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I feel like I'm using Claude Opus pretty effectively and I'm honestly not running up against limits in my mid-tier subscriptions. My workflow is more "copilot"
by rectang 6mo ago
I feel like I'm using Claude Opus pretty effectively and I'm honestly not running up against limits in my mid-tier subscriptions. My workflow is more "copilot" than "autopilot", in that I craft prompts for contained tasks and review nearly everything, so it's pretty light compared to people doing vibe coding.
The market-leading technology is pretty close to "good enough" for how I'm using it. I look forward to the day when LLM-assisted coding is commoditized. I could really go for an open source model based on properly licensed code.
- cyanydeez 6mo agoHonestly, it sounds like, assuming you have no ethical qualms, you could get by with a Mac or AMD 395+ and the newest models, specifically QWEN3.5-Coder-Next. It does exactly as you describe. It maxes out around 85k context, which if you do a good job providing guard rails, etc, is the length of a small-medium project. It does seem like the sweet spot between WallE and the destroyed earth in WallE.
- ethicalqualms 6mo agoSorry, out of the loop. Which ethical qualms are you referring to?
- kbelder 6mo agoUsing a Mac, obviously.
- folkrav 6mo agoMy guess - China.
- rectang 5mo agoI have ethical qualms to varying degrees with most LLMs, primarily because of copyright laundering. I'm a BSD-style Open Source advocate who has published a lot of Apache-licensed code. I have never accepted that AI companies can just come in and train their models on that code without preserving my license, just allowing their users to claim copyright on generated output and take it proprietary or do whatever. I would actually not mind licensing my work in an LLM-friendly way, contributing towards a public pool from which generated output would remain in that pool. Perhaps there is opportunity for Open Source organizations to evolve licenses to facilitate such usage. For what it's worth, I would be happy to pay for a commercial LLM trained on public domain or other properly licensed works whose output is legitimately public domain.
- hadlock 5mo agoSeems like AMD 395+ is only about 16 tokens/s which is 25-33% the speed of SOTA models. Break even on a $3000 machine is ~15 months
- cyanydeez 5mo agothats pessimistic. do the calc assuming Cloud provider X changes your nondetermistic output every Y Months by Z probability and increases prices by 10% every 6 months. slow and steady is worth exponentials. keep slopppping it my boid.
- Retr0id 6mo agoI also use it this way and I'm overall pretty happy with it, but it feels like they really want us to use it in "autopilot" mode. It's like they have two conflicting priorities of "make people use more tokens so we can bill them more" and "people are using more tokens than expected, our pricing structure is no longer sustainable" (but I guess they're not really conflicting, if the "solution" involves upgrading to a higher plan)
- fluidcruft 6mo agoI feel like they are making it harder to use it this way. Encouraging autonomous is one thing, but it really feels more like they are handicapping engaged use. I suspect it reflects their own development practices and needs.
- freedomben 6mo agoThis is something I've thought of as well. The way the caps are implemented, it really disincentivizes engaged use. The 5-hour window especially is very awkward and disruptive. The net result is that I have to somewhat plan my day around when the 5-hour window will affect it. That by itself is a powerful disincentive from using Claude. It has also caused me to use different tools for things I previously would have used Claude for. For example, detailed plans I use codex now rather than Claude, because I hit the limit way too fast when doing documentation work. It certainly doesn't hurt that codex seems to be better at it, but I wouldn't even have a codex subscription if it wasn't for claude's usage limits
- Retr0id 6mo agoAnother big one for me is that they dropped the cache TTLs. It is normal for me to come back to a session an hour later, but someone "autopilot"-ing won't have such gaps.
- p_stuart82 5mo agonot just the cache though. every time you stop and come back, it basically reloads the whole session. if you just let it keep going, it counts like one smooth run. you hit the wall faster for actually checking its work.
- llm_nerd 6mo agoI have Max 5x and use only Claude Opus on xhigh mode. I don't use agents, or even MCPs, and stick to Claude Code. I find it incredibly difficult to saturate my usage. I'm ending the average week at 30-ish percentage, despite this thing doing an enormous amount of work for (with?) me. Now I will say that with pro I was constantly hitting the limit -- like comically so, and single requests would push me over 100% for the session and into paying for extra usage -- and max 5x feels like far more than 5x the usage, but who knows. Anthropic is extremely squirrely about things like surge rates, and so on. I'm super skeptical of the influx of "DAE think Opus sucks now. Let's all move to Codex!" nonsense that has flooded HN. A part of it is the ex-girlfriend thing where people are angry about something and try to force-multiply their disagreement, but some of it legitimately smells like astroturfing. Like OpenAI got done pay $100M for some unknown podcaster and start hiring people to write this stuff online.
- NewsaHackO 6mo agoYea, I never got how people are even able to hit the weekly limits so consistently. Maybe it's because they use it for work? But in that case, you would expect the employer to cover it so idk. >I'm super skeptical of the influx of "DAE think Opus sucks now. Let's all move to Codex!" nonsense that has flooded HN. A part of it is the ex-girlfriend thing where people are angry about something and try to force-multiply their disagreement, but some of it legitimately smells like astroturfing. Like OpenAI got done pay $100M for some unknown podcaster and start hiring people to write this stuff online. A lot of people are angry about the whole openclaw situation. They are especially bitter that when they attempted to justify exfiltrating the OAuth token to use for openclaw, nobody agreed with them that they had the right to do so, and sided with Claude that different limits for first-party use is standard. So they create threads like this, and complain about some opaque reason why Anthropic is finished (while still keeping their subscription, of course).
- RealStupidity 6mo agoIf only OpenAI spent a significant amount of money on some kind of generative software that was predominantly trained on internet comments that'd be able to do all the astroturfing for them...
- taytus 6mo agoI'd recommend Kimi k2.6 for your use. It is an excellent model at a fraction of the cost, and you can use Claude Code with it. I did a 1:1 map of all my Claude Code skills, and it feels like I never left Opus. Super happy with the results.
- wolttam 6mo agoI was saying the same until DeepSeek v4 this morning... sorry, Kimi. The competition is intense!
- Aldipower 5mo agoFascinated, a bummer that DeepSeek does not offer a DPA or opt-out for training. This renders it unusable for my use cases unfortunately. At least z.ai GLM has a somewhat DPA in Singapore.
- wolttam 5mo agoThe weights are open and you can use the model with any third party provider that gives you the DPA you want. For my use-case, I want the providers to get my tokens as long as they plan to keep releasing open-weight models
- ramoz 6mo agoWhat provider do you use for Kimi
- taytus 6mo agoStraight from them, but I know other providers like io.net can be faster but I like to directly support the project.
- subscribed 5mo agoThx. I'll try with my personal projects (because dues to the data collection and ToS most providers are forbidden in my company), if I can opt out of training on my input. I'm just getting a but tired of using Opus 2.6 which eats my whole allowance and then some £££ going through the 4kB prompt to review ~13 kB text file twice - and that's on top of the sometimes utter bonkers, bad, lazy answers I'm not getting even from the local Gemma 4 E4B.
- boxingdog 6mo ago[dead]
- goalieca 6mo agoSimilar with the copilot and not autopilot usage. I find its the best of them all. Mostly i just use it as an occasionnal search engine. I've never found LLMs to be efficient to actually do work. I do miss the day when tech docs were usable. Claude seems like a crutch for gaps in developer experience more than anything.
- raincole 5mo ago> the day when LLM-assisted coding is commoditized Like yesterday? LLM-assisted coding is $100/mo. It looks very commoditized when most houses in developed world pay more for electricity than that. My definition of LLM-assisted coding is that you fully understand every change and every single line of the code. Otherwise it's vibe coding. And I believe if one is honest to this principle, it's very hard to deplete the quota of the $100 tier.
- sidrag22 5mo ago> fully understand every change and every single line of the code. im probably just not being charitable enough to what you mean, but thats an absurd bar that almost nobody conforms to even if its fully handwritten. nothing would get done if they did. But again, my emphasis is on that im probably just not being charitable to what you mean.
- thomasmg 5mo agoWell that is how it mostly worked until recently... unless if the developer copied and pasted from stackoverflow without understanding much. Which did happen.
- andrewjvb 5mo agoIt's a good point. To me this really comes down to the economics of the software being written. If it's low-stakes, then the required depth to accept the code is also low.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoHow is that an absurd bar? If you're handwriting code, you'd need to know what you actually want to write in the first place, hence you understand all the code you write. Therefore the code the AI produces should also be understood by you. Anything else than that is indeed vibe coding.
- Maxatar 5mo agoA lot of developers don't actually understand the code they write. Sure nowadays a lot of code is generated by LLMs, but in the past people just copied and pasted stuff off of blogs, Stack Overflow, or whatever other resources they could find without really understanding what it did or how it worked. Jeff Atwood, along with numerous others (who Atwood cites on his blog [1]) were not exaggerating when the observed that the majority of candidates who had existing professional experience, and even MSc. degrees, were unable to code very simple solutions to trivial problems. [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
- dboreham 5mo agoSame. Never hit a limit. Use it heavily for real work. Never even thought of firing off an LLM for hours of...something. Seems like a recipe for wasting my time figuring out what it did and why.
- djyde 5mo ago[dead]