7 ms·

Yes, my CC usage is regularly $50-$100 per day, so their Max plan is absolutely great value that I don’t expect to last.

by e1g 1y ago

bilsbie 1y ago
Is there a cheap version for hobbyists? Or what’s the best thing for hobbyists to use, just cut and paste?
- hanklazard 1y ago
  Cursor at 20$/M is pretty great
- taxborn 1y ago
  I've been enjoying Zed lately
  - notpushkin 1y ago
    Zed is fantastic. Just dipping my toes in agentic AI, but I was able to fix a failing test I spent maybe 15 minutes trying to untangle in a couple minutes with Zed. (It did proceed to break other tests in that file though, but I quickly reverted that.) It is also BYOA or you can buy a subscription from Zed themselves and help them out. I currently use it with my free Copilot+ subscription (GitHub hands it out to pretty much any free/open source dev).
- mrmincent 1y ago
  Claude Code pro is ~$20USD/ month and is nearly enough for someone like me who can’t use it at work and is just playing around with it after work. I’m loving it.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  Claude Code with a Claude subscription is the cheap version for current SOTA. "Agentic" workflows burn through tokens like there's no tomorrow, and the new Opus model is so expensive per-token that the Max plan pays itself back in one or two days of moderate usage. When people reports their Claude Code sessions costing $100+ per day, I read that as the API price equivalent - it makes no sense to actually "pay as you go" with Claude right now. This is arguably the cheapest option available on the market right now in terms of results per dollar, but only if you can afford the subscription itself. There's also time/value component here: on Max x5, it's quite easy to hit the usage limits of Opus (fortunately the limit is per 5 hours or so); Max x20 is only twice the price of Max x5 but gives you 4x more Opus; better model = less time spent fighting with and cleaning up after the AI. It's expensive to be poor, unfortunately.
  - leptons 1y ago
    >less time spent fighting with and cleaning up after the AI. I've yet to use anything but copilot in vscode, which is 1/2 the time helpful, and 1/2 wasting my time. For me it's almost break-even, if I don't count the frustration it causes. I've been reading all these AI-related comment sections and none of it is convincing me there is really anything better out there. AI seems like break-even at best, but usually it's just "fighting with and cleaning up after the AI", and I'm really not interested in doing any of that. I was a lot happier when I wasn't constantly being shown bad code that I need to read and decide about, when I'm perfectly capable of writing the code myself without the hasle of AI getting in my way. AI burnout is probably already a thing, and I'm close to that point already. I do not have hope that it will get much better than it is, as the core of the tech is essentially just a guessing game.
    - dgacmu 1y ago
      I tend to agree except for one recent experience: I built a quick prototype of an application whose backend I had written twice before and finally wanted to do right. But the existing infrastructure for it had bit-rotted, and I am definitely not a UI person. Every time I dive into html+js I have to spend hours updating my years-out-of-date knowledge of how to do things. So I vibe coded it. I was extremely specific about how the back end should operate and pretty vague about the UI, and basically everything worked. But there were a few things about this one: first, it was just a prototype. I wanted to kick around some ideas quickly, and I didn't care at all about code quality. Second, I already knew exactly how to do the hard parts in the back end, so part of the prompt input was the architecture and mechanism that I wanted. But it spat out that html app way way faster than I could have.
- mark_l_watson 1y ago
  If you are a hobbyist, just use Google’s gemini-cli (currently free!) on a half dozen projects to get experience.
- nickthegreek 1y ago
  cursor on a $20/month plan (if you burn thru the free credits) or gemini-cli (free) are 2 great ways to try out this kinda stuff for a hobbyist. you can throw in v0 too, $5/month free credits. susana’s free tier can give you a db as well.
  - nickthegreek 1y ago
    *supabase
mnky9800n 1y ago
Shhh don’t say that. I love Max. I don’t want it to go anywhere.
jhickok 1y ago
Can you give me an idea of how much interaction would be $50-$100 per day? Like are you pretty constantly in a back and forth with CC? And if you wouldn’t mind, any chance you can give me an idea of productivity gains pre/post LLM?
- mekpro 1y ago
  you can easily reach 50$ per day. by force switching model to opus /model opus it will continue to use opus eventhough there is a warning about approaching limit. i found opus is significantly more capable in coding than sonnet, especcially for the task that is poorly defined, thinking mode can fulfill alot of missing detail and you just need to edit a little before let it code.
  - upcoming-sesame 1y ago
    wow. haven't tried Opus but Sonnet 4 is already damn good.
- resonious 1y ago
  Re productivity gains, CC allows me to code during my commute time. Even on a crowded bus/train I can get real work done just with my phone.
  - dwohnitmok 1y ago
    How do you use Claude Code via your phone?
    - manmal 1y ago
      vibetunnel.sh perhaps
    - macrolime 1y ago
      Personally I use dev containers on a server and I have written some template containers for quickly setting up new containers that has claude code and some scripts for easily connecting to the right container etc. Makes it possible to work on mobile,but lots of room for improvement in the workflow still.
AJ007 1y ago
Pretty easy to hit $100 an hour using Opus on API credits. The model providers are heavily subsidized, the datacenters appear to be too. If you look at the Coreweave stuff and the private datacenters it starts looking like the telecom bubble. Even Meta is looking to finance datacenter expansion - https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-seeks-29-billion-private-capital-firms-ai-data-centers-ft-reports-2025-06-27/ https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-seeks-29-billion-priva... The reason they are talking about building new nuclear power plants in the US isn't just for a few training runs, its for inference. At scale the AI tools are going to be extremely expensive. Also note China produces twice as much electricity as the United States. Software development and agent demand is going to be competitive across industries. You may think, oh I can just use a few hours of this a day and I got a week of work done (happens to me some days), but you are going to end up needing to match what your competitors are doing - not what you got comfortable with. This is the recurring trap of new technology (no capitalism required.) There is a danger to independent developers becoming reliant on models. $100-$200 is a customer acquisition cost giveaway. The state of the art models probably will end up costing hourly what a human developer costs. There is also the speed and batching part. How willing is the developer to, for example, get 50% off but maybe wait twice as long for the output. Hopefully the good dev models end up only costing $1000-$2000 a month in a year. At least that will be more accessible. Somewhere in the future these good models will run on device and just cost the price of your hardware. Will it be the AGI models? We will find out. I wonder how this comment will age, will look back at it in 5 or 10 years.
- SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
  > Pretty easy to hit $100 an hour I don’t see how that can be true, but if it is… Either you, or I are definitely use Claude Code incorrectly.
  - shinycode 1y ago
    It’s definitely easy with an API key I hit 200$ in an evening. I didn’t think that could be possible. Horrifying
    - 1y ago

Yes, my CC usage is regularly $50-$100 per day, so their Max plan is absolutely great value that I don’t expect to last.

by e1g 1y ago

Yes, my CC usage is regularly $50-$100 per day, so their Max plan is absolutely great value that I don’t expect to last.

bilsbie 1y ago

Is there a cheap version for hobbyists? Or what’s the best thing for hobbyists to use, just cut and paste?

hanklazard 1y ago
Cursor at 20$/M is pretty great
taxborn 1y ago
I've been enjoying Zed lately
- notpushkin 1y ago
  Zed is fantastic. Just dipping my toes in agentic AI, but I was able to fix a failing test I spent maybe 15 minutes trying to untangle in a couple minutes with Zed. (It did proceed to break other tests in that file though, but I quickly reverted that.) It is also BYOA or you can buy a subscription from Zed themselves and help them out. I currently use it with my free Copilot+ subscription (GitHub hands it out to pretty much any free/open source dev).
mrmincent 1y ago
Claude Code pro is ~$20USD/ month and is nearly enough for someone like me who can’t use it at work and is just playing around with it after work. I’m loving it.
TeMPOraL 1y ago
Claude Code with a Claude subscription is the cheap version for current SOTA. "Agentic" workflows burn through tokens like there's no tomorrow, and the new Opus model is so expensive per-token that the Max plan pays itself back in one or two days of moderate usage. When people reports their Claude Code sessions costing $100+ per day, I read that as the API price equivalent - it makes no sense to actually "pay as you go" with Claude right now. This is arguably the cheapest option available on the market right now in terms of results per dollar, but only if you can afford the subscription itself. There's also time/value component here: on Max x5, it's quite easy to hit the usage limits of Opus (fortunately the limit is per 5 hours or so); Max x20 is only twice the price of Max x5 but gives you 4x more Opus; better model = less time spent fighting with and cleaning up after the AI. It's expensive to be poor, unfortunately.
- leptons 1y ago
  >less time spent fighting with and cleaning up after the AI. I've yet to use anything but copilot in vscode, which is 1/2 the time helpful, and 1/2 wasting my time. For me it's almost break-even, if I don't count the frustration it causes. I've been reading all these AI-related comment sections and none of it is convincing me there is really anything better out there. AI seems like break-even at best, but usually it's just "fighting with and cleaning up after the AI", and I'm really not interested in doing any of that. I was a lot happier when I wasn't constantly being shown bad code that I need to read and decide about, when I'm perfectly capable of writing the code myself without the hasle of AI getting in my way. AI burnout is probably already a thing, and I'm close to that point already. I do not have hope that it will get much better than it is, as the core of the tech is essentially just a guessing game.
  - dgacmu 1y ago
    I tend to agree except for one recent experience: I built a quick prototype of an application whose backend I had written twice before and finally wanted to do right. But the existing infrastructure for it had bit-rotted, and I am definitely not a UI person. Every time I dive into html+js I have to spend hours updating my years-out-of-date knowledge of how to do things. So I vibe coded it. I was extremely specific about how the back end should operate and pretty vague about the UI, and basically everything worked. But there were a few things about this one: first, it was just a prototype. I wanted to kick around some ideas quickly, and I didn't care at all about code quality. Second, I already knew exactly how to do the hard parts in the back end, so part of the prompt input was the architecture and mechanism that I wanted. But it spat out that html app way way faster than I could have.
mark_l_watson 1y ago
If you are a hobbyist, just use Google’s gemini-cli (currently free!) on a half dozen projects to get experience.
nickthegreek 1y ago
cursor on a $20/month plan (if you burn thru the free credits) or gemini-cli (free) are 2 great ways to try out this kinda stuff for a hobbyist. you can throw in v0 too, $5/month free credits. susana’s free tier can give you a db as well.
- nickthegreek 1y ago
  *supabase

mnky9800n 1y ago

Shhh don’t say that. I love Max. I don’t want it to go anywhere.

jhickok 1y ago

Can you give me an idea of how much interaction would be $50-$100 per day? Like are you pretty constantly in a back and forth with CC? And if you wouldn’t mind, any chance you can give me an idea of productivity gains pre/post LLM?

mekpro 1y ago
you can easily reach 50$ per day. by force switching model to opus /model opus it will continue to use opus eventhough there is a warning about approaching limit. i found opus is significantly more capable in coding than sonnet, especcially for the task that is poorly defined, thinking mode can fulfill alot of missing detail and you just need to edit a little before let it code.
- upcoming-sesame 1y ago
  wow. haven't tried Opus but Sonnet 4 is already damn good.
resonious 1y ago
Re productivity gains, CC allows me to code during my commute time. Even on a crowded bus/train I can get real work done just with my phone.
- dwohnitmok 1y ago
  How do you use Claude Code via your phone?
  - manmal 1y ago
    vibetunnel.sh perhaps
  - macrolime 1y ago
    Personally I use dev containers on a server and I have written some template containers for quickly setting up new containers that has claude code and some scripts for easily connecting to the right container etc. Makes it possible to work on mobile,but lots of room for improvement in the workflow still.

AJ007 1y ago

Pretty easy to hit $100 an hour using Opus on API credits. The model providers are heavily subsidized, the datacenters appear to be too. If you look at the Coreweave stuff and the private datacenters it starts looking like the telecom bubble. Even Meta is looking to finance datacenter expansion - https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-seeks-29-billion-private-capital-firms-ai-data-centers-ft-reports-2025-06-27/ https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-seeks-29-billion-priva... The reason they are talking about building new nuclear power plants in the US isn't just for a few training runs, its for inference. At scale the AI tools are going to be extremely expensive. Also note China produces twice as much electricity as the United States. Software development and agent demand is going to be competitive across industries. You may think, oh I can just use a few hours of this a day and I got a week of work done (happens to me some days), but you are going to end up needing to match what your competitors are doing - not what you got comfortable with. This is the recurring trap of new technology (no capitalism required.) There is a danger to independent developers becoming reliant on models. $100-$200 is a customer acquisition cost giveaway. The state of the art models probably will end up costing hourly what a human developer costs. There is also the speed and batching part. How willing is the developer to, for example, get 50% off but maybe wait twice as long for the output. Hopefully the good dev models end up only costing $1000-$2000 a month in a year. At least that will be more accessible. Somewhere in the future these good models will run on device and just cost the price of your hardware. Will it be the AGI models? We will find out. I wonder how this comment will age, will look back at it in 5 or 10 years.

SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
> Pretty easy to hit $100 an hour I don’t see how that can be true, but if it is… Either you, or I are definitely use Claude Code incorrectly.
- shinycode 1y ago
  It’s definitely easy with an API key I hit 200$ in an evening. I didn’t think that could be possible. Horrifying
  - 1y ago