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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

#311

Post by adastra22 »

BowBun wrote: post #306
raincole wrote: post #183

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…

In industry, the cost is more than 100/mo for engineers. With increased adoption and what I know now, I expect full time devs to rack up $500-$2000 usage bills if they're going full parallel agentic dev. Personal usage for projects and non-production software is not a benchmark IMO

I routinely use $4k to $5k worth of tokens a month on my $200/mo Max subscription. I don't even code every day.

You can use a Max subscription for work, btw.

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

#313

Post by mchusma »

BowBun wrote: post #306
raincole wrote: post #183

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…

In industry, the cost is more than 100/mo for engineers. With increased adoption and what I know now, I expect full time devs to rack up $500-$2000 usage bills if they're going full parallel agentic dev. Personal usage for projects and non-production software is not a benchmark IMO

I work with a lot of full-time devs, and it is very hard to go beyond the $200 max plan. If you use API credits, and I think the enterprise plan kind of forces you to do this, you can definitely incur this much, particularly if you're not using prompt caching and things like that.

But I and others in my company have very heavy usage. We only rarely, with parallel agentic processes, run out of the $200 a month plan.

And what do I mean by "hard"? I mean, it requires a lot of active thinking to think about how you can actively max it out. I'm sure there's some use cases where maybe it is not hard to do this, but in general, I find most devs can't even max out the $100 a month plan, because they haven't quite figured out how to leverage it to that degree yet.

(Again, if someone is using the API instead of subscription, I wouldn't be surprised to see $2,000 bills.)

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

#314

Post by ghurtado »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #294
gwerbin wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just don't use AI to write code. Use it as a code reviewer assistant along with your usual test-lint development cycle. Use it to help evaluate 3rd party libraries faster. Use it to research new topics. Use it to help draft RFCs and design documents. Use it as a chat buddy when working on hard problems. I think the AI companies all stink to high heaven and the whole thing being built on copyright infringement stil…

> Or just don't use AI to write code. Anecdata, but I'm still finding CC to be absolutely outstanding at writing code. It's regularly writing systems-level code that would take me months to write by hand in hours, with minimal babysitting, basically no "specs" - just giving it coherent sane direction: like to make sure it tests things in several different ways, for several different cases, including performance, comp…

> basically no "specs" - just giving it coherent sane direction

This is one variable I almost always see in this discussion: the more strict the rules that you give the LLM, the more likely it is to deeply disappoint you

The earlier in the process you use it (ie: scaffolding) the more mileage you will get out of it

It's about accepting fallability and working with it, rather than trying to polish it away with care

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

#316

Post by Aurornis »

Exoristos wrote: post #273
Aurornis wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're assuming that finding the places where AI needs help isn't already a larger task than just writing it yourself. Not assuming anything, I'm well versed in how to do this. Anyone who defers to having AI write massive blocks of code they don't understand is going to run into this. You have to understand what you want and guide the AI to write it. The AI types faster than me. I can have the idea and understand a…

The number of devs I've worked with who can't touch-type and don't use or know their way around a proper IDE is depressingly large.

Same with debuggers. I run into people with 10 years of experience who are still trying to printf debug complex problems that would be easy with 5 minutes in a debugger.

I think we're seeing something similar with AI: There are devs who spend a couple days trying to get AI to magically write all of their code for them and then swear it off forever, thinking they're the only people who see the reality of AI and everyone else is wrong.

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

#317

Post by ChicagoDave »

camel_Snake wrote: post #299
ChicagoDave wrote: post #296

I think there’s a clear split amongst GenAI developers. One group is consistently trying to play whack-a-mole with different models/tools and prompt engineering and has shown a sine-wave of success. The other group, seemingly made up of architects and Domain-Driven Design adherents has had a straight-line of high productivity and generating clean code, regardless of model and tooling. I have consistently advised all…

FYI that prominent link to your sharpee repo on GitHub 404s

OMG (fixed) - I updated devarch to check all html links for accuracy. This came from a recent update to the website to simplify it and of course Claude completely hallucinated that URL.

You can NEVER stop being vigilant. This is why I still have no faith in things like OpenClaw. Letting an AI just run off unsupervised makes me sweat.

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

#318

Post by _puk »

munk-a wrote: post #247
Aurornis wrote: post #232

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…

> 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 take…

The problem I have with this take is it's focused on solving the right now problem.

Yes, it's quicker to do it yourself this time, but if we build out the artifacts to do a good enough job this time, next time it'll have all the context it needs to take a good shot at it, and if you get overtaken by AI in the meantime you've got an insane head start.

Which side of history are you betting on?

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

#320

Post by kube-system »

echelon wrote: post #221
kube-system wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's going to be a day when we look back at $200/mo price tags and say "wow that was cheap". The breakeven at this price is 6 minutes of productivity per work day for an engineer making $200k.

Everyone is arguing why I'm wrong or that I should have presented more data. You've got the real insight with this claim. This is the way the world is moving. Open source isn't even going where the ball is being tossed. There is no leadership here. You're spot on. If the cost to deliver a unit of business automation is: A. $1M with human labor B. $700k human labor + open source models C. $500k human labor + $10,000 i…

Yeah, I don't wanna shit on open source, there will certainly be uses for all different kinds of models.

The real money in this market, though, is going to be made in the C suite, and they don't really care about the model. They don't care if it's open source, closed source, or what it is. They don't want to buy a model. They're interested in buying a solution to their problems. They're not going to be afraid of a software price tag -- any number they spend on labor is far more.

Labor is something like 50%+ of the Fortune 500's operating expenses -- capturing any chunk of this is a ridiculous sum of money.

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