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

A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

support.anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 293 posts

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#161

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

vidarh wrote: post #149
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM's don't increase programmer productivity. In fact, they actively harm it. Programmers aren't paid for coding, they're paid for following a formal spec in a particular problem domain. (Something that LLM's can't do at all.) Improving coding speed is a red herring and a scam.

In my 30 years of software development, maybe 5 of them were in places were getting people to provide a formal spec was ever an option. It's also irrelevant if LLM's can follow them - the way I use Claude Code is to have it get things roughly working, supply test cases showing where it fails, then review and clean up the code or go additional rounds with more test cases. That's not much different to how I work with m…

You don't understand.

The fact that getting a formal spec is impossible is precisely why you need to hire a developer with a big salary and generous benefits.

The formal spec lives only in the developer's head. It's the only way.

Does an LLM coding agent provide any value here?

Hardly. It's just an excuse for the developer to waste time futzing around "coding" when what they're really paid to do is cram that ineffable but very much important formal spec into their heads.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#162

Post by vidarh »

satvikpendem wrote: post #135
ramoz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

something like that. Think "paid more" as well

So just for work then or personal projects too? For work I can understand but for personal projects I haven't necessarily gotten more success out of AI than my own code, to be honest.

In terms of personal projects, I use my own custom Ruby X11 window manager, and when I moved and got the office space for an extra monitor, Claude Code wrote the basics of the multi-monitor support by itself.

It's notable to me because there are to my knowledge no other Ruby wm's (there's at least one that allows scripting with Ruby, I believe, but not the whole codebase), the X11 bindings are custom (no Xlib or XCB), and there are few great examples that fits into the structure of my wm. Yet it made it work. The code was ugly, and I haven't committed it yet as I want to clean it up (or get Claude to) but my priority was to be able to use the second monitor without spending more than a few hours on it, and starting with no idea how multi-monitor support in X11 worked.

Since then, Claude Code has added Xinerama support to my X11 bindings, and selection support to enable a systray for my pager, and written the systray implementation (which I also didn't have the faintest clue how worked, and so had Claude explain to me before starting).

I use it for work too, but for these personal projects priority has been rough working code over beauty, because I use them every day and rely on the features, and want to spend as little time as possible on them, and so the work has been very different from how I work with Claude for work projects where I'll work in much smaller chunks, polish the result etc.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#163

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

mr_mitm wrote: post #160
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM's don't increase programmer productivity. In fact, they actively harm it. Programmers aren't paid for coding, they're paid for following a formal spec in a particular problem domain. (Something that LLM's can't do at all.) Improving coding speed is a red herring and a scam.

I don't know. The other day I wanted to display an Active Directory object to the user. The dict had around 20 keys like "distinguishedname" and the "createdat" with timestamps like 144483738. I wanted friendly display names in a sensible order and have binary values converted to human readable values. Very easy to do, sure, but the LLM did this in one minute, recognized the context and correctly converted binary val…

Yes, these sorts of tasks are where LLM's are exceedingly useful.

But I was talking specifically about coding agents.

(A.k.a. spend four hours micromanaging prompts and contexts to do what can be done in 15 minutes manually.)

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#164

Post by uludag »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #142

Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers. While you can see them as a productivity enhancing tool, in times of tight budgets, they can be useful to lay off more programmers because a single one is now way more productive than pre-LLM. I feel that LLMs will increase the barrier…

> All in all, I expect salaries for non FAANG devs to decrease while salaries for FAANG devs to increase slightly (given the increased value they can now make).

I find it interesting how these sort of things are often viewed as a function of technological advancement. I would think that AI development tools would have a marginal effect on wages as opposed to things like interest rates or the ability to raise capital.

Back to the topic at hand however, assuming these tools do get better, it would seemingly greatly increase competition. Assuming these tools get better, a highly skilled team with such tools could prove to be formidable competition to longstanding companies. This would require all companies to up the ante to avoid being outcompeted, requiring even more software to be written.

A company could rest on their laurels, laying off a good portion of their employees, and leaving the rest to maintain the same work, but they run the risk of being disrupted themselves.

Alas, at the job I'm at now my team can't seem to release a rather basic feature, despite everyone being enhanced with AI: nobody seems to understand the code, all the changes seem to break something else, the code's a mess... maybe next year AI will be able to fix this.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#165

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

mr_mitm wrote: post #160
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM's don't increase programmer productivity. In fact, they actively harm it. Programmers aren't paid for coding, they're paid for following a formal spec in a particular problem domain. (Something that LLM's can't do at all.) Improving coding speed is a red herring and a scam.

I don't know. The other day I wanted to display an Active Directory object to the user. The dict had around 20 keys like "distinguishedname" and the "createdat" with timestamps like 144483738. I wanted friendly display names in a sensible order and have binary values converted to human readable values. Very easy to do, sure, but the LLM did this in one minute, recognized the context and correctly converted binary val…

Yes, these sorts of tasks (classification and summarizing and generally naming things) are where LLM's are exceedingly useful.

But I was talking specifically about coding agents.

(A.k.a. spend four hours micromanaging prompts and contexts to do what can be done in 15 minutes manually.)

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#166

Post by Kurtz79 »

lucyjojo wrote: post #79
vel0city wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get an employer match on 401k/HSA, the employer pays full healthcare premium, employer sponsored life insurance benefits, unemployment insurance, employer covered disability, payroll taxes, and all the other software costs, it wouldn't even take $200k in salary to cost $20k/mo. Someone could be making like $150k and still cost the company that much.

gentle reminder that the majority of developers do not live in the united states. median salary for a japanese dev is ~$60k. same range for europe (swiss at ~100k, italy at ~30k for the extremes). then you go down. Russia ~$37,000 Brazil ~$31,500 Nigeria ~$6,000 Morocco ~$11,800 Indonesia ~$13,500 and india ~$30k usd (asked chatgpt for these numbers down there, JP and EU numbers are mostly correct though as I have fi…

According to Wilkipedia, general average wages in Italy in 2023 were 48K, and SWE jobs are usually above average.

It would be interesting to know from where Chatgpt sourced those figures as some of them look very sketchy.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#167

Post by asim »

throwaway_0351 wrote: post #152
netdevphoenix wrote: post #142

Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers. While you can see them as a productivity enhancing tool, in times of tight budgets, they can be useful to lay off more programmers because a single one is now way more productive than pre-LLM. I feel that LLMs will increase the barrier…

I see worrying trends in my office. Developers (often juniors) use LLM code without taking time to verify it. This leads to bugs and they can't fix it because they don't understand the code. Some senior developers also trust the tool to generate a function, and don't take the time to review it and catch the edge cases that the tool missed. They rely on ChatGPT to answer their questions instead of taking time to read…

Same could be said for every language abstraction or systems layer change. When we stopped programming kernel modules and actually found a workable interface it opened the door to so many more developers. I'm sure at the time there was skepticism because people didn't understand the internals of the kernel. That's not the point. The point is to raise the level of abstraction to open the door, increase productivity and focus on new problems.

When you see 30-50 years of change you realise this was inevitable and in every generation there's new engineers entering with limited understanding of the layers beneath. Even the code produced. Do I understand the lexers and the compilers that turn my code in to machine code or instruction sets? Heck no. Doesn't mean I shouldn't use the tools available to me now.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#168

Post by miroljub »

nprateem wrote: post #128
microtonal wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I tried Claude in copilot it was so obviously crippled as to be useless. I deleted copilot and never went back.

Care to explain why? Isn't the Claude version in Copilot exactly the same as in Claude Code?

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#169

Post by jwr »

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)

Claude code, too?

I found that it is the only one that does a good job in a large codebase. It seems to be very different from others I've tested (aider, plandex).

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#170

Post by jwr »

jarym wrote: post #139

I cancelled my Claude subscription. I was happily using it for months - asking it the odd question or sometimes having longer discussions to talk through an idea. Then one day I got nagged to upgrade or wait a few hours. I was pretty annoyed, I didn’t regard my usage as high and felt like a squeeze. I cancelled my pro plan and now happily using Gemini which costs nothing. These AI companies are still finding their fe…

> now happily using Gemini which costs nothing

…and you think this is going to last? :-)

Post reply on HN