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

nickyreinert.de

241–250 of 604 posts

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

#241
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…

> the day when LLM-assisted coding is commoditized Like yesterday? LLM-assisted coding is $100/mo. It looks very commoditized when most houses in developed world pay more for electricity than that. My definition of LLM-assisted coding is that you fully understand every change and every single line of the code. Otherwise it's vibe coding. And I believe if one is honest to this principle, it's very hard to deplete the…

> Like yesterday? LLM-assisted coding is $100/mo. It looks very commoditized when most houses in developed world pay more for electricity than that.

But, it's not $100/mo. I think the best showcase of where AI is at is on the generative video side. Look at players like Higgsfield. Check out their pricing and then go look at Reddit for actual experiences. With video generation the results are very easy to see. With code generation the results are less clear for many users. Especially when things "just work".

Again, it's not $100/month for Anthropic to serve most uses. These costs are still being subsidized and as more expensive plans roll out with access to "better" models and "more* tokens and context the true cost per user is slowly starting to be exposed. I routinely hit limits with Anthropic that I hadn't been for the same (and even less) utilization. I dumped the Pro Max account recently because the value wasn't there anymore. I am convinced that Opus 3 was Anthropic's pinnacle at this point and while the SotA models of today are good they're tuned to push people towards paying for overages at a significantly faster consumption rate than a right sized plan for usage.

The reality is that nobody can afford to continue to offer these models at the current price points and be profitable at any time in the near future. And it's becoming more and more clear that Google is in a great position to let Anthropic and OAI duke it out with other people's money while they have the cash, infrastructure and reach to play the waiting game of keeping up but not having to worry about all of the constraints their competitors do.

But I'd argue that nothing has been commoditized as we have no clue what LLMs cost at scale and it seems that nobody wants to talk about that publicly.

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

#242
post #202

I write detailed specs. Multifile with example code. In markdown. Then hand over to Claude Sonnet. With hard requirements listed, I found out that the generated code missed requirements, had duplicate code or even unnecessary code wrangling data (mapping objects into new objects of narrower types when won't be needed) along with tests that fake and work around to pass. So turns out that I'm not writing code but I'm r…

Writing detailed specs and then giving them to an AI is not the optimal way to work with AI. That's vibecoding with an extra documentation step. Also, Sonnet is not the model you'd want to use if you want to minimize cleanup. Use the best available model at the time if you want to attempt this, but even those won't vibecode everything perfectly for you. This is the reality of AI, but at least try to use the right mod…

Funny hearing you’re saying only GPT 5.5 (and Opus) can do this, having in mind that it came out last night.

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

#243

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?

Plus, I don't like Anthropic allowing "chosen people" to access models - OpenAI would offer anything to anybody who's willing to pay for it, and that's a real business. Anthropic claims some moral superiority, but their model is used to kill civilians in Iran and to spy on all of us, so I don't buy their BS!

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

#244
Those AI using software developers begin to show signs of addiction:

From "yay, claude is awesome" to "damn, it sucks". This is like with withdrawal symptoms now.

My approach is much easier: I'll stay the oldschool way, avoid AI and come up with other solutions. I am definitely slower, but I reason that the quality FOR other humans will be better.

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

#245

Looking at Anthropic's new products I think they understand they don't really have a cutting edge other than the brand. I tried Kimi 2.6 and it's almost comparable to Opus. Anthropic lost the ball. I hope this is a sign the we are moving towards a future where model usage is a commodity with heavy competition on price/performance

I've been mostly using Kimi has a hacker of sorts, putting it places I want to attach AI directly as their API for their plans are not completely user hostile. Need to do OCR for scanning Magic the Gathering Cards. Sure!, have it attached to X4: Foundations as a AI manager for some stuff. sounds fun. Can't really do that with claude

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the day when LLM-assisted coding is commoditized Like yesterday? LLM-assisted coding is $100/mo. It looks very commoditized when most houses in developed world pay more for electricity than that. My definition of LLM-assisted coding is that you fully understand every change and every single line of the code. Otherwise it's vibe coding. And I believe if one is honest to this principle, it's very hard to deplete the…

> fully understand every change and every single line of the code. im probably just not being charitable enough to what you mean, but thats an absurd bar that almost nobody conforms to even if its fully handwritten. nothing would get done if they did. But again, my emphasis is on that im probably just not being charitable to what you mean.

Could they have meant "every line of code being committed by the LLM" within the current scope of work?

That's how I read it, and I would agree with that.

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

#247
post #202

I write detailed specs. Multifile with example code. In markdown. Then hand over to Claude Sonnet. With hard requirements listed, I found out that the generated code missed requirements, had duplicate code or even unnecessary code wrangling data (mapping objects into new objects of narrower types when won't be needed) along with tests that fake and work around to pass. So turns out that I'm not writing code but I'm r…

Writing detailed specs and then giving them to an AI is not the optimal way to work with AI. That's vibecoding with an extra documentation step. Also, Sonnet is not the model you'd want to use if you want to minimize cleanup. Use the best available model at the time if you want to attempt this, but even those won't vibecode everything perfectly for you. This is the reality of AI, but at least try to use the right mod…

> Stop trying to use it as all-or-nothing. You can still make the decisions, call the shots, write code where AI doesn't help and then use AI to speed up parts where it does help.

You're assuming that finding the places where AI needs help isn't already a larger task than just writing it yourself. AI can be helpful in development in very limited scenarios but the main thrust of the comment above yours is that it takes longer to read and understand code than to write it and AI tooling is currently focused on writing code.

We're optimizing the easy part at the expense of the difficult part - in many cases it simply isn't worth the trouble (cases where it is helpful, imo, exist when AI is helping with code comprehension but not new code production).

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing detailed specs and then giving them to an AI is not the optimal way to work with AI. That's vibecoding with an extra documentation step. Also, Sonnet is not the model you'd want to use if you want to minimize cleanup. Use the best available model at the time if you want to attempt this, but even those won't vibecode everything perfectly for you. This is the reality of AI, but at least try to use the right mod…

Sure, Opus is next level than Sonnet, but it still doesn't free OP from these handcuffs - It is reading the code, understanding it and making a mental model that's way more labour intensive.

The OP's problem was treating the situation as two extremes: Either write everything myself, or defer entirely to the AI and be forced to read it later.

I was trying to explain that this isn't how successful engineers use AI. There is a way to understand the code and what the AI is doing as you're working with it.

Writing a spec, submitting it to the AI (a second-tier model at that) and then being disappointed when it didn't do exactly what you wanted in a perfect way is a tired argument.

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

#249
post #202

I write detailed specs. Multifile with example code. In markdown. Then hand over to Claude Sonnet. With hard requirements listed, I found out that the generated code missed requirements, had duplicate code or even unnecessary code wrangling data (mapping objects into new objects of narrower types when won't be needed) along with tests that fake and work around to pass. So turns out that I'm not writing code but I'm r…

Writing detailed specs and then giving them to an AI is not the optimal way to work with AI. That's vibecoding with an extra documentation step. Also, Sonnet is not the model you'd want to use if you want to minimize cleanup. Use the best available model at the time if you want to attempt this, but even those won't vibecode everything perfectly for you. This is the reality of AI, but at least try to use the right mod…

> Opus or GPT-5.5 are the only ways to even attempt this.

It’s pretty funny to claim that a model released 22 hours ago is the bare minimum requirement for AI-assisted programming. Of course the newest models are best at writing code, but GPT-* and Claude have written pretty decent systems for six months or so, and they’ve been good at individual snippets/edits for years.

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

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing detailed specs and then giving them to an AI is not the optimal way to work with AI. That's vibecoding with an extra documentation step. Also, Sonnet is not the model you'd want to use if you want to minimize cleanup. Use the best available model at the time if you want to attempt this, but even those won't vibecode everything perfectly for you. This is the reality of AI, but at least try to use the right mod…

Sure, Opus is next level than Sonnet, but it still doesn't free OP from these handcuffs - It is reading the code, understanding it and making a mental model that's way more labour intensive.

But when you write code by hand, you at least are there as it’s happening, which makes reading and understanding way easier.
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