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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

#161

Post by SwellJoe »

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.

At least some of the investors in this tech are hoping for a monopoly position. They'd like to outspend the competition to get an insurmountable lead, at which point they can set their price.

But, so far, competition remains fierce. Anthropic still has the best tools for writing code. That lead is smaller than it's ever been, though. But, honestly, Opus 4.5 is when it got Good Enough. If Anthropic suddenly increased prices beyond what I'm willing to pay, any model that gives me Opus 4.5 or better performance is good enough for the vast majority of the work I do with agents. And, there are a bunch of models at that level, now maybe including some discount Chinese models. Certainly Gemini Pro 3.1 is on par with Opus 4.5. Current Codex is better than Opus 4.5 and close to Opus 4.7 (though I won't use OpenAI because I don't trust them to be the dominant player in AI).

I often switch agents/models on the same project because I like tinkering with self-hosted and I like to keep an eye on the most efficient way to work...which models wastes less of my time on silly stuff. Switching is literally nothing; I run `gemini` or `copilot` or `hermes` instead of `claude`. There's simply no deep dependency on a specific model or agent. They're all trying to find ways to make unique features for people to build a dependence on, of course, but the top models are all so fucking smart you can just tell them to do whatever thing it is that you need done. That feature could probably be a skill, whatever it is, and the model can probably write the skill. Or, even better, it could be actual software, also written by the model, rather than a set of instructions for the model to interpret based on the current random seed.

Currently, the only consistent moat is making the best model. Anthropic makes the best model and tools for coding, but that's a pretty shallow moat...I could live with several other models for coding. I'll gladly pay a premium for the best model and tools for coding, but I also won't be devastated if I suddenly don't have Claude Code tomorrow. Even open models I can host myself are getting very close to Good Enough.

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

#162

Post by conrs »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #157
jjfoooo4 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But these products are all drop in replacements for each other For now. That doesn't really change the risk, that just means they are all hyper competitive right this moment, and so they are comparable. If one of them becomes king of the hill, nothing stops them from silently degrading or jacking prices. The only shield is to not be dependent in the first place. That means keeping your skills sharp and being willin…

I'm curious - why for now? This stuff is practically commoditized. Trying to think of anything that ever successfully got back into proprietary land from there.

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

#163

Post by hungryhobbit »

wood_spirit wrote: post #149

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…

This was a real issue, and Anthropic recently awknowledged it:

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem

Of course, it sucks when companies screw up ... but at the same time, they "paid everyone back" by removing limits for awhile, and (more importantly to me) they were transparent about the whole thing.

I have a hard time seeing any other major AI provider being this transparent, so while I'm annoyed at Claude ... I respect how they handled it.

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

#164

Post by Capricorn2481 »

nikolay wrote: post #121

I can agree. ChatGPT 5.5 made this a no-brainer choice. Anthropic are idiots removing Claude Code from the Pro plan. They need to ask Claude if what they did was a natural intelligence bug! Greed kills companies, too!

> I can agree. ChatGPT 5.5 made this a no-brainer choice

The new model that came out less than 24 hours ago made this obvious? This feels like when a new video game comes out and there's 1,000 steam reviews glazing it in the first hours of release. Don't you think you should use it for longer than a day before declaring it a game changer?

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

#165

Post by agumonkey »

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.

Some people are so dependent on it they can't even say it without twisting words to hide the fact that they're now stuck at zero

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

#166

Post by conrs »

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…

IMO It's a different and new model. We're engineers, and we're rich. It's not going to be good enough for us. But the much larger market by far is all the people who used to HAVE to work with engineers. They now have optionality; the pendulum is going to swing.

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

#167

Post by hungryhobbit »

binyu wrote: post #158

I feel like Anthropic is forcing their new model (Opus 4.7) to do much less guess work when making architectural choices, instead it prefers to defer back decisions to the user. This is likely done to mine sessions for Reinforcement-Learning signals which is then used to make their future models even smarter.

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem

On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium to reduce the very long latency—enough to make the UI appear frozen—some users were seeing in high mode. This was the wrong tradeoff. We reverted this change on April 7 after users told us they'd prefer to default to higher intelligence and opt into lower effort for simple tasks. This impacted Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6.

On March 26, we shipped a change to clear Claude's older thinking from sessions that had been idle for over an hour, to reduce latency when users resumed those sessions. A bug caused this to keep happening every turn for the rest of the session instead of just once, which made Claude seem forgetful and repetitive. We fixed it on April 10. This affected Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6.

On April 16, we added a system prompt instruction to reduce verbosity. In combination with other prompt changes, it hurt coding quality and was reverted on April 20. This impacted Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, and Opus 4.7.

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

#168

Post by zozbot234 »

conrs wrote: post #162
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But these products are all drop in replacements for each other For now. That doesn't really change the risk, that just means they are all hyper competitive right this moment, and so they are comparable. If one of them becomes king of the hill, nothing stops them from silently degrading or jacking prices. The only shield is to not be dependent in the first place. That means keeping your skills sharp and being willin…

I'm curious - why for now? This stuff is practically commoditized. Trying to think of anything that ever successfully got back into proprietary land from there.

The thing is that AI is still more akin to a glorified autocomplete than something that can really supersede your skills. Proprietary model suppliers are constantly trying to obscure this basic underlying fact, without much success (much of the unpredictable shifts you see in proprietary AI behavior ultimately boils down to this); so it becomes far more crystal-clear when using open models that really are a pure commodity.

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

#169

Post by antics9 »

SwellJoe wrote: post #144

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 toke…

From the comments here it seems like people are stress prompting their builds instead of planning and reviewing.

If one model seems to be a bit off during a session I just switch to another (Opencode) and plan and review from there.

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

#170

Post by dymk »

bandrami wrote: post #115
echelon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Why should anyone waste time on poorer results? Because in almost no real-world project is "programming time" the limiting factor?

No, it's rate at which you can solve problems, and weaker models waste your time because they don't solve problems at the same speed.
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