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AI coding at home without going broke

stephen.bochinski.dev

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Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#271

Post by jreynar »

tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

I'm in the same boat. I've done a lot of work and hobby engineering projects and haven't run of tokens since moving to Claude max. I also haven't needed to let anything run over night because it needed hours to do the coding or design work.

Surprisingly, I have had one much longer run refactoring our marketing website. We have a lot of blog posts that were written before we had more detailed style and tone guidelines. I wanted to make everything consistent but it took 15 or 20 minutes per post because it required a number of passes through each post to fully enforce the guidelines and an overnight run was required. That was quite a surprise since the posts aren't terribly long...

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#272

Post by tactlesscamel »

You pay how much!?!?

Y'all know that is enough to buy a real human, right? Well, good for you. I'm going back to figuring out which of my 2 streaming subs are getting cut. Maybe my free crap is enough to figure out that for me while I make my own art.

To be frank, the time you spend constructing prompts, tasks, and all else required to get your ai to do a thing was probably enough time to do the thing yourself. -Research included.

It's good to see the world throw the concepts of art, pride, and general accomplishment in the trash. Why have friends and partners in projects when you could give your savings to Anthropic, OpenAI, or any number of companies already obtaining ungodly ammounts of financing? A somewhate helpful bot at the cost of who you are and your bank account.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#273

Post by hackeradam17 »

mikgp wrote: post #98

What are people doing at home? I have like 5 different apps I code on the $20/month Claude plan and like sure I can hit rate limits but - What are people doing to burn through $3k in tokens?

Same, but I suspect that I don't have any issues with hitting caps because I actually still do plenty of the thinking myself, and just use the AI to help accelerate some of the boring stuff I don't want to do myself. This has been especially nice for my personal projects at home. It has made me much more likely to actually want to work on my side projects when I don't have to deal with some of the tedium after working on my company's tedium all day.

I suspect that most of these people who are burning through thousands of dollars worth of tokens at home are largely producing big ol' piles of slop.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#274

Post by portly »

tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

Lol I already have this at €20 a month. And I feel like I am using it too much.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#275

Post by dofm »

tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

> I'm guessing the next thing I should probably look into is some sort of machine vm I can tunnel my codex-gui requests to so I don't have to deal with the sandbox approvals (I don't want to give it "dangerous" access to my entire mac).

Docker sbx is worth looking at here, possibly; essentially a canned VM with a file system mount and layers for installing various agentic coding environments that cannot work outside that mount.

Apple’s new container machine addition to the container CLI does some similar magic.

In my experiments I have been using opencode, running the web interface inside a multipass VM, with the LLM server on the host. I have been using the desktop app, which can now do remote connections so the GUI app on the Mac can connect to the opencode web instance inside the VM. But I might bite the bullet, install Tahoe and switch to the container machine approach.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#276

Post by dizhn »

atreids wrote: post #2

I find just going via Deepseek's platform API directly, using their V4 flash model, and hooking into a harness like Opencode more than acceptable. Think I've spent maybe $10 over a couple of weeks. I did explore self-hosting models but hardware right now is just too expensive.

I believe opencode go but only using deepseek flash would last you longer. (Equivalent to $65 in tokens but it's a monthly payment so you have to be using it up or deepseek direct will be cheaper)

First month is $5, later $10. Cancel any time. You can keep getting the deal with a new email.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#277

Post by kstenerud »

tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

> I'm guessing the next thing I should probably look into is some sort of machine vm I can tunnel my codex-gui requests to so I don't have to deal with the sandbox approvals (I don't want to give it "dangerous" access to my entire mac).

This is what https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai does.

Sandboxing using Docker, Podman, containerd (linux only), seatbelt (macos only), tart (macos only), apple container (macos 26+ only).

It takes a copy of your workdir, does its thing inside of the sandbox, and you pull the results back using git semantics:

    $ yoloai new mybugfix . -a # launch default sandbox in . and also attach the terminal

    # Work with the agent...

    $ yoloai diff mybugfix  # See what it did
    $ yoloai apply mybugfix # Bring out commits and/or uncommitted changes.
    $ yoloai destroy mybugfix

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#278

Post by tomalbrc »

isatty wrote: post #3

> The first is to self host. You buy the machine, run open source models locally, and pay nothing per token after that. Power is not free. What I’ve found is that you’re basically paying a premium for privacy, and that’s worth it for me.

What makes you think that paying gives you privacy?

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#279

Post by Schiendelman »

dnautics wrote: post #50
tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

I have been on $100/mo claude and it has been churning out quite good software for months now. like i estimate what would have taken me three ish years, assuming i didn't burn out from failure (i would have). i only hit limits when i double fisted claude with my main project and my side project. just the other day i noticed i had been stuck on 4.5 because i failed to update the npm package.

We're having a similar outcome. A hundred dollars a month is about right for me to sometimes hit a five hour limit, but mostly not. I do an hour or two of improvements, then go experiment with what I built and make a list of things to change, bugs to fix, ideas I've solidified, experiments I've invalidated.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#280

Post by whateveracct »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #212
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won’t be long till employers get wise to this stuff, they just need to burned a couple of times. It seems AI is good, great even at many things. But it doesn’t seem like it’s going to change the world as much as some people believe it will. And if it does it’s going to take time

It's more power to power-users. And more dumbness for dumbos

it disproportionately empowers the dumb and evil it seems. those two classes of people are supercharged by AI.
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