7 ms·

I decided to check this out after seeing the discussion here. I had previously misunderstood that it required a Claude.ai plan, but it actually just uses your A

• personjerry 2y ago
  That seems like a steal? Engineers are paid much more to do much less
  • CGamesPlay 2y ago
    No, I'm paid much more to do much more than what I did in this simple task. Claude didn't even test the changes (in this case, it does not have the hardware required to do that), or decide that the feature needed to be implemented in the first place. But my comparison wasn't "how do I compare to Claude Code", it was "how does Aider compare to Claude Code". My boss does not use Aider or Claude Code, and would not be happy with the results of replacing me with it (yet).
    • y1n0 2y ago
      I think you missed the point. The claim is that it would have cost you more to hire a person to do what either claude code or aider did.
      • CGamesPlay 2y ago
        I think I pretty directly addressed that point. Yes, it would be more expensive to hire me to do what Claude Code / Aider did, but nobody would be satisfied with my work if I stopped where Claude Code / Aider did.
        • radlad 2y ago
          They aren't necessarily saying it can replace you. They're saying that even though it's expensive, it's cheaper than your time (which can be better spent on other tasks, as you point out.)
          • codebolt 2y ago
            And with this increase in productivity, your boss needs fewer of you to do the work that would previously require a larger team.
          • baq 2y ago
            The first half is correct, but the conclusions shouldn’t be ‘we’re replicating our software engineers with Claude today’, they’re ‘our experienced engineers just 10x their productivity, we’ll never need to hire an intern’
            • bhaney 2y ago
              You mean "our experienced engineers just 10x'd their productivity, so we can fire 90% of them"
              • baq 2y ago
                Nah the value unlock is too great. For now. Don’t quote me next March.
    • Sterling9x 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • CGamesPlay 2y ago
        I said that the AI literally does not have the hardware required to do the testing necessary. But ignoring that, automated testing is not sufficient for shipping software. Imagine shipping a website that has full test coverage but never once opening the browser. This isn't a fundamentally impossible problem for AI, but no amount of "good prompting" is going to get you there today.
  • beepbooptheory 2y ago
    I know this is not really in the spirit of the room here, but before I ever dreamed of getting paid to code, I only learned to at all because I was cheap and/or poor cook/grad student that wanted to make little artsy musical things on the computer. I remember the first time I just downloaded pure data. No torrent, no cracks, it was just there for me and all it asked for was my patience. The only reason I ever got into linux at all was because I ended up with some dinky acer chromebook for school but didn't want to stop making stuff. Crouton changed my life in a small way with that. As I branched out and got more serious, learning web development, emacs, java, I never stopped feeling so irrationally lucky that it was all free, and always would be. Coming on here and other places to keep learning. It is to this day still the lovely forever hole I can excavate that costs only my sleep and electricity. This is all not gone, but if I was just starting now, I'd find hn and so and coding twitter just like I did 10 years ago, but would be immediately turned off by this pervasive sense that "the way to do things now" is seemingly inseparable from a credit card number and monthly charge, however small. I just probably would not of gotten into it. It just wouldn't feel like its for me: "oh well I don't really know how to do this anyway, I can't justify spending money on it!" $0.76 for 50 loc is definitely nuts, but even $0.10 would of turned me way off. I had the same thoughts with all the web3 stuff too... I know this speaks more to my money eccentricities than anything, and I know we dont really care on here about organic weirdo self teachers anymore (just productivity I guess). I am truly not even bemoaning the present situation, everyone has different priorities, and I am sure people are still having the exciting discovery of the computer like I did on their cursor ide or whatever. But I am personally just so so grateful the timeline lined up for me. I don't know if I'd have my passion for this stuff if I was born 10 years later than I was, or otherwise started learning now. But I guess we don't need the passion anymore anyway, its all been vectorized!
    • idiotsecant 2y ago
      This doesn't make much sense to me. Is there some reason a kid today can't still learn to code? In the contrary, you have LLMs available that can answer your exact personalized questions. It's like having a free tutor. It's easier than it's ever been to learn for free.
  • Bjorkbat 2y ago
    Tangential, but this reminds me of something someone said on Twitter that has resonated with me ever since. Startups targeting developers / building developer tooling are arguably one of the worst startups to build, because no matter how much of a steal the price is relative to the value you get, developers insist they can build their own or get by with an open-source competitor. We're as misguided on value as we are on efficiency and automation (more specifically, the old trope of a dev spending hours to automate something that takes minutes to do).
    • cwalv 2y ago
      I've noticed this tendency in myself and thought about the 'why' a lot, and I think it comes down to subconsciously factoring in the cost of lock-in, or worse, lack of access to fix/improve a tool I've come to rely on
      • TheDong 2y ago
        For me, a larger part than "cost of lock-in" is the "hacker spirit", the curiosity to understand how it works. Sure, I can pay google or fastmail to host a mailserver for me, but that deprives me of the joy of configuring and updating dovecot/postfix/etc, writing custom backup scripts, writing my own anti-spam tooling, etc. I want to know how all those pieces work. Sure, I can pay kagi to search its index of webpages for me, but that deprives me of the joy of creating and running a botnet to index webpages, storing 100s of terrabytes of scraped data, and writing my own search code. Targeting hackers is indeed a sucker's game.
        • lqstuart 2y ago
          I think this spirit is totally lost on most people in this field. It’s tempting to say younger generations but it’s everyone. It always amazes me when I meet someone who has spent 10+ years in this field and doesn’t even care how anything but their shitty Kafka-Flink pipelines work.
          • sgarland 2y ago
  • tropin 2y ago
    Not everybody works in USA.
• caseyf7 2y ago
  Which model did you use with aider?
  • CGamesPlay 2y ago
    My post above was with sonnet-3.5. When I used sonnet-3.7, it didn't speculate at the files at all; it simply requested that I add the appropriate ones.
• artdigital 2y ago
  Same here, I did a few small taks with Claude Code after seeing this discussion here and is too expensive for me. A small change to create a script file (20 LoC) was 10cts, a quick edit to a README was 7ct Yes yes engineers make more than that blah blah but the cost would quickly jump out of control for bigger tasks. I’d easy burn through $10-20 upwards a day with this, or upwards $100-$300 a month. Unless you have a Silicon Valley salary, that’s too expensive. I use other tools like Cody (the tool the author created) or Copilot because I pay $10 a month and that’s it. Yes I get rate limited almost daily but I don’t need to worry that my tool cost is going out of control suddenly. I hope Anthropic introduces a new plan that bundles Claude Code into it, I’d be much more comfortable using that knowing it won’t suddenly be more than my $50/mo (or whatever)
  • stevage 2y ago
    It's an interesting question. As a freelance consultant, theoretically a tool like this could allow me to massively scale up my income, assuming I could find enough clients. I'm a bit nervous where I'd end up though - with code I'd "written" but wasn't familiar with, and with who knows what kinds of limitations or subtle bugs baked in.
    • firtoz 2y ago
      I currently pay around $200-300 to a combination of Cursor + Anthropic through the API. I have both a full time job and freelance work. It pays for itself. I end up reviewing more than manual coding, to ensure the quality of the results. Funnily, the work I did through this method has received more praise than my usual work.
      • coffeecantcode 2y ago
        Did you outgrow the vase 500 searches that Cursor gives you per month and connect your API key for usage based pricing? I’m having a hard time coming close to the 500 included in the monthly subscription and I use it like, a lot. Just curious how you’re hitting that 200-300 mark unless you’re talking about paying Anthropic outside of cursor. Which I just now realized is probably the case.
• bufferoverflow 2y ago
  Now, the billion dollar question is - how long would it take you to code that diff?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • CGamesPlay 2y ago
    Probably about 3 minutes? That's my main usage of these types of coding tools, honestly. I already know generally what I want to happen and validating that the LLM is on the right track / reached the right solution is easy. I'm not saying that "Claude Code makes me 300% more effective", but I guess it did for this (simple) task.
    • off_by_inf 2y ago
      And how long would it take you to debug AI generated code again and again?
      • Maxatar 2y ago
        This shouldn't be factored in unless you never debug your own code. At any rate, I don't know about OP but usually when I get an LLM to write out some code, I also have it write out the tests for it as well.
    • generic92034 2y ago
      Are you comparing only the generation time with your coding time? How are the figures if you include the necessary step of checking the generated code? And how do these times change if you are coding in a very complex environment?
      • CGamesPlay 2y ago
        To be clear, I explicitly picked this task because my judgement call was that it was going to be faster to use an AI than coding it myself. Checking the generated code was easy for me to do (whether I or the AI wrote it). I don't know what you mean by "how do these times change if you are coding in a very complex environment", but to restate my original post: I'm fearful that Claude's additional autonomy will allow it to waste money (and time) pursuing useless ideas.
• lolinder 2y ago
  I think that tools like this have to operate on a subscription model like Cursor does in order to make any kind of sense for most users. The pay as you go model for agentic code tools makes you responsible for paying for: * Whatever context the agent decides to pull in. * However many iterations the model decides to run. * Any result you get, regardless of how bad it is. With pay as you go, the tool developer has no incentive to minimize any of these costs—they get paid more if it's inefficient, as long as it's not so inefficient that no one uses it. They don't even need it to be especially popular, they just need some subset of the population to decide that costs don't matter (i.e. those with Silicon Valley salaries). With Cursor's model of slow and fast queries, they are taking responsibility for ensuring that the agents are as cost efficient as possible. The more efficient the agent the larger their cut. The fewer times that people have to ask a question a second time, the larger their cut. This can incentivize cutting corners, but that somewhat balanced out by the need to keep people renewing their subscription, and on the whole for most users it's better to have a flat subscription price and a company that's optimizing their costs than to have a pay-as-you-go model and a company that has no incentive to improve efficiency.
  • foz 2y ago
    I think this core business model question is happening at all levels in these companies. Each time the model goes in the wrong direction, and I stop it - or I need to go back and reset context and try again - I get charged. The thing is, this is actually a useful and productive way to work sometimes. Like when pairing with another developer, you need to be able to interrupt each other, or even try something and fail. I don't mind paying per-request, but I can't help but think the daily API revenue graph at Cursor is going up whenever they have released a change that trips up development and forces users to intervene or retry things. And of course that's balanced by churn if users get frustrated and stop or leave. But no product team wants to have that situation. In the end I think developers will want to pay a fair and predictable price for a product that does a good job most of the time. I don't personally care about switching models, I tend to gravitate towards the one that works best for me. Eventually, I think most coding models will soon be good at most things and the prices will go down. Where will that leave the tool vendors?
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• maineagetter 2y ago
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