[HN Gopher] Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent
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Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent
Author : GavinAnderegg
Score : 131 points
Date : 2025-07-01 12:26 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (allenpike.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (allenpike.com)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I get a lot of value out of Claude Max at $100 USD/month. I use
| it almost exclusively for my personal open source projects. For
| work, I'm more cautious.
|
| I worry, with an article like this floating around, and with this
| as the competition, and with the economics of all this stuff
| generally... major price increases are on the horizon.
|
| _Businesses_ (some) can afford this, after all it 's still just
| a portion of the costs of a SWE salary (tho $1000/m is getting up
| there). But open source developers cannot.
|
| I worry about this trend, and when the other shoe will drop on
| Anthropic's products, at least.
| mring33621 wrote:
| Those market forces will push the thriftier devs to find better
| ways to use the lesser models. And they will probably share
| their improvements!
|
| I'm very bullish on the future of smaller, locally-run models,
| myself.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I have not invested time on locally-run, I'm curious if they
| could even get close to approaching the value of Sonnet4 or
| Opus.
|
| That said, I _suspect_ a lot of the value in Claude Code is
| hand-rolled fined-tuned heuristics built into the tool
| itself, not coming from the LLM. It does a lot of management
| of TODO lists, backtracking through failed paths, etc which
| look more like old-school symbolic AI than something the LLM
| is doing on its own.
|
| Replicating that will also be required.
| csomar wrote:
| If it weren't for the Chinese, the prices would have been x10.
| barrkel wrote:
| Where do you see the major price increases coming from?
|
| The underlying inference is not super expensive. All the tricks
| they're pulling to make it smarter certainly multiply the
| price, but the price being charged almost certainly covers the
| cost. Basic inference on tuned base models is extremely cheap.
| But certainly it looks like Anthropic > OpenAI > Google in
| terms of inference cost structure.
|
| Prices will only come up if there's a profit opportunity; if
| one of the vendors has a clear edge and gains substantial
| pricing power. I don't think that's clear at this point. This
| article is already equivocating between o3 and Opus.
| stpedgwdgfhgdd wrote:
| Just a matter of time before AI coding becomes commodity and
| prices drop. 2027
| lvl155 wrote:
| Is $200/month a lot of money when you can multiply your
| productivity? It depends but the most valuable currency in life
| is time. For some, spending thousands a month would be worth it.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| As I said elsewhere... $200/month etc is potentially not a lot
| for an employer to pay (though I've worked for some recently
| who balk at just stocking a snacks tray or drink fridge...).
|
| But $200/month is unbearable for open source / free software
| developers.
| morkalork wrote:
| It's wild when a company has another department and will
| shell out $200/month per-head for some amalgamation of
| Salesforce and other SaaS tools for customer service agents.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I suspect there's some accounting magic where salaries and
| software licenses are in one box and "Diet Coke in the
| fridge" is in another, and the latter is an unbearable cost
| but the former "OK"
|
| But yeah, doesn't explain non-payment for AI tools.
|
| Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay for
| it.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| > Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay
| for it.
|
| That seems like the worst of all worlds from their
| perspective.
|
| By not paying for it they introduce a massive security
| concern.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| At a previous job, my department was getting slashed
| because marketing was moving over to using Salesforce
| instead of custom software written in-house. Everything was
| going swimmingly, until the integration vendor for
| Salesforce just kept billing, and billing and billing.
|
| Last I checked no one is still there who was there
| originally, except the vendor. And the vendor was charging
| around $90k/mo for integration services and custom
| development in 2017 when my team was let go. My team was
| around $10k/mo including rent for our cubicles.
|
| That was another weird practice I've never seen elsewhere,
| to pay rent, we had to charge the other departments for our
| services. They turned IT and infrastructure into a
| business, and expected it to turn a profit, which pissed
| off all the departments who had to start paying for their
| projects, so they started outsourcing all development work
| to vendors, killing our income stream, which required
| multiple rounds of layoffs until only management was left.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| IT charging other departments is standard practice at
| every large company I've been at.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I've seen it too - not uncommon. A frustrating angle is
| vendor lockin. You are required to only use the internal
| IT team for everything, even if they're far more
| expensive and less skilled. They can 'charge' whatever
| they want, and you're stuck with their skills, prices and
| timeline. Going outside of that requires many levels of
| signoffs/approvals, and untold amounts of time making
| your case. There's value in having some central
| purchasing process, but when you limit your vendors to
| one (internal or external) you'll creating a lot more
| problems that you don't need to have.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Well that leads to shadow IT and upper management
| throwing a shit fit when we can't fix their system we
| don't know anything about.
| hluska wrote:
| This is really interesting because I was in business
| school almost thirty years and a cost accounting
| professor used almost this exact example, only with
| photocopiers and fax machines to illustrate how you can
| cost a company to death.
|
| He would have considered that company to be running a
| perfectly controlled cost experiment. Though it was so
| perfectly controlled they forgot that humans actually did
| the work. With cost accounting projects, you pay morale
| and staffing charges well after the project itself was
| costed.
|
| I hadn't thought of that since the late 90s. Good comment
| but how the heck did I get that old??? :)
| nisegami wrote:
| My butt needs to be in this chair 8 hours a day. Whether it
| takes me 20 hours to do a task or 2 doesn't really matter.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| This is why communism doesnt work lmao
| tough wrote:
| maybe the issue is capitalism where even if your
| productivity multiplies x100
|
| your salary stays x1
|
| and your work hours stay x1
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| But aren't you supposed to be incentivized to work harder
| by having equity?
| rimunroe wrote:
| Equity is a lottery ticket. Is sacrificing my happiness
| or life balance in the near term worth the gamble that A)
| my company will be successful, and B) that my equity
| won't have been diluted to worthlessness by the time that
| happens? At higher levels of
| seniority/importamce/influence this might make sense, but
| for most people I seriously doubt it does, especially
| early in their careers.
| adastra22 wrote:
| That doesn't happen anywhere outside of Silicon Valley.
| tough wrote:
| And even in Silicon Valley you get the survivor ship bias
| of the 1% of companies getting to IPO and making their
| employees decent exit stories...
|
| 99% of startups die off worthless and your equity never
| realises.
| tough wrote:
| As a non-founder / not a VC you max get a few percentage
| points, and its mostly paper toilet money until there's
| an exit or IPO, and the founders will always try to
| squeeze you if they can, not because they're bad people,
| but because the system incentivises it. (you'll keep
| getting diluted in future rounds)
|
| tbh, if im gonna bust my ass I'd rather own the thing.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| A recent job offer for a startup was a 5 year vest with a
| 2 year cliff. Seriously?
| dfee wrote:
| Quite literally not.
|
| Capitalism encourages you to put your butt in your own
| seat and reap the rewards of your efforts.
|
| Of course it also provides you the decision making to
| keep your butt in someone else's seat if the risk vs.
| reward of going your own isn't worth it.
|
| And then it allows your employer to put another butt in
| your seat if you don't adopt efficiency patterns.
|
| So: capitalism is compatible with communism as an option,
| but it's generally a suboptimal option for one or both
| parties.
| hiddencost wrote:
| No it doesn't. People tell that story but the system is
| incredibly heavily leveraged to prevent that.
| tough wrote:
| Maybe in a true -capitalistic- market that'd happen.
|
| but the state keeps meddling and making oligarchs and
| friends have unfair advantages.
|
| It's hard to compete when the system is rigged from the
| start.
| p_l wrote:
| Capitalism is exactly about amassing capital to make
| others reliant on capitalist providing capital for the
| tools necessary to do the work, then extracting rent from
| the value produced.
|
| In true capitalist market you end up with oligarchy.
| dfee wrote:
| also a fair point :)
| darth_avocado wrote:
| More accurate representation is this:
|
| Productivity multiplies x2 You keep your job x0.5 Your
| salary x0.8 (because the guy we just fired will gladly do
| your job for less) Your work hours x1.4 (because now we
| expect you to do the work of 2 people, but didn't account
| for all the overhead that comes with it)
| nisegami wrote:
| I am literally describing my life in a capitalist
| society....
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think that was the joke
| rapind wrote:
| Communism is an ideal but never a reality. What you see in
| reality is at best an attempt at communism which is quickly
| derailed by corruption and greed. I mean, it's great to
| have ideals, but you should also recognize when those
| ideals are completely impractical given the human
| condition.
|
| By the way, this also applies to the "Free market" ideal...
| delusional wrote:
| Importantly, problems with the ideal shouldn't preclude
| good actions that take us in a direction.
|
| There being problems with absolute libertarian free
| markets doesn't mean all policies that evoke the free
| market ideal must be disregarded, nor does the problems
| with communism mean that all communist actions must be
| ignored.
|
| We can see a problem with an ideal, but still wish to
| replicate the good parts.
| rapind wrote:
| Sure. The issue for me is when people intentionally
| mislabel something to make it look worse.
|
| For example, mislabelling socialism as communism. The
| police department, fire department, and roads are all
| socialist programs. Only a moron would call this
| communism and yet for some reason universal healthcare...
|
| There's also this nonsense when someone says "That's the
| free market at work", and I'm like, if we really lived in
| a free market then you'd be drinking DuPont's poison
| right now.
|
| Using the words "Communism" and "Free market" just show a
| (often intentional) misunderstanding of the nuance of how
| things actually work in our society.
|
| The communism label must be the most cited straw man in
| all of history at this point.
| hooverd wrote:
| for all the lip service capitalists give to the free
| market, they hate it. their revealed preference is for a
| monopoly.
| nurettin wrote:
| > Communism is an ideal but never a reality
|
| There is nothing ideal about communism. I'd rather own my
| production tools and be as productive as I want to be.
| I'd rather build wealth over trading opportunities, I'd
| rather hire people and reinvest earnings. That is ideal.
| Fokamul wrote:
| That's your problem, or your company or your country.
|
| Here in EU, if not stated in your work agreement, it's pretty
| common people work full time job and also as a self-employed
| contractor for other companies.
|
| So when I'm finished with my work, HO of course, I just work
| on my "contractor" projects.
|
| Honestly, I wouldn't sign a full time contract banning me
| from other work.
|
| And if you have enough customers, you just drop full time
| job. And just pay social security and health insurance, which
| you must pay by law anyway.
|
| And specially in my country, it's even more ridiculous that
| as self-employed you pay lower taxes than full time
| employees, which truth to be told are ridiculously high.
| Nearly 40% of your salary.
| teiferer wrote:
| > Here in EU, if not stated in your work agreement, it's
| pretty common people work full time job and also as a self-
| employed contractor for other companies.
|
| First time I'm hearing this. Where in the EU are you? I
| don't know anybody doing this, but it could depend on the
| country (I'm in the nordics).
| TheRoque wrote:
| In my country France, your contact May state hours, so
| you're paid to sit in the chair
|
| Freelancing as a side hustle may be forbidden if your
| employer refuses
|
| And it makes sense to pay more taxes since you also have
| more social benefits (paid leaves, retirement money and
| unemployment money), nothing is free
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Hmm, not a practice I've come across in the EU. What
| countries specifically are you talking about?
| Tainnor wrote:
| > Here in EU, if not stated in your work agreement, it's
| pretty common people work full time job and also as a self-
| employed contractor for other companies.
|
| Absolutely not a common thing in my corner of the EU.
| artursapek wrote:
| If you're salaried, you are not a task-based worker. The
| company pays you a salary for your full day's worth of
| productive time. If you can suddenly get 5x more done in that
| time, negotiate a higher salary or leave. If you're actually
| more productive, they will fight to keep you.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Your salary is not determined by your productivity, it's
| determined by market rates. 5X productivity does not mean
| 5X salary. Employers prey on labor market inefficiencies to
| keep the market rates low.
|
| Any employer with 2 brain cells will figure out that you
| are more productive as a developer by using AI tools, they
| will mandate all developers use it. Then that's the new bar
| and everyone's salary stays the same.
| freehorse wrote:
| Yeah a 20$ plan is prob enough for the AI slop you need to
| fill in your 8h working time. Unless you have many projects
| that require more AI slop that is.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > Is $200/month a lot of money when you can multiply your
| productivity?
|
| My read was the article takes it as a given that $200/m is
| worth it.
|
| The question in the article seems more: is an extra $800/m to
| move from Claude Code to an agent using o3 worth it?
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| Early stage founder here. You have no idea how worth it
| $200/month is as a multiple on what compensation is required to
| fund good engineers. Absolutely the highest ROI thing I have done
| in the life of the company so far.
| lvl155 wrote:
| At this point, question is when does Amazon tell Anthropic to
| stop because it's gotta be running up a huge bill. I don't
| think they can continue offering the $200 plan for too long
| even with Amazon's deep pocket.
| fragmede wrote:
| Inference is cheap to run though, and how many people do you
| think are getting their $200 worth of it?
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I don't know, I have to figure out another way to count
| money I guess, but that $200 gives me a lot of worth, far
| more than 200. I guess if you like sleeping and do other
| stuff than drive Claude Code all the time, you might have a
| different feeling. For us it works well.
| fragmede wrote:
| My question wasn't if the $200 was worth it to the buyer.
| Renting an H100 for a month is gonna cost around $1000
| ($1.33+/hr). Pretend the use isn't bursty (but really it
| is). If you could get 6 people on one, the company is
| making money selling inference.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Let me know when you can run Opus on H100.
| fragmede wrote:
| I don't understand. Obviously I can't run Opus on an
| H100, only Anthropic can do that since they are the only
| ones with the model. I am assuming they are using H100s,
| and that an all-in cost for an H100 comes to less then
| $1000/month, and doing some back of the envelope math to
| say if they had a fleet of H100s at their disposal, that
| it would take six people running it flat out, for the
| $200/month plan to be profitable.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Right but it probably takes like 8-10 H100s to run Claude
| Opus for inference just memory wise? I'm far from an
| expert just asking.
|
| Does "one" Claude Opus instance count as the full model
| being loaded onto however many GPUs it takes ?
| lvl155 wrote:
| Based on people around me and anecdotal evidence of when
| Claude struggles, a lot more than you think. I've done some
| analysis on personal use between Openrouter, Amp, Claude
| API and $200 subscription, I probably save around
| $40-50/day. And I am a "light" user. I don't run things in
| parallel too much.
| bicepjai wrote:
| I can see how pricing at 100 to 200$ per month per employee could
| make sense for companies, it's a clear value proposition at that
| scale. But for personal projects and open source work, it feels
| out of reach. I'd really like to see more accessible pricing
| tiers for individuals and hobbyists. Pay per token models don't
| work for me either; earlier this year, I racked up almost $1,000
| in a month just experimenting with personal projects, and that
| experience has made me wary of using these tools since.
|
| Sources
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I've seen some people describe getting pretty good value out of
| the Claude $20 plan with Claude Code?
| stpedgwdgfhgdd wrote:
| Pro is fine for medium sized projects, stick to 1 terminal.
| fakedang wrote:
| > Pay per token models don't work for me either; earlier this
| year, I racked up almost $1,000 in a month just experimenting
| with personal projects, and that experience has made me wary of
| using these tools since.
|
| Can't have your cake and eat it too.
|
| Behold the holy trifecta of: Number of Projects - Code Quality
| - Coding Agent Cost
| teiferer wrote:
| > But for personal projects and open source work, it feels out
| of reach
|
| Is it? Many hobbies cost much more money. A nice bike
| (motorbike or road bike, doesn't matter), a sailing boat, golf
| club/trips, a skiing season pass ... $100/month is
| significantly less than what you'd burn with those other
| things. Sure you can program in your free time without such a
| subscription, and if you enjoy that then by all means, but if
| it takes away the grunt work and you are having more fun, I
| don't see the issue.
|
| Gym memberships are in that order of magnitude too, even though
| you could use some outdoor gym in a city park for free. Maybe
| those indoor perks of heating, lights, roof and maintained
| equipment are worth sth? Similar with coding agents for
| personal projects...
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Github Copilot has unlimited GPT-4.1 for $10/month.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| is GPT-4.1 decent for coding?
| adhamsalama wrote:
| And you can use it as an API, so you can plug it as an OpenAI
| compatible LLM provider into any 3rd party tool that uses AI,
| for free.
|
| That's the only reason I subscribed to GitHub Copilot.
| Currently using it for Aider.
| feintruled wrote:
| Interesting. Though it seems they are themselves building Agentic
| AI tooling. It's vibe coding all the way down - when's something
| real going to pop out the bottom?
| z3c0 wrote:
| An LLM salesman assuring us that $1000/mo is a reasonable cost
| for LLMs feels a bit like a conflict of interests, especially
| when the article doesn't go into much detail about the code
| quality. If anything, their assertion that one should stick to
| boring tech and "have empathy for the model" just reaffirms
| that anybody doing anything remotely innovative or cutting-edge
| shouldn't bother too much with coding agents.
| butlike wrote:
| I love how paying for prompts stuck. Like, if someone's going to
| do your homework for you, they should get compensated.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I find it kind of boggling that employers spend $200/month to
| make employees lives easier, for no real gain.
|
| That's right. Productivity does go up, but most of these
| employees aren't really contributing directly to revenue. There
| is no code to dollar pipeline. Finishing work faster means some
| roadmap items move quicker, but they just move quicker toward
| true bottlenecks that can't really be resolved quickly with AI.
| So the engineers sit around doing nothing for longer periods of
| time waiting to be unblocked. Deadlines aren't being estimated
| tighter, they are still as long as ever.
|
| Enjoy this time while it lasts. Someday employers might realize
| they need to hire less and just cram more work into individual
| engineers schedules, because AI should supposedly make work much
| easier.
| jajko wrote:
| Coding an actual solution is what, 5-10% of the overall project
| time?
|
| I dont talk about some SV megacorps where better code can
| directly affect slightly revenue or valuation and thus more
| time is spend coding and debugging, I talk about basically all
| other businesses that somehow need developers.
|
| Even if I would be 10x faster project managers would barely
| notice that. And I would lose a lot of creative fun that good
| coding tends to bring. Also debugging, 0 help there its all on
| you and your mind and experience.
|
| Llms are so far banned in my banking megacorp and I aint
| complaining.
| jayd16 wrote:
| There's been pretty widespread layoffs in tech for a few years
| now.
| francisofascii wrote:
| > Someday employers might realize they need to hire less and
| just cram more work into individual engineers schedules
|
| We are already past that point. The high water mark for Devs
| was ironically in late 2020 during Covid, before RTO when we
| were in high demand.
| tabs_or_spaces wrote:
| Since this is a business problem.
|
| * It's not clear on how much revenue or new customers is
| generated by using a coding agent
|
| * It's not clear on how things are going on production. There's
| only talks about development in the article
|
| I feel ai coding agents will give you the edge. Just this article
| doesn't talk about revenue or PnL side of things, just perceived
| costs saved from not employing an engineer.
| v5v3 wrote:
| Yes. A company needs measurable ROI and isn't going to spend
| $200 a month per seat on Claude.
|
| It will instead sign a deal with Microsoft for ai that is 'good
| enough' and limit expensive ai to some. Or being in the big
| consultancys as usual to do the projects.
| suninsight wrote:
| So what we do at NonBioS.ai is to use a cheaper model to do
| routine tasks, but switch to a higher thinking model seamlessly
| if the agent get stuck. Its most cost efficient, and we take that
| switching cost away from the engineer.
|
| But broadly agree to the argument of the post - just spending
| more might still be worth it.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| > literally changing failing tests into skipped tests to resolve
| "the tests are failing."
|
| Wow. It really is like a ridiculous, over-confident, *very*
| junior developer.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| I really hope we can avoid metered stuff for the long-term. One
| of the best aspects of software development is the low capital
| barrier to entry, and the cost of the AI tools right now is
| threatening that.
|
| I'm fortunate in that my own use of the AI tools I'm personally
| paying for is squished into my off-time on nights and weekends,
| so I get buy with a $20/month Claude subscription :).
| quonn wrote:
| Charging $200/month is economically only possible if there is not
| a true market for LLMs or some sort of monopoly power. Currently
| there is no evidence that this will be the case. There are
| already multiple competitors and the barrier to entry is
| relatively low (compared to e.g. the car industry or other
| manufacturing industries), there are no network effects (like for
| social networks) and no need to get the product 100% right (like
| compatibility to Photoshop or Office) and the prices for training
| will drop further. Furthermore $200 is not free (like Google).
|
| Can anyone name one single widely-used digital product that does
| _not_ have to be precisely correct/compatible/identical to The
| Original and that everyone _does_ pay $200/month for?
|
| Therefore, should prices that users pay get anywhere even close
| to that number, there will naturally be opportunities for
| competitors to bring prices down to a reasonable level.
| chis wrote:
| I think you forgot to consider the cost of providing the
| inference.
| quonn wrote:
| Well, that could be an additional problem.
|
| My point was not that AI will necessarily be cheaper to run
| than $200, but that there is not much profit to be made. Of
| course the cost of inference will form a lower bound on the
| price as well.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Barrier to entry is actually very very high. Just because we
| have "open source" models doesn't mean anyone can enter. And
| the gap is widening now. I see Anthropic/OpenAI as clear
| leaders. Opus 4 and its derivative products are irreplaceable
| for coders since Spring 2025. Once you figure it out and have
| your revelation, it will be impossible to go back. This is an
| iPhone moment right now and the network effect will be
| incredible.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| It's all text and it's all your text. There's zero network
| effect.
| lvl155 wrote:
| And that's how it's been forever. If your competitor is
| doing 10x your work, you will be compelled to learn. If
| someone has a nail gun and you're using a hammer, no one's
| saying "it's all nails." You will go buy a nail gun.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| Network affects come from people building on extra stuff.
| There's no special sauce with these models, as long as
| you have an inference endpoint you can recreate anything
| yourself with any of the models.
|
| As to the nailgun thing, that's an interesting analogy,
| I'm actually building my own house right now entirely
| with hand tools, it's on track to finish in 1/5 the time
| some of this mcmansions do with 1/100th of the cost
| because I'm building what I actually need and not
| screwing around with stuff for business reasons. I think
| you'll find software projects are more similar to that
| than you'd expect.
| jbentley1 wrote:
| My Claude Code usage would have been $24k last month if I didn't
| have a max plan, at least according to Claude-Monitor.
|
| I've been using a tool I developed
| (https://github.com/stravu/crystal) to run several sessions in
| parallel. Sometimes I will run the same prompt multiple times and
| pick the winner, or sometimes I'll be working on multiple
| features at once, reviewing and testing one while waiting on the
| others.
|
| Basically, with the right tooling you can burn tokens incredibly
| fast while still receiving a ton of value from them.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Max $100 or $200?
|
| I'm on $100 and i'm shocked how much usage i get out of Sonnet,
| while Opus feels like no usage at all. I barely even bother
| with Opus since most things i want to do just runout super
| quick.
| borgel wrote:
| Interesting, I'm fairly new to using these tools and am
| starting with Claude Code but at the $20 level. Do you have
| any advice for when I would benefit from stepping up to $100?
| I'm not sure what gets better (besides higher usage limits).
| vlade11115 wrote:
| I recently switched from Pro to $100 Max, and the only
| difference I've found so far is higher usage limits.
| Antropic tends to give shiny new features to Max users
| first, but as of now, there is nothing Max-only. For me,
| it's a good deal nonetheless, as even $100 Max limits are
| huge. While on Pro, I hit the limits each day that I used
| Claude Code. Now I rarely see the warning, but I never
| actually hit the limit.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| No clue as i've not used Claude Code on Pro to get an idea
| of usage limits. But, if you get value out of Claude Code
| and ever run into limits, Max is quite generous for Sonnet
| imo. I have zero concern about Sonnet usage atm, so it's
| definitely valuable there.
|
| Usage for Opus is my only "complaint", but i've used it so
| little i don't even know if it's that much better than
| Sonnet. As it is, even with more generous Opus limits i'd
| probably want a more advanced Claude Code behavior - where
| it uses Opus to plan and orchestrate, and Sonnet would do
| the grunt work for cheaper tokens. But i'm not aware of
| that as a feature atm.
|
| Regardless, i'm quite pleased with Claude Code on $100 Max.
| If it was a bit smarter i might even upgrade to $200, but
| atm it's too dumb to give it more autonomy and that's what
| i'd need for $200. Opus might be good enough there, but
| $100 Opus limits are so low i've not even gotten enough
| experience with it to know if it's good enough for $200
| mccoyb wrote:
| Looked at your tool several times, but haven't answered this
| question for myself: does this tool fundamentally use the
| Anthropic API (not the normal MAX billing)? Presuming you built
| around the SDK -- haven't figured out if it is possible to use
| the SDK, but use the normal account billing (instead of hitting
| the API).
|
| Love the idea by the way! We do need new IDE features which are
| centered around switching between Git worktrees and managing
| multiple active agents per worktree.
|
| Edit: oh, do you invoke normal CC within your tool to avoid
| this issue and then post-process?
| Jonovono wrote:
| Claude code has an SDK, where you specify the path to the CC
| executable. So I believe thats how this works. Once you have
| set up claude code in your environment and authed with
| however you like, this will just use that executable in a new
| UI
| mccoyb wrote:
| Interesting, the docs for auth don't mention it:
| https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-
| code/sdk#authentic...
|
| Surprised that this works, but useful if true.
| Jonovono wrote:
| https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-
| code/sdk#typescrip...
|
| `pathToClaudeCodeExecutable`!
| mccoyb wrote:
| Thanks for showing!
| qwertox wrote:
| Does Claude Max allow you to use 3rd-party tools with an API
| key?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| There is no way those companies don't loose ton of money on max
| plans.
|
| I use and abuse mine, running multiple agents, and I know that
| I'd spend the entire month of fees in a few days otherwise.
|
| So it seems like a ploy to improve their product and capture
| the market, like usual with startups that hope for a winner-
| takes-all.
|
| And then, like uber or airbnb, the bait and switch will raise
| the prices eventually.
|
| I'm wondering when the hammer will fall.
|
| But meanwhile, let's enjoy the free buffet.
| RobinL wrote:
| This is why unlimited plans are always revoked eventually - a
| small fraction of users can be responsible for huge costs
| (Amazon's unlimited file backup service is another good
| example). Also whilst in general I don't think there's much to
| worry about with AI energy use, burning $24k of tokens must
| surely be responsible for a pretty large amount of energy
| spacecadet wrote:
| 70,000,000 just last week ;P
|
| But based on my costs, yours sounds much much higher :)
| v5v3 wrote:
| >My Claude Code usage would have been $24k last month if I
| didn't have a max plan, at least according to Claude-Monitor.
|
| In their dreams.
| nickjj wrote:
| Serious question, how do you justify paying for any of this
| without feeling like it's a waste?
|
| I occasionally use ChatGPT (free version without logging in) and
| the amount of times it's really wrong is very high. Often times
| it takes a lot of prompting and feeding it information from third
| party sources for it to realize it has incorrect information and
| then it corrects itself.
|
| All of these prompts would be using money on a paid plan right?
|
| I also used Cursor (free trial on their paid plan) for a bit and
| I didn't find much of a difference. I would say whatever back-end
| it was using was possibly worse. The code it wrote was busted and
| over engineered.
|
| I want to like AI and in some cases it helps gain insight on
| something but I feel like literally 90% of my time is it
| prodiving me information that straight up doesn't work and
| eventually it might work but to get there is a lot of time and
| effort.
| benbayard wrote:
| I'd try out cursor with either o3 or Claude 4 Opus. The free
| version of ChatGPT and Claude in Cursor are much better. That's
| also what this article claims and is true in my experience.
| chis wrote:
| I can't believe people are still writing comments like this lol
| how can it be
| zzzeek wrote:
| I think it's a serious question because something really big
| is being missed here. There seem to be very different types
| of developers out there and/or working on very different
| kinds of codebases. Hypothetically, maybe you have devs or
| specific contexts where the dev can just write the code
| really fast where having to explain it to a bot is more time
| consuming, vs. devs /contexts where lots of googling and
| guessing goes on and it's easier to get the AI to just show
| you how to do it.
|
| I'm actually employer mandated to continue to try/use AI bots
| / agents to help with coding tasks. I'm sort of getting them
| to help me but I'm still really not being blown away and
| still tending to prefer not to bother with them with things
| I'm frequently iterating on, they are more useful when I have
| to learn some totally new platform/API. Why is that? do we
| think there's something wrong with me?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > I'm actually employer mandated to continue to try/use AI
| bots / agents to help with coding tasks
|
| I think a lot of this comes down to the context management.
| I've found that these tools work worse at my current
| employer than my prior one. And I think the reason is
| context - my prior employer was a startup, where we relied
| on open source libraries and the code was smaller,
| following public best practices regarding code structure in
| Golang and python. My current employer is much bigger, with
| a massive monorepo of custom written/forked libraries.
|
| The agents are trained on lots of open source code, so
| popular programming languages/libraries tend to be really
| well represented, while big internal libraries are a
| struggle. Similarly smaller repositories tend to work
| better than bigger ones, because there is less searching to
| figure out where something is implemented. I've been trying
| some coding agents with my current job, and they spend a
| lot more time searching through libraries looking to
| understand how to implement or use something if it relies
| on an internal library.
|
| I think a lot of these struggles and differences are also
| present with people, but we tend to discount this struggle
| because people are generally good at reasoning. Of course,
| we also learn from each task, so we improve over time,
| unlike a static model.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Depends on how much you use. I use AI to think through code and
| other problems, and write the dumb parts of code. Claude
| definitely works much better than the free offerings. I use
| OpenRouter [1] and spend only a couple of dollar per month on
| AI usage. It's definitely worth it.
|
| [1] https://openrouter.ai No affiliation
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > Serious question, how do you justify paying for any of this
| without feeling like it's a waste?
|
| I would invert the question, how can you think it's a waste
| (for OP) if they're willing to spend $1000/mo on it? This isn't
| some emotional or fashionable thing, they're tools, so you'd
| have to assume they derive $1000 of value.
|
| > free version... the amount of times it's really wrong is very
| high... it takes a lot of prompting and feeding it information
| from third party
|
| Respectfully, you're using it wrong, and you get what you paid
| for. The free versions are obviously inferior, because
| obviously they paywall the better stuff. If OP is spending
| $50/day, why would the company give you the same version for
| free?
|
| The original article mentions Cursor. With (paid) cursor, the
| tool automatically grabs all the information on behalf of the
| user. It will grab your code, including grepping to find the
| right files, and it will grab info from the internet (eg up to
| date libraries, etc), and feed that into the model which can
| provide targeted diffs to update just select parts of a file.
|
| Additionally, the tools will automatically run
| compiler/linter/unit tests to validate their work, and iterate
| and fix their mistakes until everything works. This write ->
| compile -> unit test -> lint loop is exactly what a human will
| do.
| klank wrote:
| > This isn't some emotional or fashionable thing, they're
| tools, so you'd have to assume they derive $1000 of value.
|
| This is not born out in my personal experience at all. In my
| experience, both in the physical and software tool worlds,
| people are incredibly emotional about their tools. There are
| _deep_ fashion dynamics within tool culture as well. I mean,
| my god, editors are the prima donna of emotional fashion
| running roughshod over the developer community for decades.
|
| There was a reason it was called "Tool Time" on Home
| Improvement.
| pxc wrote:
| > This isn't some emotional or fashionable thing, they're
| tools, so you'd have to assume they derive $1000 of value.
|
| If someone spends a lot of money on something but they don't
| derive commensurate value from that purchase, they will
| experience cognitive dissonance proportional to that
| mismatch. But ceasing or reversing such purchases are only
| _some_ of the possibilities for resolving that dissonance.
| Another possibility is adjusting one 's assessment of the
| value of that purchase. This can be subconscious and
| automatic, but it an also involve validation-seeking
| behaviors like reading positive/affirming product reviews.
|
| In this present era of AI hype, purchase-affirming material
| is very abundant! Articles, blog posts, interviews podcasts,
| HN posts.. there's lots to tell people that it's time to "get
| on board", to "invest in AI" both financially and
| professionally, etc.
|
| How much money people have to blow on experiments and toys
| probably makes a big difference, too.
|
| Obviously there are limits and caveats to this kind of
| distortion. But I think the reality here is a bit more
| complicated than one in which we can directly read the
| derived value from people's purchasing decisions.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Respectfully, you're using it wrong, and you get what you
| paid for.
|
| I used the paid (free trial) version of Cursor to look at Go
| code. I used the free version of ChatGPT for topics like
| Rails, Flask, Python, Ansible and various networking things.
| These are all popular techs. I wouldn't describe either
| platform as "good" if we're measuring good by going from an
| idea to a fully working solution with reasonable code.
|
| Cursor did a poor job. The code it provided was mega over
| engineered to the point where most of the code had to be
| thrown away because it missed the big picture. This was after
| a lot of very specific prompting and iterations. The code it
| provided also straight up didn't work without a lot of manual
| intervention.
|
| It also started to modify app code to get tests to pass when
| in reality the test code was the thing that was broken.
|
| Also it kept forgetting things from 10 minutes ago and
| repeating the same mistakes. For example when 3 of its
| solutions didn't work, it started to go back and suggest
| using the first solution that was confirmed to not work (and
| it even output text explaining why it didn't work just
| before).
|
| I feel really bad for anyone trusting AI to write code when
| you don't already have a lot of experience so you can keep it
| in check.
|
| So far at best I barely find it helpful for learning the
| basics of something new or picking out some obscure syntax of
| a tool you don't well after giving it a link to the tool's
| docs and source code.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I feel really bad for anyone trusting AI to write code
| when you don't already have a lot of experience so you can
| keep it in check.
|
| You _definitely_ should be skilled in your domain to use it
| effectively.
| jonfw wrote:
| The AI agents that run on your machine where they have access
| to the code, and tools to browse/edit the code, or even run
| terminal commands are much more powerful than a simple chatbot.
|
| It took some time for me to learn how to use agents, but they
| are very powerful once you get the hang of it.
| josefresco wrote:
| > much more powerful than a simple chatbot
|
| Claude Pro + Projects is a good middle ground between the
| two. Things didn't really "click" for me as a _non-developer_
| until I got access to both.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Try with serious models. Here's what I would suggest:
|
| 1. Go to https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/ and pick one of
| the top (but not expensive) models. If unsure, just pick Gemini
| 2.5 Pro ( _not_ Flash).
|
| 2. Get API access.
|
| 3. Find a decent tool (hint: Aider is very good and you can
| learn the basics in a few minutes).
|
| 4. Try it on a new script/program.
|
| 5. (Only after some experience): Read people's detailed posts
| describing _how_ they use these tools and steal their ideas.
|
| Then tell us how it went.
| chis wrote:
| Has anyone else done this and felt the same? Every now and then I
| try to reevaluate all the models. So far it still feels like
| Claude is in the lead just because it will predictably do what I
| want when given a mid-sized problem. Meanwhile o3 will sometimes
| one-shot a masterpiece, sometimes go down the complete wrong
| path.
|
| This might also just be a feature of the change in problem size -
| perhaps the larger problems that necessitate o3 are also too
| open-ended and would require much more planning up front. But at
| that point it's actually more natural to just iterate with sonnet
| and stay in the driver's seat a bit. Plus sonnet runs 5x faster.
| delduca wrote:
| I just pay $20/month on ChatGPT and spend the entire day coding
| with its help, no need to pay for tokens, no need to integrate it
| on your IDE.
| iamleppert wrote:
| "Now we don't need to hire a founding engineer! Yippee!" I wonder
| all these people who are building companies that are built on
| prompts (not even a person) from other companies. The minute
| there is a rug pull (and there WILL be one), what are you going
| to do? You'll be in even worse shape because in this case there
| won't be someone who can help you figure out your next move,
| there won't be an old team, there will just be NO team. Is this
| the future?
| hluska wrote:
| It get even darker - I was around in the 1990s and a lot of
| people who ran head on into that generation's problems used
| those lessons to build huge startups in the 2000s. If we have
| outsourced a lot of learning, what do we do when we fail? Or
| how we compound on success?
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| Any cost/benefit analysis of whether to use AI has to factor in
| the fact that AI companies aren't even close to making a
| profit, and are primarily funded by investment money. At some
| point, either the cost to operate these AI models needs to go
| down, or the prices will go up. And from my perspective, the
| latter seems a lot more likely.
| v5v3 wrote:
| They are not making money as they are all competing to push
| the models further and this R&D spending on salaries and
| cloud/hardware costs.
|
| Unless models get better people are not going to pay more.
| xianshou wrote:
| Rug pulls from foundation labs are one thing, and I agree with
| the dangers of relying on future breakthroughs, but the open-
| source state of the art is already pretty amazing. Given the
| broad availability of open-weight models within under 6 months
| of SotA (DeepSeek, Qwen, previously Llama) and strong open-
| source tooling such as Roo and Codex, why would you expect AI-
| driven engineering to regress to a worse state than what we
| have today? If every AI company vanished tomorrow, we'd still
| have powerful automation and years of efficiency gains left
| from consolidation of tools and standards, all runnable on a
| single MacBook.
| fhd2 wrote:
| The problem is the knowledge encoded in the models. It's
| already pretty hit and miss, hooking up a search engine (or
| getting human content into the context some other way, e.g.
| copy pasting relevant StackOverflow answers) makes all the
| difference.
|
| If people stop bothering to ask and answer questions online,
| where will the information come from?
|
| Logically speaking, if there's going to be a continuous need
| for shared Q&A (which I presume), there will be mechanisms
| for that. So I don't really disagree with you. It's just that
| having the model just isn't enough, a lot of the time. And
| even if this sorts itself out eventually, we might be in for
| some memorable times in-between two good states.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Probably similar to the guy who was gloating on Twitter about
| building a service with vibe coding and without any programming
| knowledge around the peak of the vibe coding madness.
|
| Only for people to start screwing around with his database and
| API keys because the generated code just stuck the keys into
| the Javascript and he didn't even have enough of a technical
| background to know that was something to watch out for.
|
| IIRC he resorted to complaining about bullying and just shut it
| all down.
| marcosscriven wrote:
| What service was this?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Looks like I misremembered the shutting down bit, but it
| was this guy:
| https://twitter.com/leojr94_/status/1901560276488511759
|
| Seems like he's still going on about being able to
| replicate billion dollar companies' work quickly with AI,
| but at least he seems a little more aware that technical
| understanding is still important.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Honestly i'm less scared of claude doing something like that,
| and more scared of it just bypassing difficult behavior. Ie
| if you chose a particularly challenging feature and it
| decided to give up, it'll just do things like `isAdmin(user)
| { /* too difficult to implement currently */ true }`. At
| least if it put a panic or something it would be an
| acceptable todo, but woof - i've had it try and bypass quite
| a few complex scenarios with silently failing code.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| This is by far the most crazy how thing I look out for with
| Claude Code in particular.
|
| > Tries to fix some tests for a while > Fails and just
| .skip the test
| apwell23 wrote:
| > around the peak of the vibe coding madness.
|
| I thought we are currently in it now ?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I don't actually hear people call it vibe coding as much as
| I did back in late 2024/early 2025.
|
| Sure there are many more people building slop with AI now,
| but I meant the peak of "vibe coding" being parroted around
| everywhere.
|
| I feel like reality is starting to sink in a little by now
| as the proponents of vibe coding see that all the companies
| telling them that programming as a career is going to be
| over in just a handful of years, aren't actually cutting
| back on hiring. Either that or my social media has decided
| to hide the vibe coding discourse from me.
| euazOn wrote:
| The Karpathy tweet came out 2025-02-02.
| https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> back in late 2024/early 2025
|
| As an old man, this is hilarious.
| RexySaxMan wrote:
| Yeah, I kind of doubt we've hit the peak yet.
| pshirshov wrote:
| That's why I stick to what I can run locally. Though for most
| of my tasks there is no big difference between cloud models and
| local ones, in half the cases both produce junk but both are
| good enough for some mechanical transformations and as a
| reference book.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Excellent discussion in this thread, captures a lot of the
| challenges. I don't think we're a peak vibe coding yet, nor
| have companies experienced the level of pain that is possible
| here.
|
| The biggest 'rug pull' here is that the coding agent company
| raises there price and kills you're budget for "development."
|
| I think a lot of MBA types would benefit from taking a long
| look at how they "blew up" IT and switched to IaaS / Cloud and
| then suddenly found their business model turned upside down
| when the providers decided to up their 'cut'. It's a double
| whammy, the subsidized IT costs to gain traction, the loss of
| IT jobs because of the transition, leading to to fewer and
| fewer IT employees, then when the switch comes there is a huge
| cost wall if you try to revert to the 'previous way' of doing
| it, even if your costs of doing it that way would today would
| be cheaper than the what the service provider is now charging
| you.
| v5v3 wrote:
| No need to use the most expensive models for every query? Use it
| for the ones the cheaper models don't do well.
| logifail wrote:
| Q: Can you tell in advance whether your query is one that's
| worth paying more for a better answer?
| v5v3 wrote:
| Most programmers are not asking ai to re-write the whole app
| or convert C to Rust.
|
| You wouldn't gain anything from asking the most expensive
| model to adjust some css.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I am blown away that you can get a founding engineer for $10k /
| month. I guess that is not counting stock options, in which case
| it makes sense. But I think if you include options the
| opportunity cost is much higher. IMO great engineers are worth a
| lot, no shade.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I must be holding OpenAI wrong.
|
| Everyone time I try it I find it to be useless compared to Claude
| or Gemini.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| I can't imagine using something like this and not self hosting.
| Moving around in your editor costs money? That would completely
| crush my velocity.
| pshirshov wrote:
| > Use boring technology: LLMs do much better with well-documented
| and well-understood dependencies than obscure, novel, or magical
| ones. Now is not the time to let Steve load in a Haskell-to-
| WebAssembly pipeline.
|
| If we all go that way, there might be no new haskells and
| webassemblies in the future.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| I think there certainly will, it will just mean that only
| people who can function independently of the AI will have
| access to them a few years before everyone else.
| emrehan wrote:
| LLMs can read documentations for a language and use it as well
| as human engineers.
|
| "given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer
| than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate
| English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned
| from the same content"
|
| Source: Gemini 1.5's paper from March 2024
| https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_...
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