201–210 of 344 posts
Am I the only one super confused about how to even get started trying out this stuff? Just so I wouldn't be "that critic who doesn't try the stuff he criticizes," I tried GitHub Copilot and was kind of not very impressed. Someone on HN told me Copilot sucks, use Claude. But I have no idea what the right way to do it is because there are so many paths to choose. Let's see: we have Claude Code vs. Claude the API vs. Cl…
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You need Claude Pro or Max. The website subscription also allows you to use the command line tool—the rate limits are shared—and the command line tool includes IDE integration, at least for VSCode. Claude Code is currently best-in-class, so no point in starting elsewhere, but you do need to read the documentation.
Correct. Claude Code Max with Opus. Don’t even bother with Sonnet.
I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard from people that Opus can be slow when using it for coding tasks. I've only been using Sonnet, and it's performed well enough for my purposes.
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as if they wait competitor first then launch it at the same time to make market decide which one is best
I think this means that GPT5 is better - you can't launch a worse model after the competitor supersedes you - you have to show that you're in the lead even if its just for a day.
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Every time that Sonnet is acting like it has brain damage (which is once or twice a day), I switch to Opus and it seems to sort things out pretty fast. This is unscientific anicdata though, and it could just be that switching models (any model) would have worked.
This is a great use case for sub-agents IMO. By default, sub-agents use sonnet. You can have opus orchestrate the various agents and get (close to) the best of both worlds.
Subagents seem pretty similar to using zen mcp w/ OpenRouter but maybe better or at least more turnkey? I'll be checking them out.
Claude Code has honestly made me at least 10x more productive. I’ve burned through about 3 billion tokens and have been consistently merging 5+ PRs a day, tackling tons of tech debt, improving GitHub Actions, and making crazy progress on product work
My current bottleneck is having to review the huge amounts of code that these models spit out. I do TDD, use auto-linting and type-checking.... but the model makes insidious changes that are only visible on deep inspection.
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Is it considerably more cost effective than cline+sonnet api calls with caching and diff edits? Same context length and throughput limits? Anecdotally I find gpt4.1 (and mini) were pretty good at those agentic programming tasks but the lack of token caching made the costs blow up with long context.
I'm on the basic $20/mo sub and only ran into token cap limitations in the first few days of using Claude Code (now 2-3 weeks in) before I started being more aggressive about clearing the context. Long contexts will eat up tokens caps quickly when you are having extended back-and-forth conversations with the model. Otherwise, it's been effectively "unlimited" for my own use.
Unfortunately there's no easy tool to inspect usage. I started a project to parse the Claude logs using Claude and generate a Chrome trace with it. It's promising but it was taking my tokens away from my core project.
Opus 4(.1) is so expensive[1]. Even Sonnet[2] costs me $5 per hour (basically) using OpenRouter + Codename Goose[3]. The crazy thing is Sonnet 3.5 costs the same thing [4] right now. Gemini Flash is more reasonable[5], but always seems to make the wrong decisions in the end, spinning in circles. OpenAI is better, but still falls short of Claude's performance. Claude also gives back 400's from its API if you CTRL-C in…
Get a subscription and use claude code - that's how you get actual reasonable economics out of it. I use claude code all day on the max subscription and maybe twice in the last two weeks have I actually hit usage limits.
Maybe I'm out of touch, but I'm not handing out my phone number to sign up for random SaaS tools.
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I think this means that GPT5 is better - you can't launch a worse model after the competitor supersedes you - you have to show that you're in the lead even if its just for a day.
Not sure that this is true. Are there a lot of people waiting anxiously to adopt the next model on the day of release and expecting some huge work advantage?