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I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

nickyreinert.de

271–280 of 604 posts

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#271
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Opus or GPT-5.5 are the only ways to even attempt this. It’s pretty funny to claim that a model released 22 hours ago is the bare minimum requirement for AI-assisted programming. Of course the newest models are best at writing code, but GPT-* and Claude have written pretty decent systems for six months or so, and they’ve been good at individual snippets/edits for years.

> It’s pretty funny to claim that a model released 22 hours ago is the bare minimum requirement for AI-assisted programming. Not what I said. The OP was trying to write specs and have an AI turn it into an app, then getting frustrated with the amount of cleanup. If you want the AI to write code for you and minimize your cleanup work, you have to use the latest models available. They won't be perfect, but they're goin…

Is it actually the case that 5.5 is that much better at implementing specs than its very capable predecessor released a month ago? Just seems like a baseless and silly claim about a model that has barely been out long enough for anyone to do serious work with it.

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was saying the same until DeepSeek v4 this morning... sorry, Kimi. The competition is intense!

Fascinated, a bummer that DeepSeek does not offer a DPA or opt-out for training. This renders it unusable for my use cases unfortunately. At least z.ai GLM has a somewhat DPA in Singapore.

The weights are open and you can use the model with any third party provider that gives you the DPA you want.

For my use-case, I want the providers to get my tokens as long as they plan to keep releasing open-weight models

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#273
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stop trying to use it as all-or-nothing. You can still make the decisions, call the shots, write code where AI doesn't help and then use AI to speed up parts where it does help. You're assuming that finding the places where AI needs help isn't already a larger task than just writing it yourself. AI can be helpful in development in very limited scenarios but the main thrust of the comment above yours is that it take…

> You're assuming that finding the places where AI needs help isn't already a larger task than just writing it yourself. Not assuming anything, I'm well versed in how to do this. Anyone who defers to having AI write massive blocks of code they don't understand is going to run into this. You have to understand what you want and guide the AI to write it. The AI types faster than me. I can have the idea and understand a…

The number of devs I've worked with who can't touch-type and don't use or know their way around a proper IDE is depressingly large.

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fully understand every change and every single line of the code. im probably just not being charitable enough to what you mean, but thats an absurd bar that almost nobody conforms to even if its fully handwritten. nothing would get done if they did. But again, my emphasis is on that im probably just not being charitable to what you mean.

How is that an absurd bar? If you're handwriting code, you'd need to know what you actually want to write in the first place, hence you understand all the code you write. Therefore the code the AI produces should also be understood by you. Anything else than that is indeed vibe coding.

its an absurd bar if you are being a uncharitable jerk like i was, the layers go deep, and technically i can claim I have never fully grasped any of my code. It is likely just a dumb point to bring up tbh.

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#275
The discussion about Claude always omit the important context - which language/platform you’re using it for. It is best trained for web languages and has most up to date knowledge for that. If you use it for Swift it is trained on whole landfill of code and that gives you strong bias towards pre-Swift 6 coding output. Imagine you would give Claude a requirements for a web app, and it implements it all in JQuery. That’s what happens with other platforms.

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#277
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels more and more like OpenAI/Anthoropic aren't the future but Qwen, Kimi, or Deepseek are. You can run them locally, but that isn't really the point, it is about democratization of service providers. You can run any of them on a dozen providers with different trade-offs/offerings OR locally. They won't ever be SOTA due to money, but "last year's SOTA" when it costs 1/4 or less, may be good enough . More quantit…

Open Source isn't even within 50% of what the SOTA models are. Benchmarks are toys, real world use is vastly different, and that's where they seriously lag. Why should anyone waste time on poorer results? I'd rather pay my $200/mo because my time matters. I'm not a poor college student anymore, and I need more return on my time. I'm not shitting on open weights here - I want open source to win. I just don't see how t…

If sharing all of your code with the closed providers is OK then it works. If that is a blocker, open weights becomes much more compelling...

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's going to be a day when we look back at $200/mo price tags and say "wow that was cheap". The breakeven at this price is 6 minutes of productivity per work day for an engineer making $200k.

Okay, but then by that logic a person making only $20k would break even at about an hour. Are you suggesting that someone making $20k should be spending $200/mo on Claude?

I'm talking about the cost of labor.

If you pay someone $20,000 for labor, and they save 65 minutes worth of labor per day using a $200/mo Claude subscription, you are better off buying the Claude subscription.

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, it sounds like, assuming you have no ethical qualms, you could get by with a Mac or AMD 395+ and the newest models, specifically QWEN3.5-Coder-Next. It does exactly as you describe. It maxes out around 85k context, which if you do a good job providing guard rails, etc, is the length of a small-medium project. It does seem like the sweet spot between WallE and the destroyed earth in WallE.

Sorry, out of the loop. Which ethical qualms are you referring to?

I have ethical qualms to varying degrees with most LLMs, primarily because of copyright laundering.

I'm a BSD-style Open Source advocate who has published a lot of Apache-licensed code. I have never accepted that AI companies can just come in and train their models on that code without preserving my license, just allowing their users to claim copyright on generated output and take it proprietary or do whatever.

I would actually not mind licensing my work in an LLM-friendly way, contributing towards a public pool from which generated output would remain in that pool. Perhaps there is opportunity for Open Source organizations to evolve licenses to facilitate such usage.

For what it's worth, I would be happy to pay for a commercial LLM trained on public domain or other properly licensed works whose output is legitimately public domain.

Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

#280
post #202

I write detailed specs. Multifile with example code. In markdown. Then hand over to Claude Sonnet. With hard requirements listed, I found out that the generated code missed requirements, had duplicate code or even unnecessary code wrangling data (mapping objects into new objects of narrower types when won't be needed) along with tests that fake and work around to pass. So turns out that I'm not writing code but I'm r…

> With hard requirements listed, I found out that the generated code missed requirements, This is hardly a surprise, no? No matter how much training we run, we are still producing a generative model. And a generative model doesn't understand your requirements and cross them off. It predicts the next most likely token from a given prompt. If the most statistically plausible way to finish a function looks like a versio…

But agents do keep task lists and check the tasks off as they go. Of course it’s not perfect either but it’s MUCH better than an LLM can offer on its own.

If you are seeing an agent missing tasks, work with it to write down the task list first and then hold it accountable to completing them all. A spec is not a plan.

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