> There are probably more effective methods of achieving the same, but it costs us less than a dollar to provision 50 servers using Claude to screen-scrape ever

> There are probably more effective methods of achieving the same, but it costs us less than a dollar to provision 50 servers using Claude to screen-scrape every minute during the install. I think this is an important thing to remember/consider. I can't tell you how many personal projects I've stalled on worrying about costs "XYZ service/platform/API is expensive" without considering what "expensive" actually means. Yes, they could have used OCR/image recognition-type software but what's easier than piping an image to an API and asking it? LLMs frustrate me with their inconsistency/"fuzziness" (repeating instructions, putting them in all caps, saying "please" just rubs me the wrong way) but I know personally I have a bad habit of "That would be too expensive" or "How does it scale to X" when neither the cost nor the scale would ever be a real issue in the thing I'm writing.