genuinely great productivity enhancers, but the boosters are constantly going on about how it’s going to replace all your employees and it’s just. . .not good for that! And I don’t mean “not yet” I mean I don’t see it ever getting there barring some major breakthrough on the order of inventing a room-temp superconductor.

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

#134
I've noticed that sometimes the same Claude model will make logical errors sometimes but not other times. Claude's performance is highly temporal. There's even a graph! https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/

I haven't seen anyone mention this publicly, but I've noticed that the same model will give wildly different results depending on the quantization. 4-bit is not the same as 8-bit and so on in compute requirements and output quality. https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-...

I'm aware that frontier models don't work in the same way, but I've often wondered if there's a fidelity dial somewhere that's being used to change the amount of memory / resources each model takes during peak hours v. off hours. Does anyone know if that's the case?

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

#135
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…

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

#136
I've spent thousands of dollars on API tokens in the last few months. Out of my own pocket, as an indie contractor. I used the API specifically instead of Pro/Max/Plus/Silver/Gold/Platinum/Diamond to avoid all of the mess there regarding usage resets and potential hidden routing to worse models. It worked great for months, I got a ton of shit done, shipped a bunch of features. I really began to rely on the tech. I was not happy about the cost, but the value proposition was there.

Then within the last few months everything changed and went to shit. My trust was lost. Behavior became completely inconsistent.

During the height of Claude's mental retardation (now finally acknowledged by the creators) I had an incident where CC ran a query against an unpartitioned/massive BQ table that resulted in $5,000 in extra spend because it scanned a table which should have been daily partitioned 30 times. 27 TB per scan. I recall going over and over the setup and exhaustively refining confidence. After I realized this blunder, I referred to it in the same CC session, "jesus fucking christ, I flagged this issue earlier" -- it responded, "you did. you called out the string types and full table scans and I said "let's do it later." That was wrong. I should have prioritized it when you raised it". Now obviously this is MY fault. I fucked up here, because I am the operator, and the buck stops with me. But this incident really galvinized that the Claude I had come to vibe with so well over the last N months was entirely gone.

We all knew it was making making mistakes, becoming fully retarded. We all felt and flagged this. When Anthropic came out and said, "yeah ... you guys are using it wrong, its a skill issue" I knew this honeymoon was over. Then recently when they finally came out and ack'd more of the issues (while somehow still glossing over how bad they fucked up?) it was the final nail. I'm done spending $ on Anthropic ecosystem. I signed up for OpenAI pro $200/mo and will continue working on my own local inference in the meantime.

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

#137
post #29

The usage metering is just so incredibly inconsistent, sometimes 4 parallel Opus sessions for 3 hours straight on max effort only uses up 70% of a session, other times 20 mins / 3 prompts in one session completely maxes it out. (Max x20 plan) Is this just a bug on anthropic side or is the usage metering just completely opaque and arbitrary?

It's something strange because i never have these issues. I often run two in parallel (though not all day), and generally have something running anytime i look at my laptop to advance the steps/tasks/etc. Usually i struggle to hit 50% on my Max20.

Heck two weeks ago i tried my hardest to hit my limit just to make use of my subscription (i sometimes feel like i'm wasting it), and i still only managed to get to 80% for the week.

I generally prune my context frequently though, each new plan is a prune for example, because i don't trust large context windows and degradation. My CLAUDE.md's are also somewhat trim for this same fear and i don't use any plugins, and only a couple MCPs (LSP).

No idea why everyone seems to be having such wildly different experiences on token usage.

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

#138
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://pi.dev/ seems popular, whats not open source about opencode? The repo has an MIT License.

Some people believe only copyleft licenses are open source. They're right on principle, wrong in (legal) practice.

They're not even right on principle: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Even the FSF recognizes that non-copyleft licenses still follow the Freedoms, and therefore are still Free Software.

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

#140

If someone wants to move off Claude what are the alternatives? More importantly can another system pick up from where Claude left off or is there some internal knowledge Claude keeps in their configuration that I need to extract before canceling?

Opencode is a great cli for driving a coding agents.

Like 3 weeks ago Qwen3-coder was the best coding LLM to run locally. I haven’t spent time since to figure out if anything is better.

You can also power Opencode with OpenRouter which lets you pay for any LLM à la carte.

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