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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

#531

Post by dragandj »

jwitthuhn wrote: post #429
mathisfun123 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bro do you really not understand that that's a game played for your sake - it checks boxes yes but you have no idea what effect the checking of the boxes actually has. like do you not realize/understand that anthropic/openai is baking this kind of stuff into models/UI/UX to give the sensation of rigor.

The checkboxes inform the model as well as the user, and you can observe this yourself. For example in a C++ project with MyClass defined in MyClass.cpp/h: I ask the model to rename MyClass to MyNewClass. It will generate a checklist like: - Rename references in all source files - Rename source/header files - Update build files to point at new source files Then it will do those things in that order. Now you can re-ru…

And when it doesn't, it politely apologizes, at least :)

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

#532

Post by dragandj »

linsomniac wrote: post #445
wg0 wrote: 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…

>Then hand over to Claude Sonnet. Have you tried Opus 4.6 with "/effort max" in Claude Code? That's pretty much all I use these days, and it is, honestly, doing a fantastic job. The code it's writing looks quite good to me. Doesn't seem to matter if it's greenfield or existing code. If code is harder to read than to write, you're doing yourself a disservice by having the output stage not be top shelf.

I find it works even better with "/effort ultra".

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

#533

Post by adastra22 »

hunterpayne wrote: post #462
adastra22 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I routinely use $4k to $5k worth of tokens a month on my $200/mo Max subscription. I don't even code every day. You can use a Max subscription for work, btw.

You do understand the concept of a subsidy right?

I do. Do you? A company providing a cheaper subscription plan is not a subsidy.

I assume you meant loss-leader. We can’t know that without knowing their financials. The actual marginal cost of inference is demonstrably less than $200/mo though, so it’s not clear whether they are operating at a loss. Without seeing their books we can’t know.

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

#534

Post by flyinglizard »

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…

You're right, data migration is a specific case where you have a very strong set of constraints.

I, on the other hand, am doing a new UI for an existing system, which is exactly where you want more freedom and experimentation. It's great for that!

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

#535

Post by flyinglizard »

prmph wrote: post #529
timr wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-o…

Try asking to review your code as if it were Linus Torvalds. No, really.

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

#536

Post by mwigdahl »

system2 wrote: post #361
mwigdahl wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What level of subscription are you on? If you're complaining about running out of tokens but are happy to pay "whatever" for it, it should be Max 20x, yes? And one prompt drained all your tokens for the day on Max 20x?

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…

Agreed, and sorry for the snarky tone in my reply. The $100 / month plan is what I use at home and it has always been more than sufficient for something like what you describe. It does sound like maybe you have MCPs or skills that might be changing the default behavior as the other poster suggests, or the agent somehow interpreted your request as wanting it to read node_modules in addition to the code or something. In any event I hope you or Anthropic or both figures out what the issue was.

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

#537

Post by sarchertech »

hirvi74 wrote: post #509
sarchertech wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I apply the Herbie Hancock philosophy when defining good code. When once asked what is Jazz music, Herbie responded with, "I can't describe it in words, but I know it when I hear it." That’s the problem. If we had an objective measure of good code, we could just use that instead of code reviews, style guides, and all the other things we do to maintain code quality. > I truly believe that most competent developers (…

I had a long reply to your comment, then decide it was not truly worth reading. However, I do have one question remaining: > the tactical tornadoes get more of a speed boost than the people who care about maintainability. Why are these not the same people? In my job, I am handed a shovel. Whatever grave I dig, I must lay in. Is that not common? Seriously, I am not being factious. I've had the same job for almost a de…

That’s because you’ve been there a decade. It’s very common for people to skip jobs every 2 years so that they never end up seeing the long term consequences of their actions.

The other common pattern I’ve seen goes something like this.

Product asks Tactical Tornado if they can building something TT says sure it will take 6 weeks. TT doesn’t push back or asks questions, he builds exactly what product asks for in an enormous feature branch.

At the end of 6 weeks he tries to merge it and he gets pushback from one or more of the maintainability people.

Then he tells management that he’s being blocked. The feature is already done and it works. Also the concerns other engineers have can’t be addressed because “those are product requirements”. He’ll revisit it later to improve on it. He never does because he’s onto the next feature.

Here’s the thing. A good engineer would have worked with product to tweak the feature up front so that it’s maintainable, performant etc…

This guy uses product requirements (many that aren’t actually requirements) and deadlines to shove his slop through.

At some companies management will catch on and he’ll get pushed out. At other companies he’ll be praised as a high performer for years.

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

#538

Post by hnfong »

wg0 wrote: post #403
jonas21 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's why every chat box has that "Regenerate" button. Wait, are you doing this in the web chat interface?! That's definitely not a good way. You need to be using a harness (like Claude Code) where the agent can plan its work, explore the codebase, execute code, run tests, etc. With this sort of set up, your prompts can be short (like 1 to 5 sentences) and still get great results.

I use claud CLI or OpenCode. The "Regenerate" example is just to illustrate that same prompt would produce different output each time. You're rolling a dice.

Not sure what your point is.

Sure, AI output is kind of random.

But that's also basically true for humans. It's harder to "prove" humans are random, but wouldn't you think a person would do things slightly differently when given the same tasks but on different days? People change their minds a lot, it's just that there's no "reconsider" button for people so you feel a bit of social friction if you pester somebody to rethink an issue. But it's no different.

I'd be really surprised if your point is that humans, unlike AI, are super deterministic and that's why they are so much more trustworthy and smarter than AI...

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

#539

Post by dragandj »

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.

Who's gonna pay $20,000 for labor that can be done by anyone with a $200/mo subscription?

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

#540

Post by Planktonne »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #294
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…

> 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…

> It's regularly writing systems-level code that would take me months to write by hand in hours, with minimal babysitting

Has your output kept pace with the code? Because months in hours means, even pushing those ratios quite far, to be years in days.

Has your roadmap accelerated multiple years in the last few months in terms of verifiable results?

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