I feel like the author isn’t aware of the Anthropic fixed price subscriptions, any of which can give you a lot of home AI programming.
AI coding at home without going broke
231–240 of 321 posts
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because you're treating the problem as an engineer instead of an "influencer" or "10xer" or whatever. You're treating it as a problem to be solved with engineering and AI is merely a tool to do so. It is, in my experience, vanishingly rare for an engineer to have a problem that needs to be solved with multiple hours of unattended AI code generation. I've only found one single application where it makes even th…
I thought most products had legal provisions that prohibit reverse engineering?
Those provisions would broadly be civil (not criminal); the vendor would have to identify you had reversed the blob and then take you to court, and then win.
They could also try for criminal charges if you’re in a relevant jurisdiction.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I think the distinction between vibe coding and hitl based coding routines will blur as workflows prove themselves There's far less need for what the author refers to as frontier models as soon as you move away from vibe coding to filling in the gaps that you don't want to write yourself. The author doesn't even consider Gemini models to be frontier. > models become smarter and less expensive That's optimistic. The…
Gemini models are great. They’re just not good at coding. I use them all the time.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have downgraded my Claude to the $20 one, and basically only use it for the web chat right now. For coding, I use DeepSeek @API Rates configured in Claude Code. I have spent around $4.8 for 320,000,000 tokens. I always felt like i was not using Claude plan, that i had to have the LLM working on something all the time to justify the price. Now with DeepSeek i don't think about it anymore. I don't feel bad when not u…
Gemini changed their rate limits recently and I find the free plan is sufficient for any 'hard' problems that DeepSeek might have trouble with. The combination of the two has reduced my AI spend to $5/month. I agree that it's nice not to have to worry about maxing out your subscription - I'm not doing personal projects 24/7.
I am right now at DeepSeek + Claude $20 combo. The former for coding home projects (it's pay as you use is quite cost effective) and the latter mainly for general purpose because I deal with it's relatively more even keeled tone better. Gemini preview couple of years ago was very balanced in terms of tone but they amped up the positivity in the GA version. The over the top sycophantic responses really grind my gears.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#235I 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…
If you can give your agent broad access and an effective feedback loop, you just need to steer it and do a final check on outputs.
As an example I might have an agent with access to a browser, logs, metrics, GitHub& CI logs etc. and ask it to implement a new feature.
In Slack I have a few bug reports so I spin up a few more agents. A PM needs a UI tweak so I spin up an agent. You can imagine that a lot of work a dev does isn’t necessarily that complicated and I just need to be there to review the final PR and leave comments as if it were a colleagues (and then my agent goes back, fixes the comments, requests a new review…)
While that’s happening I might be using my actual attention for a meaty feature, design doc, data analysis, etc.
I spend $300/mo for personal use, and a couple thousand at work. Agents can be really transformative and well worth the cost.
Would my company rather pay a few thousand per month, or a several hundred thousand per year for an extra fully loaded engineer? At this point it is _at least_ a 2x multiplier for myself
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Make no mistakes" is I thought a phrase used to make fun of "prompt engineering," not something people really do?
Pleading has worked for me. “My job depends on this, please help me” and ChatGPT would do a task it previously claimed it wasn’t able to (extract text from an image, it claimed it couldn’t make it out at first)
Asking LLMs to do things in different ways does sometimes get them to answer correctly when they didn't with a previous prompt that is effectively equivalent but people really go nuts anthropomorphizing this behavior.
ChatGPT has no empathy for you keeping your job, you just lucked into a more helpful predictive text chain based on some combination of the input and the random temperature.
Asking it to just 'try again, dummy' could have worked equally well (or not, its all just probabilities after all).
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#237I recently switched to the opencode $20 a month plan and am also testing the $5 a month go plan to see if that works. Connected into MiMo or DeepSeek Zen seems to code all day.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
perhaps simply threatening to fire it would also do the trick...it sure has worked well on us for a long time now.
You laugh, but this is real, and PUA means what you think it means: https://github.com/tanweai/pua Also, it works amazingly well, which is just lol.
Lol thanks for the tip. Does it work even for normal tasks or only the long running one's?
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more power to power-users. And more dumbness for dumbos
It's gasoline. Whether you put it in the tank of a race car or pour it all over the floor while handling lit matches is up to the user
I think hard part is that outside it takes 1-3 months to see if it’s race car. Especially in begin both things look pretty same.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are so many layers deep in AI hype that I honestly can’t tell if this is /s or not
"Make no mistakes" is I thought a phrase used to make fun of "prompt engineering," not something people really do?
I did too, but then added something very similar to a prompt ("must be accurate") for an ai-backed feature out of frustration, and sure enough it fixed the issue. Lord have mercy