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AI coding at home without going broke
171–180 of 321 posts
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#172I cannot figure out what people are doing to spend all this money. I have used a $60 per month Cursor plan on auto, and have never come close to using up my included usage, and I probably have it planning and coding and working for me all through the evenings 4 nights a week. What on earth are people doing differently that it's costing them so much? Maybe enabling on-demand usage or other paid models, or on higher mo…
A few things imo, 1) not prompting precisely enough (narrowing scope) means your agent will scan your entire code-base and sometimes get stuck looking at things repeatedly. 2) not checking the output is usually fine but sometimes it produces junk because it doesn't understand, and you cannot prompt your way out of it without reading the code and figuring out the problem. If you leave it on auto it will burn tokens.
Plenty of low level things can trip agents up, too. I just had one inexplicably refuse to read an error about a function needing a bool return value - trying about 10 variations of the same thing before I interrupted it. Skills probably cause issues too, it loves to for example read the source code of libraries I'm using if I give it permission. That's a rabbit hole.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#173since when $400/m is justified as a "efficient" way of using a "nice-to-have" option?
what a world we live in?
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Deterministic scripts are awesome, and they certainly power my internal dashboards.
But I'm a human - I will miss things. I maintain too many apps to have entire codebases in memory at this point. Or to continue monitoring all these streams. Logging is cheap - I log as much as possible because an AI will scan it for me.
I just want scoped pull requests to review proactively against the slew of things that can happen in prod that I didn't account for in my specs (again, from logs, customer issues, etc). I discard most of them. That is fine.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#175I 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.
I just recently learned about hooks[1] from another HN comment. Conceptually, running CI doesn't have to impose an Agentic tax right?
In other words, isn't there a way to orchestrate this NOT as a long running token maxxing setup given that triggers and CI runs can be run deterministically.
disclaimer: I haven't done this, just interested.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've found that adding "Make no mistakes." to my prompt usually helps with this kind of problem...
We are so many layers deep in AI hype that I honestly can’t tell if this is /s or not
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#177I cannot figure out what people are doing to spend all this money. I have used a $60 per month Cursor plan on auto, and have never come close to using up my included usage, and I probably have it planning and coding and working for me all through the evenings 4 nights a week. What on earth are people doing differently that it's costing them so much? Maybe enabling on-demand usage or other paid models, or on higher mo…
To be honest I’m not doing too much. I’m just on one of the $200 plans, but always hit limits. I only use the best models and mostly use it for various software projects I always wanted to build, but didn’t have time for. I just closely monitor the usage caps and have something running on a Ralph loop most of the time, unless I get near the cap. The post here is more about how I’d start a self-funded software company, if I wasn’t already working full time.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#178> The first is to self host. You buy the machine, run open source models locally, and pay nothing per token after that. Power is not free. What I’ve found is that you’re basically paying a premium for privacy, and that’s worth it for me.
If you paid for solar, this is less of an issue. I also don’t worry so much about running my AC.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#179> The upfront cost is steep and the models you can actually run at home are weaker than what the frontier labs ship, so this only pays off if you can keep the rig busy with long running tasks where a slower, cheaper model grinds away overnight. Most people can’t keep a home machine that loaded, and the hardware you buy today may look like a bad bet in a year. Oh, so this is not a post about AI coding at home. It's ab…
There are certain things you can leave running for a while. I think the distinction between vibe coding and hitl based coding routines will blur as workflows prove themselves and models become smarter and less expensive. Most of the best engineers I know have transitioned a lot more into vibe coding this year. The possibilities are much better nowadays.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#180Pretty happy with oMLX running Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-8bit