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

nickyreinert.de

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

#511

Post by verve_rat »

buredoranna wrote: post #328
gwerbin wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just don't use AI to write code. Use it as a code reviewer assistant along with your usual test-lint development cycle. Use it to help evaluate 3rd party libraries faster. Use it to research new topics. Use it to help draft RFCs and design documents. Use it as a chat buddy when working on hard problems. I think the AI companies all stink to high heaven and the whole thing being built on copyright infringement stil…

> the whole thing being built on copyright infringement I am not a lawyer, but am generally familiar with two "is it fair use" tests. 1. Is it transformative? I take a picture, I own the copyright. You can't sell it. But if you take a copy, and literally chop it to pieces, reforming it into a collage, you can sell that. 2. Does the alleged infringing work devalue the original? If I have a conversation with ai about "…

The US is not the only legal jurisdiction these services are being sold in.

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

#512

Post by kuboble »

kube-system wrote: post #278
cheschire wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think if you (a company) pay someone for labor, your labor cannot use personal subscription and you have to pay considerably higher api prices.

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

#513

Post by hypercube33 »

mescalito wrote: post #216
dutchCourage wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any good resources on how to work like that? I made the move from "auto complete on steroids" to "agents write most of my code". But I can't imagine running agents unchecked (and in parallel!) for any significant amount of time.

I would also be interested on resources on "agents write most of your code" if you can share some.

For me you open a markdown editor and draft up a code plan and details of what you'd do as a coder at a high level then bust into whatever tool in planning mode (I usually fire this into the opus 4.5 model) and have it break it down into concise steps and then hand it off to a simple model (gpt spark, sonnet, composer or whatever) to execute. when I feel frisky I'll just have opus one shot it and it can be done in a few minutes.

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

#514

Post by antonvs »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #341
mlinsey wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My anecdata is that it heavily depends on how much of the relevant code and instructions it can fit in the context window. A small app, or a task that touches one clear smaller subsection of a larger codebase, or a refactor that applies the same pattern independently to many different spots in a large codebase - the coding agents do extremely well, better than the median engineer I think. Basically "do something real…

> My anecdata is that it heavily depends on how much of the relevant code and instructions it can fit in the context window. Agreed, but I'm working on something >100k lines of code total (a new language and a runtime). It helps when you can implement new things as if they're green-field-ish AND THEN implement and plumb them later.

In a well-designed system, you can point an agent at a module of that system and it's perfectly capable of dealing with it. Humans also have a limited context window, and divide and conquer is always how we've dealt with it. The same approach works for agents.

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

#515

Post by justinclift »

sarchertech wrote: post #433
flyinglizard wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... or one person has a very strong mental model of what he expects to do, but the LLM has other ideas. FWIW I'm very happy with CC and Opus, but I don't treat it as a subordinate but as a peer; I leave it enough room to express what it thinks is best and guide later as needed. This may not work for all cases.

If you don’t have a very strong mental model for what you are working on Claude can very easily guide in you into building the wrong thing. For example I’m working on a huge data migration right now. The data has to be migrated correctly. If there are any issues I want to fail fast and loud. Claude hates that philosophy. No matter how many different ways I add my reasons and instructions to stop it to the context, it…

> it will constantly push me towards removing crashes and replacing them with “graceful error handling”.

Is it generating JS code for that?

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

#516

Post by justinclift »

janalsncm wrote: post #379
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or just don't use AI to write code. Anecdata, but I'm still finding CC to be absolutely outstanding at writing code. It's regularly writing systems-level code that would take me months to write by hand in hours, with minimal babysitting, basically no "specs" - just giving it coherent sane direction: like to make sure it tests things in several different ways, for several different cases, including performance, comp…

How can a person reconcile this comment with the one at the root of this thread? One person says Claude struggles to even meet the strict requirements of a spec sheet, another says Claude is doing a great job and doesn’t even need specific specs? I have my own anecdata but my comment is more about the dissonance here.

Note that one person is mentioning they use Claude Sonnet, which is less capable than the higher tiers (Opus, etc).

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

#517

Post by idiotsecant »

michaelmrose wrote: post #466
idiotsecant wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tiresome and well trod road. The fact of the matter is that for profit corporations consumed the sum knowledge of mankind with the intent to make money on it by encoding it into a larger and better organized corpus of knowledge. They cited no sources and paid no fees (to any regular humans, at least). They are making enormous sums of money (and burning even more, ironically) doing this. If that doesn't viol…

You are assuming intellectual property has intrinsic basis when it's at best functional not foundational. It's only useful if the net value to society is positive which is extremely dubious.

I'm assuming human creativity has intrinsic value, or what's the point of being human?

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

#518

Post by system2 »

gitaarik wrote: post #504
system2 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am on max 10x ($100 a month). I asked it to summarize a small codebase (2000 lines). Instead, it ran 4 agents in the background, and those agents went nuts, started reading everything and related dependencies, and sucked all my daily quota, forcing me to wait till 2 AM to continue using. Up until last month, a $100 plan was more than enough, and it was difficult to run out of tokens per day for me. Something fundam…

Maybe you need to clean up MCP tools? My codebase is very large (hundreds of files, hundreds of lines per file), and I am managing fine on a 5x subscription, chatting all day. Some time ago I cleaned up a bunch of MCP tools I had installed some time ago and that did make a significant impact on token usage.

Thanks, I will definitely check them out.

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

#520

Post by vlovich123 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #464
vlovich123 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense because the largest Qwen models are not even open weight so I’m not sure how that’s any different.

Right, which isn't what we're discussing, since I mentioned "across multiple providers" in every comment about this topic. Those closed weight models aren't available like we're discussing. They're only available from the vendor that created them.

The largest qwen model is similar so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. The only ones available are the open weight ones which are the smaller variants and nowhere near within 20% of the closed frontier models.
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