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A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

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Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They rely on ChatGPT to answer their questions instead of taking time to read the documentation or a simple web search. Documentation is not written with answers in mind. Every little project wants me to be an expert in their solution. They want to share with me the theory behind their decisions. I need an answer now. Web search no longer provides useful information within the first few results. Instead, I get cont…

Ah yes, LLM is very good at giving me information from documentation that was out of date 15 years ago instead of using the documentation from 2025.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Gemini 2.5 Pro is better at coding than Claude, it’s just not as good at acting agentically, nor does Google have good tooling to support this use case. Given how quickly they’ve come from far behind and their advantage on context size (Claude’s biggest weakness), this could change just as fast, although I’m skeptical they can deliver a good end user dev tool.

How much do you pay for Gemini 2.5 Pro?

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#173
post #124

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.

Doesn't per-call pricing reduce your usage? When I see the price of a session go to >$3, for a handful of interactions I self-limit my usage. I'd love to have an all-you-can-eat, but $100 p/m isn't compelling enough compared to copy/paste for $20 p/m via chat. That's not to say the value doesn't exceed $100, I just don't want to pay it.

> Doesn't per-call pricing reduce your usage?

Yes, and thats why phone contracts migrated from "$0.0X per minute" to "$X for up to 500 minutes", and finally "$X for unlimited calls".

When the service you provide has near zero marginal cost, you'd prefer the customer use it as much as possible, because then it'll provide more value to them and they'll be prepared to pay more.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#174
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ineffabl…

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

You and I have different ideas of what a formal spec is.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Gemini 2.5 Pro is better at coding than Claude, it’s just not as good at acting agentically, nor does Google have good tooling to support this use case. Given how quickly they’ve come from far behind and their advantage on context size (Claude’s biggest weakness), this could change just as fast, although I’m skeptical they can deliver a good end user dev tool.

> Gemini 2.5 Pro is better at coding than Claude

Id be careful with stating things like these as fact. I asked Gemini for half an hour to write code that draws a graph the way I want, it never got it right. Then I asked Cladue 3.7 and it got it almost right the first try, to the point I thought its compeltely right, and fixed the bug I discovered right after I pointed it out.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#176

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…

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.

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Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

[dead]

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#178
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ineffabl…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_specification

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is better at coding than Claude, it’s just not as good at acting agentically, nor does Google have good tooling to support this use case. Given how quickly they’ve come from far behind and their advantage on context size (Claude’s biggest weakness), this could change just as fast, although I’m skeptical they can deliver a good end user dev tool.

> Gemini 2.5 Pro is better at coding than Claude Id be careful with stating things like these as fact. I asked Gemini for half an hour to write code that draws a graph the way I want, it never got it right. Then I asked Cladue 3.7 and it got it almost right the first try, to the point I thought its compeltely right, and fixed the bug I discovered right after I pointed it out.

Yup, I have had similar experience too. Not only for coding, but just yesterday, I was asking Gemini to compose an email with a list of attachments, which I had specified as a list of file paths in the prompt, and it wasn't able to count correctly and report in the email text (the text went something like, there are charts attached). Claude 3.7 was able to do that correctly in one go.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#180

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…

So the scope of answers are single function or single class ? I have people nearby that are attempting generating whole projects, I really wonder how they will ensure anything about it beside the happy paths. Or maybe they plan to have an army of agents fuzzing and creating hotfixes 24/7 ..
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