4 ms·

Are you leveraging caching? (It didn't seem like it from initial investigation, so figured I'd ask) Recent sessions with Claude Code come out to a few $ each a

Are you leveraging caching? (It didn't seem like it from initial investigation, so figured I'd ask) Recent sessions with Claude Code come out to a few $ each and like 90% of tokens are cached reads. Which would be hundreds of $ without.

bhouston 2y ago
I do not use caching yet. An average run costs less than a dollar I find. I think the most expensive so far may have been 2 dollars or so.
- MrsPeaches 2y ago
  I had similar costs. With caching it went down to 20-40 cents. Well worth it, if you are using this regularly.
  - bhouston 2y ago
    Okay I have token caching and token costing implemented in a PR. Will go live tomorrow. Thanks for the suggestion!
- saberience 2y ago
  Wait, running this once costs "less than a dollar" but up to 2 dollars? So if I used this all day it could cost me 100s of dollars? How is that a good deal when Claude costs 20 dollars per month?
  - bhouston 2y ago
    When I use it heavily for a work day it costs around $25 a day. It will write whole features and debug things and write tests and docs. It is that valuable. I’ve started to run two sessions at once to be more productive. I will be moving it to the cloud soon so I can run dozens of sessions at the same time. Tech like this replaces human developers for the most part so yes it is worth it. $25/day is cheaper than hiring another dev or two. Development teams are coming to an end right now.
    - menaerus 2y ago
      Can you say more about the type of work? How big are those repositories? Thanks
      - bhouston 2y ago
        I had it fix a bug recently in the medium sized tanstack mono repo. Transcript here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43178222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43178222
        menaerus 2y ago
        I saw that, I was more interested in other examples you might have since you said that you have started to run two sessions at once to be more productive. And this bug doesn't look like such workload.
        bhouston 2y ago
        The issue is I am working on non-public projects so it is harder to share. But I have a mono-repo that has 8 packages in the packages/* folder and it is all managed by pnpm. I had two sessions going locally in two separate terminal windows in cursor. One was modifying 2 packages to add a feature and another session was modifying another package that was orthogonal to the first two. This isn't really professional - it felt wrong - one shouldn't be adding two separate features at once, but because they were isolated I could check them in separately into Git as two separate commits. It was as if two coders were working on the same checked out code. I need to move this into a cloud service and that is coming soon. Ping me at ben@benhouston3d.com and I can show you some live demos. It works incredibly well.
        menaerus 2y ago
        > This isn't really professional - it felt wrong I don't see anything wrong with that tbh. If it works that's great since this means that you're bound by the compute power you have and not the amount of devs available at that moment. I guess this is what the wet dream is about.
  - Terretta 2y ago
    If using Anthropic professionally with, e.g., Cline, it's easy to spend $1500 a week.
    - bhouston 2y ago
      Whoa. That is insane. I will have to try it out to see why it is so much more expensive.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      For a team of 1,500 people? :)
JustFinishedBSG 2y ago
A few dollars??? What are those sessions doing ? How do you define a "session" How can it be worth it in anyway except for FAANG engineers in the US ?
- mhalle 2y ago
  I spent about five hours using Claude Code heavily yesterday to upgrade and enhance a four year old React web app. This app is widely used to reference anatomical nomenclature. I was able to internationalize it for 45 major languages across the world (still subject to human testing). That allows it to be accessible for 85-90% of the world's population. It cost me about $50. It saved me months of work on a "labor of love" project and allowed me to add lots of quality of life features in a single day that I just never would have gotten to otherwise. That's an enormous value for me.
- bhouston 2y ago
  On average I've been spending $25 a day on Claude credits once this was up and fully running. That is cheaper than hiring another developer in just about any country and it greatly boosts my productivity.
  - jasonjmcghee 2y ago
    If you use threads / chains of messages in any form, I strongly encourage you to checkout caching. The cost savings are crazy. ($0.05 / cache read 1M tokens instead of $3 / 1M input tokens)
    - bhouston 2y ago
      Okay I have token caching annd token costing implemented in a PR. Will go live tomorrow. Thanks for the suggestion!
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Isn't it much cheaper to just use CoPilot with GPT-o?

bhouston 2y ago

I do not use caching yet. An average run costs less than a dollar I find. I think the most expensive so far may have been 2 dollars or so.

MrsPeaches 2y ago
I had similar costs. With caching it went down to 20-40 cents. Well worth it, if you are using this regularly.
- bhouston 2y ago
  Okay I have token caching and token costing implemented in a PR. Will go live tomorrow. Thanks for the suggestion!
saberience 2y ago
Wait, running this once costs "less than a dollar" but up to 2 dollars? So if I used this all day it could cost me 100s of dollars? How is that a good deal when Claude costs 20 dollars per month?
- bhouston 2y ago
  When I use it heavily for a work day it costs around $25 a day. It will write whole features and debug things and write tests and docs. It is that valuable. I’ve started to run two sessions at once to be more productive. I will be moving it to the cloud soon so I can run dozens of sessions at the same time. Tech like this replaces human developers for the most part so yes it is worth it. $25/day is cheaper than hiring another dev or two. Development teams are coming to an end right now.
  - menaerus 2y ago
    Can you say more about the type of work? How big are those repositories? Thanks
    - bhouston 2y ago
      I had it fix a bug recently in the medium sized tanstack mono repo. Transcript here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43178222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43178222
      - menaerus 2y ago
        I saw that, I was more interested in other examples you might have since you said that you have started to run two sessions at once to be more productive. And this bug doesn't look like such workload.
        bhouston 2y ago
        The issue is I am working on non-public projects so it is harder to share. But I have a mono-repo that has 8 packages in the packages/* folder and it is all managed by pnpm. I had two sessions going locally in two separate terminal windows in cursor. One was modifying 2 packages to add a feature and another session was modifying another package that was orthogonal to the first two. This isn't really professional - it felt wrong - one shouldn't be adding two separate features at once, but because they were isolated I could check them in separately into Git as two separate commits. It was as if two coders were working on the same checked out code. I need to move this into a cloud service and that is coming soon. Ping me at ben@benhouston3d.com and I can show you some live demos. It works incredibly well.
        menaerus 2y ago
        > This isn't really professional - it felt wrong I don't see anything wrong with that tbh. If it works that's great since this means that you're bound by the compute power you have and not the amount of devs available at that moment. I guess this is what the wet dream is about.
- Terretta 2y ago
  If using Anthropic professionally with, e.g., Cline, it's easy to spend $1500 a week.
  - bhouston 2y ago
    Whoa. That is insane. I will have to try it out to see why it is so much more expensive.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    For a team of 1,500 people? :)

JustFinishedBSG 2y ago

A few dollars??? What are those sessions doing ? How do you define a "session" How can it be worth it in anyway except for FAANG engineers in the US ?

mhalle 2y ago
I spent about five hours using Claude Code heavily yesterday to upgrade and enhance a four year old React web app. This app is widely used to reference anatomical nomenclature. I was able to internationalize it for 45 major languages across the world (still subject to human testing). That allows it to be accessible for 85-90% of the world's population. It cost me about $50. It saved me months of work on a "labor of love" project and allowed me to add lots of quality of life features in a single day that I just never would have gotten to otherwise. That's an enormous value for me.
bhouston 2y ago
On average I've been spending $25 a day on Claude credits once this was up and fully running. That is cheaper than hiring another developer in just about any country and it greatly boosts my productivity.
- jasonjmcghee 2y ago
  If you use threads / chains of messages in any form, I strongly encourage you to checkout caching. The cost savings are crazy. ($0.05 / cache read 1M tokens instead of $3 / 1M input tokens)
  - bhouston 2y ago
    Okay I have token caching annd token costing implemented in a PR. Will go live tomorrow. Thanks for the suggestion!
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Isn't it much cheaper to just use CoPilot with GPT-o?