Did the same with Google Ai Ultra. They rug pulled the subscribers. They changed the deal, we cancel. Simple.
I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support
521–530 of 604 posts
Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always wonder if anyone out there thinks they're not making money off of other people's work. If you're coding, writing a fantasy novel, taking a photograph or drawing a picture from first principals you came up with yourself I applaud you though.
You are absolutely right. Seriously though, I do think that is the case. It would be self-righteous to argue otherwise. It's just the scale and the nature of this, that makes it so repulsive. For my taste, copying something without permission, is stealing. I don't care what a judge somewhere thinks of it. Using someone's good will for profit is disgusting. And I hope we all get to profit from it someday, not just a s…
I understand but I think this will be quite a quaint idea soon in all honesty. Imagine these things are able to progress the world of science, math, physics, and whatever else (they already are) and we stopped them because someone didn't make enough royalties first. That to me would be more repulsive. We stop/slow the progress of all humanity because there wasn't enough temporary gain for x individual who wrote y book. And if it all turns out to be bogus nonsense then I doubt x individual who wrote y book loses much in the process anyway.
Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support
#523Earlier 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.
I think it depends on both the complexity and the quality bars set by the engineer.
From my observations, generally AI-generated code is average quality.
Even with average quality it can save you a lot of time on some narrowly specialized tasks that would otherwise take you a lot of research and understanding. For example, you can code some deep DSP thingie (say audio) without understanding much what it does and how.
For simpler things like backend or frontend code that doesn't require any special knowledge other than basic backend or frontend - this is where the bars of quality come into play. Some people will be more than happy with AI generated code, others won't be, depending on their experience, also requirements (speed of shipping vs. quality, which almost always resolves to speed) etc.
Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support
#524I 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…
Writing detailed specs and then giving them to an AI is not the optimal way to work with AI. That's vibecoding with an extra documentation step. Also, Sonnet is not the model you'd want to use if you want to minimize cleanup. Use the best available model at the time if you want to attempt this, but even those won't vibecode everything perfectly for you. This is the reality of AI, but at least try to use the right mod…
> That's vibecoding with an extra documentation step.
This sounds like an LLM talking.
Either you're a bot, or our human languages are being modified in realtime by the influence of these tools.
Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support
#525I know this thread is likely full of similar anecdotes, but I also want to share.
My experience very suddenly and very clearly degraded over the last few days.
Today I was trying to build a simple chess game. Previous one shots were HTML, this gave me a jsx file. I asked it to put it HTML and it absolutely devoured my credits doing so, I had to abort and do it manually. The resulting app didn't work, and it had decided that multiplayer could work by storing the game state only on local storage without the clients communicating at all
Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why should anyone waste time on poorer results? Because in almost no real-world project is "programming time" the limiting factor?
amazing how often is this repeated on here are some sort of a gospel SWEs pass down to one another to continue this charade. I have worked in this industry for 30+ years on countless projects, last decade+ as consultant - at every single project (every single one) programming time was the limiting factor. there is a whole industry inside our industry dealing with “processes” and “how to estimate” (apparently we are i…
What counts as programming time ? Writing ? Reviewing ? Compiling ? Debugging ? It also depends the industry. From idea to production, the limiting factor is not always writing the code, and in my experience (15years in fintech) it almost has never been. Discussion, alignment, compilation, heavy testing pipelines, shipping, all of this on a 30million line monorepo.
On a greenfield 10k line repo, yes, AI really shines. In other cases, it’s currently just a helper on very specific narrow tasks, that is not always programming.
Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
One aspect you have to consider is the differences in human beings doing the evaluation. I had a coworker/report who would hand me obvious garbage tier code with glaring issues even in its output, and it would take multiple iterations to address very specific review comments (once, in frustration, I showed a snippet of their output to my nontechnical mom and even my mom wtf’ed and pointed out the problem unprompted);…
This is plausible. Assuming it’s true, we would see the adoption of vibe coding at a faster rate amongst inexperienced developers. I think that’s true.
A counterpoint is Google saying the vast majority of their code is written by AI. The developers at Google are not inexperienced. They build complex critical systems.
But it still feels odd to me, this contradiction. Yes there’s some skill to using AI but that doesn’t feel enough to explain the gap in perception. Your point would really explain it wonderfully well, but it’s contradicted by pronouncements by major companies.
One thing I would add is that code quality is absolutely tanking. PG mentioned YC companies adopted AI generated code at Google levels years ago. Yesterday I was using the software of one such company and it has “Claude code” levels of bugginess. I see it in a bunch of startups. One of the tells is they seem to experience regressions, which is bizarre. I guess that indicates bugs with their AI generated tests.
Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might as well just write the code yourself at that point. And as a bonus, end up with a much better understanding of the codebase (and way better code)
> Might as well just write the code yourself at that point "We have this thing that can speed your code writing 10x" "If it isn't 1000x and it doesn't give me a turnkey end to end product might as well write the whole thing myself" People have forgotten balance. Which is funny, because the inability of the AI to just do the whole thing end to end correctly is what stands between 10 developers having a job versus 1 de…
Writing the code is usually not the bottleneck, so you don’t gain that much speeding it up. And as I said, you lose a lot of knowledge about the code when you don’t write it yourself.
Unless coding is most of your job, which is rare, you’re giving up really knowing what your software does in order to achieve a very minor speed up. Just to end up having to spend way more time later trying to understand the AI generated code when inevitably something breaks.
> And if you do it the way I describe you get to both use AI, AND have "a much better understanding of the codebase (and way better code)".
Using AI is not a goal in itself, so I don’t care about “getting to use AI”. I care about doing my job as efficiently as possible, considering all parts of my job, not just coding.
Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Claude has no taste and its opinions are mostly those of the most prolific bloggers. I often think that LLMs are like a reddit that can talk. The more I use them, the more I find this impression to be true - they have encyclopedic knowledge at a superficial level, the approximate judgement and maturity of a teenager, and the short-term memory of a parakeet. If I ask for something, I get the statistical average opin…
> they have encyclopedic knowledge at a superficial level, the approximate judgement and maturity of a teenager, and the short-term memory of a parakeet. If I ask for something, I get the statistical average opinion of a bunch of goons, unconstrained by context or common sense or taste.
Love this paragraph; it's exactly how I feel about the LLMs. Unless you really know what you are doing, they will produce very sub-optimal code, architecturally speaking. I feel like a strong acumen for proper software architecture is one of the main things that defines the most competent engineers, along with naming things properly. LLMs are a long, long way from having architectural taste
Re: I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support
#530I 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…
I'm starting to think a lot of the problem people are having is just that they have unrealistic expectations. I'm not having the same problem as you and I follow a very similar methodology. I'm producing code faster and at much higher quality with a significant reduction in strain on my wrists. I doubt I'm typing that much less, but what I am typing is prose which is much more compatible with a standard QWERTY keyboa…
If the main problem is programming languages incompatibility with QWERTY, that problem has been solved many decades ago. The programmers can switch to Colemak, and save many trillions of dollars of AI expenses.