4 ms·

I put in probably thousands of Claude session hours a month, aggregated across work + personal. I must be missing something or supremely lucky because I feel l

by Syntaf 6mo ago

I put in probably thousands of Claude session hours a month, aggregated across work + personal. I must be missing something or supremely lucky because I feel like I’ve never hit these “stupid” moments. If I do, it’s probably because I forgot to switch off of haiku for some tiny side thing I was doing before going back to planning.

hakanderyal 6mo ago
Similar usage here. But I encountered this moments, and I chalk it up to the random nature of LLMs. Back in Sonnet 3.5 days, it would happen every other day. I even build an 'you are absolutely right' tracker back then to measure it. Opus 4.6, maybe once or twice a month.
- closewith 6mo ago
  Yes, subjectively there do seem to be moments where the quality of the output drops significantly - usually during US peak hours.
g-mork 6mo ago
It's possible that it's simply paranoia, but moments where Opus starts acting like Haiku seem to correlate with periods of higher latency and HTTP errors. Don't like reporting this because it's so hand-wavy and conspiratorial, but it's difficult not to think they're internally using extraordinary measures of some sort to manage capacity. But even when Opus is running healthy, it still doesn't address the underlying issue that these models can only do so much. I have had Opus build out a bunch of apps but I'm still finding my time absorbed as soon as it comes to anything genuinely exceeding "CRUD level difficulty". Ask it to fix a subtle visual alignment issue, make a small change to a completely novel algorithm, or just fix a tiny bug without having to watch for "Oh, this means I should rewrite module <X>" is something that simply isn't possible while still being able to stand over the work. It's not to say I don't get a massive benefit from these tools, I just think it's possible to be asking too much of them, and that's maybe the real problem to solve.
gverrilla 6mo ago
Most people hate reading. Therefore they don't know how to write. Therefore they can't prompt properly. Not to mention so many "enemies of logic" cults being so strong nowadays.
saulpw 6mo ago
There are 720 hours in a month. You'd have to be running 3 sessions in parallel continuously to be doing thousands of session-hours in a month. Are individual people really doing this?!
- closewith 6mo ago
  Our developers work office hours, but would frequently have 10 plus sessions open. Massive parallelism is one of the benefits of agentic coding.
- ikari_pl 6mo ago
  We do. I work with 3-5 parallel sessions most of the time. Some of the projects are related, some are not, some sessions are just managing and tuning my system configuration, whatever it means at a given time. It doesn't feel weird to me.
  - saulpw 6mo ago
    3-5 parallel sessions for 8 hours a workday, fine. 5x8x20 = 800. How do we get to thousands?!
    - Syntaf 6mo ago
      In my OP I mention this is aggregated across both work + personal, so the comparison of just 8 hour workdays 5 days a week isn't accurate. Running some `/stats` on my work computer shows for the last 30 days: * Sessions: 341 * Active days: 21/30 * Longest session: 3d 20h 33m (Some large scale refactoring of types) So I'm running a little over 10 sessions a day, each session varies from something like 1-2 hours to sometimes multiple days if it's a larger project. Running `/clear` actually doesn't start a new session fwiw, it will maintain the session but clear context, which explains why I can have a 3 day long session but I'm not actually using a single context window. On the personal side I have activity in 30/30 of the last days (:yay); I've been learning game dev recently and use Claude a lot for helping digest documentation and learn about certain concepts as I try to build them in Unity. One of my more interesting use-cases is I have three skills I use during play tests: * QA-Feedback: Takes random thoughts / feedback from me and writes to feedback markdown files * Spec-Feedback: Loops every minute to grab a feedback item and spec out the intention / open questions * Impl-Feedback: Loops every minute to grab a spec, clarify open questions with the user (me) first, then create an implementation plan So I might have a friend play my game and I'll generate 20-30 items of feedback as I watch them play the game, things like minor bugs or mechanics in general. Over the course of the day my Claude will spec and plan out the feedback for me. I have remote sessions always on so I can use my phone to check in on the implementor job and answer open ended questions as they come up. By the following day I'll usually have a bunch of plans ready for Claude to work on. I'll send agents off to do the simple ones throughout the day (bugs) and work with Claude on the bigger items. Sorry for the long winded explanation but trying to convey the level of usage I have w/ Claude code. I do admit "thousands" is hyperbolic, as I'm probably only nearing 2k session hours in the most extreme months but I would say I on average use Claude every day to some capacity, often times both during work and after work (for my hobbies).

by Syntaf 6mo ago

hakanderyal 6mo ago

Similar usage here. But I encountered this moments, and I chalk it up to the random nature of LLMs. Back in Sonnet 3.5 days, it would happen every other day. I even build an 'you are absolutely right' tracker back then to measure it. Opus 4.6, maybe once or twice a month.

closewith 6mo ago
Yes, subjectively there do seem to be moments where the quality of the output drops significantly - usually during US peak hours.

g-mork 6mo ago

It's possible that it's simply paranoia, but moments where Opus starts acting like Haiku seem to correlate with periods of higher latency and HTTP errors. Don't like reporting this because it's so hand-wavy and conspiratorial, but it's difficult not to think they're internally using extraordinary measures of some sort to manage capacity. But even when Opus is running healthy, it still doesn't address the underlying issue that these models can only do so much. I have had Opus build out a bunch of apps but I'm still finding my time absorbed as soon as it comes to anything genuinely exceeding "CRUD level difficulty". Ask it to fix a subtle visual alignment issue, make a small change to a completely novel algorithm, or just fix a tiny bug without having to watch for "Oh, this means I should rewrite module <X>" is something that simply isn't possible while still being able to stand over the work. It's not to say I don't get a massive benefit from these tools, I just think it's possible to be asking too much of them, and that's maybe the real problem to solve.

gverrilla 6mo ago

Most people hate reading. Therefore they don't know how to write. Therefore they can't prompt properly. Not to mention so many "enemies of logic" cults being so strong nowadays.

saulpw 6mo ago

There are 720 hours in a month. You'd have to be running 3 sessions in parallel continuously to be doing thousands of session-hours in a month. Are individual people really doing this?!

closewith 6mo ago
Our developers work office hours, but would frequently have 10 plus sessions open. Massive parallelism is one of the benefits of agentic coding.
ikari_pl 6mo ago
We do. I work with 3-5 parallel sessions most of the time. Some of the projects are related, some are not, some sessions are just managing and tuning my system configuration, whatever it means at a given time. It doesn't feel weird to me.
- saulpw 6mo ago
  3-5 parallel sessions for 8 hours a workday, fine. 5x8x20 = 800. How do we get to thousands?!
  - Syntaf 6mo ago
    In my OP I mention this is aggregated across both work + personal, so the comparison of just 8 hour workdays 5 days a week isn't accurate. Running some `/stats` on my work computer shows for the last 30 days: * Sessions: 341 * Active days: 21/30 * Longest session: 3d 20h 33m (Some large scale refactoring of types) So I'm running a little over 10 sessions a day, each session varies from something like 1-2 hours to sometimes multiple days if it's a larger project. Running `/clear` actually doesn't start a new session fwiw, it will maintain the session but clear context, which explains why I can have a 3 day long session but I'm not actually using a single context window. On the personal side I have activity in 30/30 of the last days (:yay); I've been learning game dev recently and use Claude a lot for helping digest documentation and learn about certain concepts as I try to build them in Unity. One of my more interesting use-cases is I have three skills I use during play tests: * QA-Feedback: Takes random thoughts / feedback from me and writes to feedback markdown files * Spec-Feedback: Loops every minute to grab a feedback item and spec out the intention / open questions * Impl-Feedback: Loops every minute to grab a spec, clarify open questions with the user (me) first, then create an implementation plan So I might have a friend play my game and I'll generate 20-30 items of feedback as I watch them play the game, things like minor bugs or mechanics in general. Over the course of the day my Claude will spec and plan out the feedback for me. I have remote sessions always on so I can use my phone to check in on the implementor job and answer open ended questions as they come up. By the following day I'll usually have a bunch of plans ready for Claude to work on. I'll send agents off to do the simple ones throughout the day (bugs) and work with Claude on the bigger items. Sorry for the long winded explanation but trying to convey the level of usage I have w/ Claude code. I do admit "thousands" is hyperbolic, as I'm probably only nearing 2k session hours in the most extreme months but I would say I on average use Claude every day to some capacity, often times both during work and after work (for my hobbies).