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Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

blog.kilocode.ai

171–180 of 363 posts

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#171

I'm trying to cancel my Claude plan right now, because mid-research I got hit with a one hour time out for the first time, and I realized just how little I need the "expensive" research stuff and just want basic language refinement and some basic augmented knowledge search to get more terms to search the web. And all that basic stuff gets cutoff when you hit some invisible barrier that you have no way of controlling…

I've now got it behind OpenRouter on Bedrock and Vertex and am rotating in K2 and Qwen more and more as I learn how to get the most of them because the silent degredation and work avoidance heuristics are not a variable I need in an already difficult expectation management regime to my stakeholders.

At the rate the Chinese are going it won't be long before I can shake the dust off my sandals of this bullshit for good.

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1, even though I mildly disagree with you. I pay For Gemini Pro by the year, and even though I don’t use it often, it is still high value. There are obvious things like generating a Bash shell script quickly - and other things I rarely do, are simple, and I save 5 minutes here and there. Sometimes code generation can be useful, in moderation. But the big thing is using AI to learn new things, explain some tricky mat…

> explain some tricky math in a paper I am reading To me this seems to be the single most valuable use case of newer "AI tools" > generating a Bash shell script quickly I do this very often, and to me this seems to me the second most valuable use case of newer "AI tools" > The value of AI is in improving ourselves I agree completely. > help brain storm This strikes me as very concerning. In my experience, AI brainsto…

For brainstorming: when I write out a plan for a writing or coding project, I like to ask questions for ‘what am I missing or leaving out?’, etc.

Really, it is like students using AI: some are lazy and expect it to do all the work, some just use it as a tool as appropriate. Hopefully I am not misunderstanding you and others here, but I think you are mainly complaining about lazy use of AI.

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#173

When you offer "unlimited", you're immediately exposing yourself to the 0.1% of userbase that will absolutely treat it is unlimited. Whale users/hoarders. This has been a known problem since the dawn of hosting...hell, it goes back to times before computers. One thing I miss for the other users, i.e. the casual users that never use anywhere near of their quota, is rollover. If you haven't used your quota this month,…

>This has been a known problem since the dawn of hosting...hell, it goes back to times before computers.

yep

>Adverse selection has been discussed for life insurance since the 1860s,[3] and the phrase has been used since the 1870s.[4]

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#174
post #63

When you offer "unlimited", you're immediately exposing yourself to the 0.1% of userbase that will absolutely treat it is unlimited. Whale users/hoarders. This has been a known problem since the dawn of hosting...hell, it goes back to times before computers. One thing I miss for the other users, i.e. the casual users that never use anywhere near of their quota, is rollover. If you haven't used your quota this month,…

Things would be much easier if, instead of “unlimited”, companies simply offered great usage limits. Yes, hoarders would still exist, but their impact would be negligible. Even better: provide a counter displaying both remaining usage available and the quota reset time. But companies probably earn so much money from the vast majority of users that having good and clear limits would only empower them to actually benef…

It simply shouldn't be called unlimited, then.

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#176
This is just an ad for Kilo Code with a very dumb take.

Claude Max, to my knowledge, was never marketed as "unlimited". Claude Max gives you WAY more tokens then $100/$200 would buy. When you get rate limited, you have the option to just use the API. Overall, you will have gotten more value than just using the API alone.

And you always had, and continue to have, the option of just using the API directly. Go nuts.

The author sounds like a petulant child. It's embarrassing, honestly.

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#177
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. While there are developers that truly build new technology and invent novel solutions, the overwhelming majority of developers who are paid for their work daily do pretty mundane and boring software development. They are implementing business logic, building forms, building tables, etc. And AI already excels at building those sorts of things faster and with cleaner code. I’ve never once seen a model gener…

> the overwhelming majority of developers who are paid for their work daily do pretty mundane and boring software developmet So are musicians. We think of them as doing creative stuff but a vast majority is mundane.

Most musicians (i.e. non-famous ones) get most of their income from teaching students. I don't think such a model makes sense for developers

(though who knows, maybe at some time in the future there will be significant numbers of people programming as a hobby and wanting to be coached by a human...)

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#179
post #26

Did the Max plan ever promise unlimited anything? I’m on it, and I remember seeing and paying for 20x, not infinity. There is a case to be made that they sold a multiple and are changing x or rate limiting x differently, but the tone seems different from that.

No, it's never promised unlimited — it's always had usage limits: 20× the usage of their regular Pro plan, with a limit of 50 sessions per month (a session being a 5-hour window), although I don't know if they ever enforced this.

They appear to have removed reference to this 50-session cap in their usage documents. (https://gist.github.com/eonist/5ac2fd483cf91a6e6e5ef33cfbd1e...)

So even if these mystery people Anthropic reference who did run it "in the background, 24/7", they still would've had to stay within usage limits.

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#180
Come to think of it, there could be real benefits — possibly unexpectedly strong ones — in being bold enough to just say: “Unlimited… until we decide otherwise.”

Differentiation through honesty: In a market full of fluff, directness stands out. Customers might respect a brand more for telling the truth plainly, even if the truth isn’t ideal.

The risk: It could scare off some customers who don’t read the fine print anyway. But that may not be a loss—it might actually filter in the right kind of customer, the one who wants to know what they’re really getting.

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