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Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

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Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#141
post #5

There's definitely a way to use Claude code that is token conscious. I've tried throwing unsupervised agentic software factory workflows against the wall, and they burned through my tokens like nobody's business but didn't produce much. Supervised, human-in-the-loop process on the other hand is much more productive but doesn't consume nearly as much. Maybe that's why everyone's pushing agentic approaches so much.

> There's definitely a way to use Claude code that is token conscious. Colleague used Sonnet 4.6 on some pretty normal agentic coding tasks through AWS Bedrock to keep the data in the EU, 100 EUR usage in a single day. In comparison, the Mistral subscription costs about 20 EUR per month and we tested that for similar tasks it was okay , the usage got to around 10% of that monthly limit in a single day. Or Anthropic's…

> They're gonna say that the future is all AI... until they get the bill.

I mean, the will continue to say so, they just want to be the ones being paid for the service, not anthropic :)

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rage canceled Claude today. After 2 weeks of Claude getting progressively worse and worse, today was the final straw. I don't care if they have a phone app. The model is COMPLETE garbage after you subscribe long enough and they think they've "got you". I can't code on my phone if the model literally moves in the wrong direction and does the opposite of what I tell it to. If I wanted to make my code worse, I'd just…

I've seen a lot of this sentiment over the previous six months from people on reddit. I have yet to experience this myself as a developer with over 20 years of experience.

What it does seem like is that they're tuning some knobs up and down or releasing new versions of models or system prompts that result in the model getting dumber and smarter in waves.

Opus has been dumb this week.

Claude was having a lot of capacity problems and downtime and then this week that has been much less obvious... and the model is dumber.

It could also just be luck and my impressions are false... who knows.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#143
post #5

There's definitely a way to use Claude code that is token conscious. I've tried throwing unsupervised agentic software factory workflows against the wall, and they burned through my tokens like nobody's business but didn't produce much. Supervised, human-in-the-loop process on the other hand is much more productive but doesn't consume nearly as much. Maybe that's why everyone's pushing agentic approaches so much.

---- Before it was:

Me: We need to do this this that.

Claude:

Me: Are you sure?

Claude: Well actually there is a bug

----- Now it is:

Me: We need to do this this that.

Claude:

Claude: Let me consult the advisor on that.

Claude: advisor came up with some advice, adjusting according to that.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a lot of this sentiment over the previous six months from people on reddit. I have yet to experience this myself as a developer with over 20 years of experience.

It’s because it’s not true, there’s no evidence for it that passes the sniff test. No lab is “shipping a worse model once they’ve got you”. People have a bad few days and blame the model providers instead of stepping back to fix their workflow.

When it comes to something with random results (unfortunately that's what LLMs are), people will think the odds are rigged against them.

It's a good thing that hype-chasers are cancelling though. So we can use the services with a reasonable latency.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rage canceled Claude today. After 2 weeks of Claude getting progressively worse and worse, today was the final straw. I don't care if they have a phone app. The model is COMPLETE garbage after you subscribe long enough and they think they've "got you". I can't code on my phone if the model literally moves in the wrong direction and does the opposite of what I tell it to. If I wanted to make my code worse, I'd just…

I've seen a lot of this sentiment over the previous six months from people on reddit. I have yet to experience this myself as a developer with over 20 years of experience.

Opus 4.7 has been a real downgrade for me. I’m back to mid 2025 when I had to catch all the completely intermediary goals/assumptions the model is creating for itself

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#146
post #48

The way coding agent work is fantastically wasteful. All the megabytes of code are processed over and over and over, sometimes withing just one session. There are papers describing KV cache precomputation for commonly used documents (e.g. KVLink), but, of course, it's not a priority for model providers: they'd rather sell you more tokens, also they would rather get to AGI/ASI first than optimize usage of existing mod…

Claude code gets >98% KV cache hits. It’s not reprocessing unless you let the cache go cold (5 minutes, which is annoyingly short).

Are you sure that hitting the cache mean you’re not paying for those tokens?

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#147
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no fucking training to mitigate a slot machine.

Games like Diablo are basically a whole bunch of slot machines, and there are strategies you can follow to optimize your run.

Yes, because in video games there is always a chance to win so you can optimize your strategy around that chance. If you have a 1% chance to drop a legendary weapon, the question becomes how do I manufacture 100 chances for a weapon drop in the shortest possible time. With agentic coding there is no such guaranteed chance - in a way it's worse than a slot machine that is guaranteed to pay out eventually. You could spend hundreds of millions of tokens and still not get what you asked for.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the enterprise level though, its going to be hard to want to use a service in which costs are not predictable, and keeping those costs under control requires employee training.

>...use a service in which costs are not predictable, and keeping those costs under control requires employee training. Isn't this a (mildly exaggerated) description of AWS, which is a very successful service?

Mmm… but for AWS its pay for external use right?

So your costs scale with the number of users you have.

Thats an op ex that you can explain.

For tokens for developers its maybe closer, cost/outcome wise, to hiring an external consulting company to write your code; money paid scales with work done, no promise of delivery, arbitrary unpredictable external price changes.

Its not quite the same; though, similarly lucrative for consultants.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a lot of this sentiment over the previous six months from people on reddit. I have yet to experience this myself as a developer with over 20 years of experience.

Opus 4.7 has been a real downgrade for me. I’m back to mid 2025 when I had to catch all the completely intermediary goals/assumptions the model is creating for itself

You can still use older versions of Opus if they work better for you. Just need to set the environment variable.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#150
post #35

Thus does kind of beg the question: If developers are being laid off because AI is better/faster/cheaper or makes all their people 10x or whatever fig leaf, what happens if the required tooling ends up being more expensive? From the investor’s point of view is the drag of employee costs better or worse than a ballooning expense item?

They lay people off and look good in front of investors. Then they hire people, talk about "growth", and once again look good in front of investors. This would never fly if stock market was rational. But it never is.

And if/when companies need to scale back their ai investments they can spin it too and the stock market will eat it up.
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