201–210 of 268 posts
Surprised that "controlling cost" isn't a section in this post. Here's my attempt. --- If you get a hang of controlling costs, it's much cheaper. If you're exhausting the context window, I would not be surprised if you're seeing high cost. Be aware of the "cache". Tell it to read specific files (and only those!), if you don't, it'll read unnecessary files, or repeatedly read sections of files or even search through f…
If I have to spend this much time thinking about any of this, congratulations, you’ve designed a product with a terrible UI.
VIM, Emacs and Excel are obvious power tools which may require you to think but often produce unrivalled productivity for power users
So I don't think the verdict that the product has a bad UI is fair. Natural language interfaces is such a step up from old school APIs with countless flags and parameters
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[flagged]
Don’t be a dismissive dick; that’s not appropriate for this forum. The above post is clearly trying to engage thoughtfully and offers genuinely good advice.
Claude Code works fairly well, but Anthropic has lost the plot on the state of market competition. OpenAI tried to buy Cursor and now Windsurf because they know they need to win market share, Gemini 2.5 pro is better at coding than their Sonnet models, has huge context and runs on their TPU stack, but somehow Anthropic is expecting people to pay $200 in API costs per functional PR costs to vibe code. Ok.
> but somehow Anthropic is expecting people to pay $200 in API costs per functional PR costs to vibe code. Ok. Reading the thread, somehow people are paying. It is mindblowing how in place of getting cheaper, development just got more expensive for businesses.
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$100/day seems reasonable as an upper-percentile spend per programmer. $500/day sounds insane. A 2.5 hour session with Claude Code costs me somewhere between $15 and $20. Taking $20/2.5 hours as the estimate, $100 would buy me 12.5 hours of programming.
I'm waiting for the day this AI bubble bursts since as far as we can tell almost all these AI "providers" are operating at a loss. I wonder if this billing model actually makes profit or if it's still just burning cash in hopes of AGI being around the corner. We have yet to see a product that is useful and affordable enough to justify the cost.
[0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...
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Think about what you would do in an unfamiliar project with no context and the ticket "please fix the authorization bug in /api/users/:id". You'd start by grepping the code base and trying to understand it. Compare that to, "fix the permission in src/controllers/users.ts in the function `getById`. We need to check the user in the JWT is the same user that is being requested"
So, AIs are overeager junior developers at best, and not the magical programmer replacements they are advertised as.
You'll be prompting and evaluating and iterating entirely finished pieces of software and be able to see multiple attempts at each solve at once, none of this deep in the weeds fixing a bug stuff.
We're rapidly approaching a world where a lot of software will be being made without an engineer hire at all, maybe not the hardest most complex or novel software but a lot of software that previously required a team of 3-15 wont have a single dev.
My current estimate is mid 2026
Surprised that "controlling cost" isn't a section in this post. Here's my attempt. --- If you get a hang of controlling costs, it's much cheaper. If you're exhausting the context window, I would not be surprised if you're seeing high cost. Be aware of the "cache". Tell it to read specific files (and only those!), if you don't, it'll read unnecessary files, or repeatedly read sections of files or even search through f…
The productivity boost can be so massive that this amount of fiddling to control costs is counterproductive. Developers tend to seriously underestimate the opportunity cost of their own time. Hint - it’s many multiples of your total compensation broken down to 40 hour work weeks.
Mostly I just use the 4o model instead of the newer better models because it is faster. It's good enough mostly and I prefer getting a good enough answer quickly than the perfect answer after a few minutes. Mostly what I ask is not rocket science so perfect is the enemy of good here. I rarely have to escalate to better models. The reasoning models are annoyingly slow. Especially when they go down the wrong track, which happens a lot.
And my cost is a predictable 20$/month. The downside is that the scope of what I can ask is more limited. I'd like it to be able to "see" my whole code base instead of just 1 file and for me to not have to micro manage what the model looks at. Claude can do that if you don't care about money. But if you do, you are basically micro managing context. That sounds like monkey work that somebody should automate. And it shouldn't require an Einstein sized artificial brain to do that.
There must be people that are experimenting with using locally running more limited AI models to do all the micromanaging that then escalate to remote models as needed. That's more or less what Apple pitched for Apple AI at some point. Sounds like a good path forward. I'd be curious to learn about coding tools that do something like that.
In terms of cost, I don't actually think it's unreasonable to spend a few hundred dollars per month on this stuff. But I question the added value over the 20$ I'm spending. I don't think the improvement is 20x better. more like 1.5x. And I don't like the unpredictability of this and having to think about how expensive a question is going to be.
I think a lot of the short term improvement is going to be a mix of UX and predictable cost. Currently the tools are still very clunky and a bit dumb. The competition is going to be about predictable speed, cost and quality. There's a lot of room for improvement here.
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I'm waiting for the day this AI bubble bursts since as far as we can tell almost all these AI "providers" are operating at a loss. I wonder if this billing model actually makes profit or if it's still just burning cash in hopes of AGI being around the corner. We have yet to see a product that is useful and affordable enough to justify the cost.
It's burning cash. Lots of it. [0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...
Tweaking claude.md files until the desired result is achieved is similar to a back and forth email chain with the contractor. The difference being that the contractor can be held accountable in our human legal system and can be made to follow their "prompt" very strictly. The LLM has its own advantages, but they seem to be a subset since the human contractor can also utilize an LLM.
Those who get a lot of uplift out of the models are almost certainly using them in a cybernetic manner wherein the model is an integral part of an expert's thinking loop regarding the program/problem. Defining a pile of policies and having the LLM apply them to a codebase automatically is a significantly less impactful use of the technology than having a skilled human developer leverage it for immediate questions and code snippets as part of their normal iterative development flow.
If you've got so much code that you need to automate eyeballs over it, you are probably in a death spiral already. The LLM doesn't care about the terrain warnings. It can't "pull up".