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AI coding at home without going broke

stephen.bochinski.dev

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Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#91

Post by tchock23 »

tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

Same boat here. I’m able to get a lot done on CC at $100/mo and feel like I’m not being creative or productive enough somehow when I hear of people blowing past that in a day.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#92

Post by sublinear »

geophph wrote: post #83

> Do that well and you can build what a team of twenty engineers would put out in a month for around a thousand dollars. What does this look like after 6-12 months? Like, how much code are you trying to write total? Maybe it just doesn’t click in my mind, but sometimes I wonder about how much work people are trying to do and how they actually have enough to get done so quickly in such a short amount of time.

They prefer to work harder and not smarter. Forever hill climbing to nowhere.

I've never worked on a complicated codebase that started out that way until the rest of the business concerns and office politics came into effect. People may not like it, but the bureaucracy is far and away more valuable than the core functionality.

Mature codebases are years of people thinking of all the possible gotchas while solving their acute pain points. This is not fluff, but the living and breathing part of it. Without that code, it's just a machine barely doing stuff in the most obtuse ways possible that nobody wants to pay for.

I would argue that they're putting LLMs to work on that finer detail stuff, but AI is still far too dumb. No, what they're doing is playing with their skinner box.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#93

Post by dheera »

tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

[dead]

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#94

Post by pshirshov »

> and the hardware you buy today may look like a bad bet in a year.

3090s and 7900s are going well so far.

Next year an Arc Pro B70 won't produce you less tokens than today.

They aren't fast but if you have flows where you can make money with them - they are a bargain in terms of price per Gb.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#95

Post by justinhj »

manfre wrote: post #74
OutOfHere wrote: post #5

Fixed-price monthly plans ought to be sufficient for most people who actually review their spec and code, for building production-grade software that stand the test of time. A careful spec+review+iteration takes time, resetting the usage quota. Granted, security audits uses tokens too. If you still need more tokens, odds that you're vibecoding unmaintainable throwaway trash.

With access to view usage for my org and conversations with developers, I think much of the high token usage is a result of people not knowing how to right size the model for the given task. The trend seems to be to pick the most powerful model and use it for everything. Based upon git metrics, I'm one of the top performing engineers at my org and I've yet to run into any overage or throttling on the $200/mo anthropi…

I had no idea git metrics could show your best performers

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#96

Post by albertgoeswoof »

tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

I’ve watched a bunch of layman videos where they create stuff with AI, these people burning through 12 hour tasks are literally not reading the output or understanding what it’s doing. Like they’ll ask for a program, and then right after it’s been created they ask the AI how to run it. Then when there’s a bug, they ask the AI what went wrong, or scrap the entire thing and switch model/harness and try again.

Here’s an example https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xc1296HY8Fw&ra=m

It’s completely different to a professional workflow (what you described). It’s a toy for consumers

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#97

Post by Kuyawa »

This month I've spent only 15 cents using DeepSeek API and my own coding agent. Three apps delivered to clients and currently working on a tournament management app for pickleball, padel and beach tennis. I love DeepSeek.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#99

Post by chasd00 »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #19

AI coding at home literally costs $100/month. I'm wondering where $400 is coming from? $100 is more than enough for "coding at home", IMO. I rarely face the limits, and when I do it's just a time for a quick walk anyway.

Man I’m using the $20/month sub and it works just fine for me. Granted, I have a family and house and lots of obligations so by the time I hit the limits some other task is due before I can return to coding. If I hit the limits before I have something else to do then I just code by hand or review what has been generated until I can use the agent again. Reviewing agent code is a good way to learn too, agents have shown me different approaches than what I would have done and they’re definitely worth thinking about. Also, fixing their mistakes has helped me write better prompting although being a team lead for half a decade has taught me how to specify what I want very clearly and cc gets it right most of the time haha

About interruptions, one thing AI assisted coding really helps with is coding with constant interruption. I can leave CC for half an hour and return then tell it I had to step away, catch me up, and proceed. This works well for me.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#100

Post by calgoo »

tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

I have downgraded my Claude to the $20 one, and basically only use it for the web chat right now. For coding, I use DeepSeek @API Rates configured in Claude Code. I have spent around $4.8 for 320,000,000 tokens. I always felt like i was not using Claude plan, that i had to have the LLM working on something all the time to justify the price. Now with DeepSeek i don't think about it anymore. I don't feel bad when not using the subscription anymore, and i don't worry about limits as i just pay more. Where i really felt this was on running things in parallel as there are no hourly limits anymore!
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