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

nickyreinert.de

391–400 of 604 posts

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

#391

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…

> the whole thing being built on copyright infringement I am not a lawyer, but am generally familiar with two "is it fair use" tests. 1. Is it transformative? I take a picture, I own the copyright. You can't sell it. But if you take a copy, and literally chop it to pieces, reforming it into a collage, you can sell that. 2. Does the alleged infringing work devalue the original? If I have a conversation with ai about "…

This is a tiresome and well trod road.

The fact of the matter is that for profit corporations consumed the sum knowledge of mankind with the intent to make money on it by encoding it into a larger and better organized corpus of knowledge. They cited no sources and paid no fees (to any regular humans, at least).

They are making enormous sums of money (and burning even more, ironically) doing this.

If that doesn't violate copyright, it violates some basic principle of decency.

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

#392
I am sort of in the same place, it seems to have lost enough of the magic that I might be better trying to do more with running local LLMs on my 4090.

The thing is running local LLMs will give some kind of reliability and fixed expectations that saves a lot of time - yeah sure Claude might be fantastic one day, but what do I do when the same workload churns out shit the next and I am halfway thru updating and referencing a 500 document set?

Better the devil you know and all that.

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

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qwen3.6 at which model size and quantization? I already think Opus 4.6 is usable but still dumb as bricks. A 20% cut off that feels like it would still be unusable. And that's not even getting to the annoyance of setting everything up to run locally & getting HW that can run it locally which basically looks like a Macbook M4 these days as the x86 side is ridiculously pricey to get decent performance out of models.

At their highest model size and quant. We are discussing price and quality at the top, not what you can run on the lower end. So the starting point is Opus 4.7 pricing and we're contrasting alternatives near the top end (offered across multiple providers). Also I said 20% was hyperbole, meaning far too high.

That makes no sense because the largest Qwen models are not even open weight so I’m not sure how that’s any different.

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

#394

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…

Not sure about ChatGPT, but Claude was (is still?) an absolute ripper at cracking some software if one has even a little bit of experience/low level knowledge. At least, that's what my friend told me... I would personally never ever violate any software ToA.

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

#395

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…

months you say? how incredible. it beggars belief in fact

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

#396

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…

did you set your 4.7 to xhigh or max effort? anything else is basically not worth your time...

Why would I set 4.7 to xhigh or max when the original 4.6 was doing just fine with medium and high?

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

#397
post #68

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…

I think the problem is that we're all waiting for the patented Silicon Value Rug Pull and ensuing enshittification, where there are a dozen tiers of products, you need 4 of them, and they now cost $2000/month. I want to hedge against that.

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

#398
post #68

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…

> Open Source isn't even within 50% of what the SOTA models are.

The gap has been shrinking with each release, and the SOTA has already run into diminishing returns for each extra unit of data+computation it uses.

Do you really want to bet that the gap will not eventually be a hairs breadth?

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

#399
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…

I'm starting to think a lot of the problem people are having is just that they have unrealistic expectations.

I'm not having the same problem as you and I follow a very similar methodology. I'm producing code faster and at much higher quality with a significant reduction in strain on my wrists. I doubt I'm typing that much less, but what I am typing is prose which is much more compatible with a standard QWERTY keyboard.

I think part of it is that I'm not running forward as fast as I can and I keep scope constrained and focused. I'm using the AI as a tool to help me where it can, and using my brain and multiple decades of experience where it can't.

Maybe you're expecting too much and pushing it too hard/fast/prematurely?

I don't find the code that hard to read, but I'm also managing scope and working diligently on the plans to ensure it conforms to my goals and taste. A stream of small well defined and incremental changes is quite easy to evaluate. A stream of 10,000 line code dumps every day isn't.

I bet if you find that balance you will see value, but it might not be as fast as you want, just as fast as is viable which is likely still going to be faster than you doing it on your own.

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