A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code • Hacker News Board

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#231

Post by GuardianCaveman » Fri, May 09, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

jjice wrote: post #225

Tangential, but I don't want to use LLMs for writing code because it's one of the things I enjoy the most in life, but it's feeling that I'm going to need to have to to get ready for the next years of my career. I've had some experiences with Claude that have seriously impressed me, but it takes away the fun that I've found in my jobs since I was in middle school writing small programs. Does anyone have advice for ma…

Are you using it for other things? I think you can write code without it but it’s so good for research and stack overflow replacement.

Last night I used it to look through some project in an open source code base in a language I’m not familiar with to get a report on how that project works. I wanted to know what are its capabilities and integrations with these other specialized tools, because the documentation is so limited. It saved me time and didn’t help me write code. Beyond that it’s good for asking really stupid questions about complex topics that you’d get roasted on for stack overflow.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#232

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 09, 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

swader999 wrote: post #227

jjice wrote: post #225

Tangential, but I don't want to use LLMs for writing code because it's one of the things I enjoy the most in life, but it's feeling that I'm going to need to have to to get ready for the next years of my career. I've had some experiences with Claude that have seriously impressed me, but it takes away the fun that I've found in my jobs since I was in middle school writing small programs. Does anyone have advice for ma…

Have a side project where you control the entire experience and let your main job bend to the beast.

[deleted]

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#233

Post by _fat_santa » Fri, May 09, 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

jjice wrote: post #225

Tangential, but I don't want to use LLMs for writing code because it's one of the things I enjoy the most in life, but it's feeling that I'm going to need to have to to get ready for the next years of my career. I've had some experiences with Claude that have seriously impressed me, but it takes away the fun that I've found in my jobs since I was in middle school writing small programs. Does anyone have advice for ma…

> I don't want to use LLMs for writing code because it's one of the things I enjoy the most in life

I think LLM's are really good for the "drudge work" when you're coding. I always say it's excellent for things where the actual task is easy but the bottleneck is how fast you can type.

As an example I had a project where I was previously extracting all strings in the UI into an object. For a number of reasons I wanted to move away from this but this codebase is well over 50k LOC and I have probably 5k lines of strings. Doing this manually would have been very tedious and would have taken me quite some time so I leveraged AI to help me and managed to refactor all the strings in my app in a little over an hour.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#234

Post by McScrooge » Fri, May 09, 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

jjice wrote: post #225

Tangential, but I don't want to use LLMs for writing code because it's one of the things I enjoy the most in life, but it's feeling that I'm going to need to have to to get ready for the next years of my career. I've had some experiences with Claude that have seriously impressed me, but it takes away the fun that I've found in my jobs since I was in middle school writing small programs. Does anyone have advice for ma…

Treat them as resources for remembering/exploring code libraries and documentation. For example, I needed to import some JSON files as structs into Unreal Engine. Gemini helped me to quickly identify the classes UE has for working with JSON.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#235

Post by davepeck » Fri, May 09, 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

jjice wrote: post #225

Tangential, but I don't want to use LLMs for writing code because it's one of the things I enjoy the most in life, but it's feeling that I'm going to need to have to to get ready for the next years of my career. I've had some experiences with Claude that have seriously impressed me, but it takes away the fun that I've found in my jobs since I was in middle school writing small programs. Does anyone have advice for ma…

Do you use compilers? Linker loaders? Web bundlers? Linters and formatters? Code gen for or from schema? Image editors? Memory safe or garbage collected languages?

Then you already use levers to build code.

LLMs are a new kind of tool. They’re weird and probabilistic and only sometimes useful. We don’t yet know quite how and when to use them. But they seem like one more lever for us to wield.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#236

Post by Dlemo » Fri, May 09, 2025, 2:23 PM UTC

netdevphoenix wrote: post #188

Dlemo wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's an enabler for everyone. So many people benefit from basic things like sorting tables, searching and filtering data etc. Things were I might just use excel or a small script, they can now use an LLM for it. And for now, we are still in dire need for more developers and not less. But yes I can imagine that after a golden phase of 5-15 years it will start to go down to the bottom when automaisation and ai…

When a company lays off a chunk of the workforce because the increased productivity due to LLMs means they don't need as many people, how is it an enabler for the laid off people. What happens when most companies do this? During the 10s, every dev out there was screaming "everyone should learn to code and get a job coding". During the 20s, many devs are being laid off. For a field full of self-professed smart and log…

Right now we have not enough software developers at least based on surveys.

So now LLM helps us with that.

In parallel all the changes due to AI also need more effort for now. That's what I called golden age.

After that, I can imagine fundamental change for us developers.

And at least we're I live, a lot of small companies never got the chance to properly become modern due to the good developers earning very good money somewhere else.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#237

Post by burnte » Fri, May 09, 2025, 2:23 PM UTC

netdevphoenix wrote: post #142

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…

> 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.

No, you're in a tech bubble. I'm in healthcare, and you'd think that AI note takers and summary generators were the reason LLMs were invented and the lion's share of use. I get a new pitch every day, "this product will save your providers hours every day!" They're great products, and our providers love ours, but it's not saving hours.

There's also a huge push for LLMs to work in search and data-retrieval chatbots. The push there is huge, and now Mistal just released Le Chat Enterprise for that exact market.

LLMs for code are so common because they're really easy to create. It's notepad plus chatGPT. Sure, it's actually VS Code and CoPilot, but you get the idea, it's actually not more complicated than regular chatbots.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#238

Post by owebmaster » Fri, May 09, 2025, 2:26 PM UTC

jjice wrote: post #225

Tangential, but I don't want to use LLMs for writing code because it's one of the things I enjoy the most in life, but it's feeling that I'm going to need to have to to get ready for the next years of my career. I've had some experiences with Claude that have seriously impressed me, but it takes away the fun that I've found in my jobs since I was in middle school writing small programs. Does anyone have advice for ma…

> Does anyone have advice for maintaining this feeling but also going with the flow and using LLMs to be more productive

Coding with LLMs brought me so much more joy coding. Not always, but it is getting better. Sometimes is quite frustrating, but when you have some good idea, explain it well and get the model to generate the code the way you would code or even better and you can use it to build new things faster, that's magical. Many devs are having this experience, some earlier, some now, some later. But for sure I would not say that using LLMs to code made it less enjoyable.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#239

Post by wofo » Fri, May 09, 2025, 2:26 PM UTC

jjice wrote: post #225

Tangential, but I don't want to use LLMs for writing code because it's one of the things I enjoy the most in life, but it's feeling that I'm going to need to have to to get ready for the next years of my career. I've had some experiences with Claude that have seriously impressed me, but it takes away the fun that I've found in my jobs since I was in middle school writing small programs. Does anyone have advice for ma…

I faced a related dilemma when I finished my CS degree: to work as a full-stack dev or to work on more foundational technology (and actually use what I learned in my degree). My experience is that the "foundational technology" area is more "research-oriented", which means you get to work on projects where LLM's don't help that much: writing code in languages that have little data in the LLM's training corpus, coming up with performance benchmarking approaches unique for your application, improving a workload's throughput with insights derived from your benchmarking results and your ingenuity, etc. Had I gone down the full-stack path, I think I'd be worried now.

Re: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code

#240

Post by Arubis » Fri, May 09, 2025, 2:27 PM UTC

Been on this about a week at the $100/mo mark. I’m not hitting quota limits (I’d swap to the $200/mo in a heartbeat if I were), using Claude Code on multiple tasks simultaneously without abandon. Prior to the flat plan I was spending nearly $1k/mo on tokens. That figure was justifiable but painful. Paying a tenth of it is lovely.