Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI coding at home without going broke

stephen.bochinski.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 321 posts

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#151

Post by Random09 »

mikgp wrote: post #98

What are people doing at home? I have like 5 different apps I code on the $20/month Claude plan and like sure I can hit rate limits but - What are people doing to burn through $3k in tokens?

> What are people doing to burn through $3k in tokens?

The short answer is: they are doing slop. Most of the coding can be done quickly with a keyboard, intelisense and maybe some code generation templates.

But people became dependent on AI doing everything for them and tech bros now started to squeeze. Like a drug dealers.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#152

Post by frizlab »

rbalicki wrote: post #149
vitally3643 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you're treating the problem as an engineer instead of an "influencer" or "10xer" or whatever. You're treating it as a problem to be solved with engineering and AI is merely a tool to do so. It is, in my experience, vanishingly rare for an engineer to have a problem that needs to be solved with multiple hours of unattended AI code generation. I've only found one single application where it makes even th…

I'll add another use case for letting an AI go ham: many small, atomic refactors where the name of the game is never breaking anything. My personal OSS projects don't have the scale to necessarily make this worth it, but at work I run three pipelines using Barnum ( https://barnum-circus.github.io/ ). First, one that ingests files, identifies refactors (from a pre-approved list), and places a precise description of th…

I recently in $COMPANY had a coworker try fable to do a refactor where not breaking anything was the game.

It broke something at the first PR.

I think we’re not there yet.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#153

Post by astqs »

bredren wrote: post #146

What is going broke for a programmer? This is US centric but a $200 Claude code and $100 codex sub is a vast, vast amount of tokens. Enough to pay for itself many times over. It provides exposure to the very edge of harnesses and experience that is being hired for. Isn’t there an argument this is possibly the best price to available performance for frontier models? Both due to subsidies and the distance between open…

I used Kiro in December and I burnt through 200 eur worth of tokens in a weekend. Ultimately it was money well-spent, but, I think that if you want, you can spend as much compute as you have access to. Will it be efficient use of tokens? Probably not.

From all the data, it looks like the 200usd we pay for monthly usage is subsidised… at break-even pricing … well, that 200 is starting to look like a few thousand.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#154

Post by dyauspitr »

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 usually say run the full regression suite, all the simulator tests, install simulators and take a screenshot of every page on all applicable devices and do comprehensive fuzzing and chaos testing before I go to bed. It usually takes atleast 3-4 hours, usually longer, especially the UI/simulator tests.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#156

Post by gabriel-uribe »

Random09 wrote: post #148
gabriel-uribe wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YMMV but automations eat through the $100-$200 plans, which burn thousands in tokens alone. I have hourly automations for root cause analysis on customer support issues, daily automations for eg log analysis, weekly & monthly automations for KPI tracking & actioning. I will say, when I was building side projects that were 1) fairly well defined in scope and 2) without users/need for automations it was much easier to…

Most of it doesn't require AI. You could generate automation scripts that do that, except of customer support. People became dependent on AI in places where it never was required and now tech bros are doing the squeeze.

I don't miss the days of scraping through logs or dashboards myself to troubleshoot some latency or malformed data issue that I missed conditionals for.

AI is incredible at finding patterns in otherwise benign stdouts, let alone as it cross-references data streams.

In theory, I don't need most of these automations. But for $200/mo? I will happily reduce my cognitive burden on stuff that doesn't impact the core business and make it easier to keep things gliding smoothly.

When the subsidized plans disappear, I will keep these automations going with the best small models that fit on my laptop.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#158

Post by 59nadir »

wincy wrote: post #104
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’m using $200 a month Codex working on a game for my kids for fun and curiosity since I’m a dev, I’ve played games, but I’ve never done dev for games. and have all night tasks but mostly they’re “spend time tending to and adding stuff to my 3D asset pipeline”. My RTX 5090 runs Trellis2 -> ultrashapes -> Trellis2 -> wiring up rigging and setting up animations. But like 99% of that task is just Codex waiting for the o…

This sounds like you're overcomplicating things a lot and like you're very unlikely to be learning anything useful, I would suggest making something simple yourself to get a handle on what making the different parts of a game actually means in practice.

Knowing LLMs and their output I would also bet that you're getting nonsense output that sucks.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#159

Post by Random09 »

gabriel-uribe wrote: post #156
Random09 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of it doesn't require AI. You could generate automation scripts that do that, except of customer support. People became dependent on AI in places where it never was required and now tech bros are doing the squeeze.

I don't miss the days of scraping through logs or dashboards myself to troubleshoot some latency or malformed data issue that I missed conditionals for. AI is incredible at finding patterns in otherwise benign stdouts, let alone as it cross-references data streams. In theory, I don't need most of these automations. But for $200/mo? I will happily reduce my cognitive burden on stuff that doesn't impact the core busine…

What I mean is a script that can look through the logs. They are known and deterministic (if you properly handle errors) and you can analyze them statistically. If you don't know what logs your app is outputting, then you have a bigger problem in your hands tbh.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#160

Post by contingencies »

sheremetyev wrote: post #90
contingencies wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

recommend converting to https://github.com/apple/container

Linux VM doesn't run native macOS toolchain and requires copying files back and forth

I am skeptical there are many real use cases that require native macOS not arbitrary unix. For files, use a readonly mount https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/how-to.md#... (ie. /path:ro)
Post reply on HN