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A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

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Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#111

Post by energy123 »

singhrac wrote: post #71
cye131 wrote: post #26

I'm curious whether anyone's actually using Claude code successfully. I tried it on release and found it negative value for tasks other than spinning up generic web projects. For existing codebases of even a moderate size, it burns through cash to write code that is always slightly wrong and requires more tuning than writing it myself.

Here's a very small piece of I code I generated quickly (i.e. https://gist.github.com/rachtsingh/e3d2e2b495d631b736d24b56e... Is it correct? Sort of; I don't trust the duration benchmark because benchmarking is hard, but the size should be approximately right. It gave me a pretty clear answer to the question I had and did it quickly. I could have done it myself but it would have taken me longer to type it out. I don'…

> I don't use it in large codebases (all agentic tools for me choke quickly), but part of our skillset is taking large problems and breaking them into smaller testable ones, and I give that to the agents. It's not frequent (~1/wk).

Where is the breakpoint here? What number of lines of code or tokens in a codebase when it becomes not worth it?

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#112

Post by petesergeant »

energy123 wrote: post #111
singhrac wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a very small piece of I code I generated quickly (i.e. https://gist.github.com/rachtsingh/e3d2e2b495d631b736d24b56e... Is it correct? Sort of; I don't trust the duration benchmark because benchmarking is hard, but the size should be approximately right. It gave me a pretty clear answer to the question I had and did it quickly. I could have done it myself but it would have taken me longer to type it out. I don'…

> I don't use it in large codebases (all agentic tools for me choke quickly), but part of our skillset is taking large problems and breaking them into smaller testable ones, and I give that to the agents. It's not frequent (~1/wk). Where is the breakpoint here? What number of lines of code or tokens in a codebase when it becomes not worth it?

30 to 40ish in my experience. Current state of the art seems to lack thinking well about programming tasks with a layer of abstraction or zooming out a little bit in terms of what might be required.

I feel like as a programmer I have a meta-design in my head of how something should work, and the code itself is a snapshot of that, and the models currently struggle with this big picture view, and that becomes apparent as they make changes. Entirely willing to believe that Just Add Moar Parameters could fix that (but also entirely willing to believe that there's some kind of current technical dead-end there)

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#113

Post by asaddhamani »

tkzed49 wrote: post #14

The problem is that this is $100/mo with limits. At work I use Cursor, which is pretty good (especially tab completion), and at home I use Copilot in vscode insiders build, which is catching up to Cursor IMO. However, as long as Microsoft is offering copilot at (presumably subsidized) $10/mo, I'm not interested in paying 10x as much and still having limits. It would have to be 10x as useful, and I doubt that.

I don’t know why people expect unlimited usage for limited cost. Copilot hasn’t been good for a long time. They had the first mover advantage but they were too slow to improve the product. It’s still not caught up to cursor or windsurf. Cline leaves it so far in the dust it’s like a decade behind in AI years. So you get what you pay for.

Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o3s of the world still don’t match up to Claude.

I started using Claude code once it became a fixed price with my Claude max subscription. And it’s taken a little getting used to vs Cline, but I think it’s closer to Cline in performance rather than cursor (Cline being my personal gold standard). $100 is something most people on this forum could make back in 1 day of work.

$100 per month for the value is nothing and for what it’s worth I have tried to hit the usage limit and the only thing that got me close was using their deep research feature. I’ve maxed out Claude code without hitting limits.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#115

Post by jwr »

cye131 wrote: post #26

I'm curious whether anyone's actually using Claude code successfully. I tried it on release and found it negative value for tasks other than spinning up generic web projects. For existing codebases of even a moderate size, it burns through cash to write code that is always slightly wrong and requires more tuning than writing it myself.

I use it, on a large Clojure/ClojureScript application. And it's good.

The interactions and results are roughly in line with what I'd expect from a junior intern. E.g. don't expect miracles, the answers will sometimes be wrong, the solutions will be naive, and you have to describe what you need done in detail.

The great thing about Claude code is that (as opposed to most other tools) you can start it in a large code base and it will be able to find its way, without me manually "attaching files to context". This is very important, and overlooked in competing solutions.

I tried using aider and plandex, and none of them worked as well. After lots of fiddling I could get mediocre results. Claude Code just works, I can start it up and start DOING THINGS.

It does best with simple repetitive tasks: add another command line option similar to others, add an API interface to functions similar to other examples, etc.

In other words, I'd give it a serious thumbs up: I'd rather work with this than a junior intern, and I have hope for improvement in models in the future.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#116

Post by lelanthran »

asaddhamani wrote: post #113
tkzed49 wrote: post #14

The problem is that this is $100/mo with limits. At work I use Cursor, which is pretty good (especially tab completion), and at home I use Copilot in vscode insiders build, which is catching up to Cursor IMO. However, as long as Microsoft is offering copilot at (presumably subsidized) $10/mo, I'm not interested in paying 10x as much and still having limits. It would have to be 10x as useful, and I doubt that.

I don’t know why people expect unlimited usage for limited cost. Copilot hasn’t been good for a long time. They had the first mover advantage but they were too slow to improve the product. It’s still not caught up to cursor or windsurf. Cline leaves it so far in the dust it’s like a decade behind in AI years. So you get what you pay for. Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o…

> $100 is something most people on this forum could make back in 1 day of work.

I expect so. The question is "How many days does the limit last for?"

Maybe they have a per-day limit, maybe it's per-month (I'm not sure), but paying $100/m and hitting the limit in the first day is not economical.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#117

Post by sixtyj »

asaddhamani wrote: post #113
tkzed49 wrote: post #14

The problem is that this is $100/mo with limits. At work I use Cursor, which is pretty good (especially tab completion), and at home I use Copilot in vscode insiders build, which is catching up to Cursor IMO. However, as long as Microsoft is offering copilot at (presumably subsidized) $10/mo, I'm not interested in paying 10x as much and still having limits. It would have to be 10x as useful, and I doubt that.

I don’t know why people expect unlimited usage for limited cost. Copilot hasn’t been good for a long time. They had the first mover advantage but they were too slow to improve the product. It’s still not caught up to cursor or windsurf. Cline leaves it so far in the dust it’s like a decade behind in AI years. So you get what you pay for. Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o…

Exactly, $100 per month is nothing for professional usage. For hobby projects, it is a lot.

From the internet, we got used to get everything for nothing, thus ppl beg for a lower price, even if it doesn't make sense.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#118

Post by designed »

anonzzzies wrote: post #114

My first language is not English, but is this changing the meaning of 'flat'? To me this is not flat.

It's flat as in flat rate, similar to fixed rate, meaning a set cost per month, instead of pay-as-you-go. Hope that helps.

It's flat if you graph your spend over multiple months :)

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#119

Post by microtonal »

asaddhamani wrote: post #113
tkzed49 wrote: post #14

The problem is that this is $100/mo with limits. At work I use Cursor, which is pretty good (especially tab completion), and at home I use Copilot in vscode insiders build, which is catching up to Cursor IMO. However, as long as Microsoft is offering copilot at (presumably subsidized) $10/mo, I'm not interested in paying 10x as much and still having limits. It would have to be 10x as useful, and I doubt that.

I don’t know why people expect unlimited usage for limited cost. Copilot hasn’t been good for a long time. They had the first mover advantage but they were too slow to improve the product. It’s still not caught up to cursor or windsurf. Cline leaves it so far in the dust it’s like a decade behind in AI years. So you get what you pay for. Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o…

Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o3s of the world still don’t match up to Claude.

I might be missing something, but you can use Claude 3.7 in Copilot Chat:

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/using-github-copilot/ai-m...

VS Code with your favorite model in Copilot is rapidly catching up with Cursor, etc. It's not there yet, but the trajectory is good.

(Maybe you meant code completion? But even smaller, local models do pretty well in code completion.)

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#120

Post by tippytippytango »

I prefer just paying for metered use on every request. I hope monthly fees don’t carry over from the last era of tech. It’s fine to charge consumers $10 per month. But once it’s over $50 let’s not pretend you are hoping I under utilize the service, and you want me to think I’m over utilizing it. These premium subscriptions are too much for me to pretend that math doesn’t exist.
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