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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

#141

Post by bachmeier »

echelon wrote: post #68
Someone1234 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Benchmarks are toys, real world use is vastly different...Why should anyone waste time on poorer results? I'd rather pay my $200/mo because my time matters.

This kind of rhetoric is not helpful. If you want to make a point, then make one, but this adds nothing to the conversation. Maybe open source models don't work for you. They work very well for me.

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

#142

Post by jjfoooo4 »

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.

But these products are all drop in replacements for each other. I've recently favored Codex more than CC, just because rate limits got mildly annoying. I really didn't have to change anything about my workflow in doing that.

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

#143

Post by gizmodo59 »

Codex is becoming such a good product. I have the 100$ pro lite. I have Claude still but 20$. I rarely use it. Let’s see if they give generous limits and more importantly a model that’s better than 5.5. The mythos fear mongering did not give me a good impression that they care about the average developer.

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

#144

Post by SwellJoe »

I don't get it. I use Claude Code every day, what I would consider pretty heavy usage...at least as heavy as I can use it while actually paying attention to what it's producing and guiding it effectively into producing good software. I literally never run into usage limits on the $100 plan, even when the bugs related to caching, etc. were happening that led to inflated token usage.

WTF are y'all doing that chews tokens so fast? I mean, sure, I could spin up Gas Town and Beads and produce infinite busy work for the agents, but that won't make useful software, because the models don't want anything. They don't know what to build without pretty constant guidance. Left to their own devices, they do busy work. The folks who "set and forget" on AI development are producing a whole lot of code to do nothing that needed doing. And, a lot of those folks are proud of their useless million lines of code.

I'm not trying to burn as many tokens as a possible, I'm trying to build good software. If you're paying attention to what you're building, there's so many points where a human is in the loop that it's unusual to run up against token limits.

Anyway, I assume that at some point they have to make enough money to pay the bills. Everything has been subsidized by investors for quite some time, and while the cost per token is going down with efficiency gains in the models/harnesses and with newer compute hardware tuned for these workloads, I think we're all still enjoying subsidized compute at the moment. I don't think Anthropic is making much profit on their plans, especially with folks who somehow run right at the edge of their token limit 24/7. And, I would guess OpenAI is running an even lossier balance sheet (they've raised more money and their prices are lower).

I dunno. I hear a lot of complaining about Claude, but it's been pretty much fine for me throughout 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7. It got Good Enough at 4.5, and it's never been less than Good Enough since. And, when I've tried alternatives, they usually proved to be not quite Good Enough for some reason, sometimes non-technical reasons (I won't use OpenAI, anymore, because I don't trust OpenAI, and Gemini is just not as good at coding as Claude).

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

#145

Post by dandaka »

Retr0id wrote: post #88
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…

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…

autopilot (yolo mode) is amazing and feels great, truly delegate instead of hand-holding on every step

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

#146

Post by oceanplexian »

echelon wrote: post #68
Someone1234 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Benchmarks are toys, real world use is vastly different, and that's where they seriously lag.

I'm not disagreeing per-se but if you think the benchmarks are flawed and "my real world usage" is more reflective of model capabilities, why not write some benchmarks of your own?

You stand to make a lot of money and gain a lot of clout in the industry if you've figured out a better way to measure model capability, maybe the frontier labs would hire you.

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

#147

Post by zkmon »

banditelol wrote: post #84
zkmon wrote: post #21

Yesterday was a realization point for me. I gave a simple extraction task to Claude code with a local LLM and it "whirred" and "purred" for 10 minutes. Then I submitted the same data and prompt directly to model via llama_cpp chat UI and the model single-shotted it in under a minute. So obviously something wrong with coding agent or the way it is talking to LLM. Now I'm looking for an extremely simple open-source cod…

what model you used with llama_cpp?

Qwen3.6-35B quant-4 gguf

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

#148

Post by zkmon »

syhol wrote: post #33
zkmon wrote: post #21

Yesterday was a realization point for me. I gave a simple extraction task to Claude code with a local LLM and it "whirred" and "purred" for 10 minutes. Then I submitted the same data and prompt directly to model via llama_cpp chat UI and the model single-shotted it in under a minute. So obviously something wrong with coding agent or the way it is talking to LLM. Now I'm looking for an extremely simple open-source cod…

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

Maybe it's just my feeling. It asks to update/upgrade continuously.

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

#149

Post by wood_spirit »

Me and so many coworkers have been struggling with a big cognitive decline in Claude over the last two months. 4.5 was useful and 4.6 was great. I had my own little benchmark and 4.5 could just about keep track of a two way pointer merge loop whereas 4.6 managed a 3 way and the 1M context managed k-way. And this ability to track braids directly helped it understand real production code and make changes and be useful etc.

but then two months ago 4.6 started getting forgetful and making very dumb decisions and so on. Everyone started comparing notes and realising it wasn’t “just them”. And 4.7 isn’t much better and the last few weeks we keep having to battle the auto level of effort downgrade and so on. So much friction as you think “that was dumb” and have to go check the settings again and see there has been some silent downgrade.

We all miss the early days of 4.6, which just show you can have a good useful model. LLMs can be really powerful but in delivering it to the mass market Anthropic throttle and downgrade it to not useful.

My thinking is that soon deepseek reaches the more-than-good-enough 4.6+ level and everyone can get off the Claude pay-more-for-less trajectory. We don’t need much more than we’ve already had a glimpse of and now know is possible. We just need it in our control and provisioned not metered so we can depend upon it.

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

#150

Post by zozbot234 »

politelemon wrote: post #58
GaryBluto wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily local AI is becoming more feasible every day.

Feasibility on commodity hardware would be the true watermark. Running high end computers is the only way to get decent results at the moment, but if we can run inference on CPUs, NPUs, and GPUs on everyday hardware, the moat should disappear.

You can already run inference on ordinary hardware but if you want workable throughput you're limited to small models, and these have very poor world-knowledge.
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