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The comments I see recommending selective use of cheaper models doesn't match the reality I experience working in the industry. I have the constant threat hangi

• cowsandmilk 5mo ago
  This, if you’re high performing, the company won’t question your use of tokens. If they want to limit it, they have ways to set limits on spend and usage.
• krzyk 5mo ago
  If you have such toxic environment, run.
  • mschuster91 5mo ago
    Where to, that's the question. The economy is in the gutters and the replace-people-with-AI craze is making the issue even worse.
    • ponector 5mo ago
      And open positions are simply because someone decided to run from that place
    • ggititel 5mo ago
      Perhaps for now. But you know, after working solid with AI for two years and adopting effective methods using detailed plans, and having a lot of success with it, here is the problem: Coding faster leads to less understanding and higher long-term risk. Source-Code amnesia is real, and there’s a time requirement to really understand and appreciate what a system is actually doing. I’ve been able to implement very large features using frontier models, but the code needs to always be revisited. AI can do two things: find vulnerabilities, and prototype code. It cannot design software, and any appearance of such is an illusion at best. We don’t need to produce faster to be successful, we need to create better, long lasting products.
      • ekidd 5mo ago
        > Coding faster leads to less understanding and higher long-term risk. Source-Code amnesia is real, and there’s a time requirement to really understand and appreciate what a system is actually doing. This is why I have switched nearly all of my personal coding experiments over to Qwen3.6 27B. Opus make it easy to gloss over too much and to delegate too much. And so I don't build sufficient memory of the code to provide long-term oversight. But Qwen3.6 27B sits on an really interesting balance point. It understands code well enough to get 80% of the way to a good design, and it can fully implement a well-specified feature. But if my understanding of the code starts to weaken, things start going wrong much more quickly than they do with Claude. Opus will happily take complex code beyond the point of salvation, if you allow it. I'm currently cleaning up a successful prototype code base right now, one that was partially vibe-coded and now needs to be put into production. And Opus generated massive amounts of tech debt. So clearly people who lean into vibe coding will need to keep upgrading their models for many years to keep up with the mess created by earlier models.
        • trollbridge 5mo ago
          Strong agree (although I'm on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, with 6-bit quant.). If you're a programmer, it gets the job done. When I occasionally don't want to care about the code, I switch over to DeepSeek V4 Pro. Opus is relegated to the planning / design phase.
      • maplethorpe 5mo ago
        > It cannot design software, and any appearance of such is an illusion at best. Have you tried Claude Opus 4.7?
        • ggititel 5mo ago
          Yes I use Opus 4.7 regularly as my daily AI tool. It can do incredible things for sure, but more in the sense of pure intellect not much in “emotional” or “creative” intelligence. For example you might have a great design/architecture session and then run out of context. The next agent tries to piece things together from fragments of conversation and such. But it often starts going off on tangents, searching overly broad to understand, misses cues and nuance, all-the-while burning tokens. As other articles have put it: AI makes doing the easy things easier and the hard things harder. Because hard things require creativity. To bring this back to the original post: companies need people, and they shouldn’t expect that they can fire half their workforce and replace it with AI. Quite the contrary. The faster companies move with AI the more technical debt they’ll end up with it’s a guarantee. “If you want to travel fast, go alone. If you want to travel far, go together.”
    • krzyk 5mo ago
      Now as you can see from the article, it starts turning. People are getting less pricey than agents on API pricing. Copilot switches to API pricing starting next month (let's see how long it will last for our $39, and $19 since September), Anthropic switches all corps into API based pricing. From the most popular choices I think only Codex didn't switch yet (although it is hard to tell because I don't know their enterprise pricing).
      • trollbridge 5mo ago
        The Chinese models are going to look really attractive. I have DS-V4-Pro agents pretty much running 24/7. The cost is inconsequential. The same cannot be said for anything from Anthropic.
    • ac29 5mo ago
      > The economy is in the gutters Consumer sentiment is in the gutters certainly. But objective measures of the economy like unemployment and real wages look good to excellent https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
      • throwaway85825 5mo ago
        It's easy when you can just lie. The data from phone surveys is increasingly divergent from the delayed payroll data.
      • mschuster91 5mo ago
        > But objective measures of the economy like unemployment and real wages look good to excellent Oh hell no, ever since the tail end of Biden the trend for unemployment is showing upwards when corrected for seasonal effects [1], and for real wage growth the situation has been worse for an even longer time [2] - if not for the effects of the post covid stimulus packages plus emergency wage raises following the energy cost explosion thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The story the stonk markets tell is completely decoupled from reality, partially because the AI wash trading bubble keeps distorting the statistics, partially because no matter what the stonk markets only can grow up because pension contributions keep blowing up the market [3]. Not getting that difference was what blew up Biden's reelection and is now screwing over Trump. [1] https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une... [2] https://www.atlantafed.org/research-and-data/data/wage-growth-tracker https://www.atlantafed.org/research-and-data/data/wage-growt... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48233492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48233492
      • bachmeier 5mo ago
        What is in the gutters is memories of 2008-2010. That was the last time folks experienced a bad economy. I remember Ed Elson saying something along the lines of "who cares about employment, what matters is inflation". Sure, if you're 27, you haven't got a clue what a bad economy looks like.
      • 5mo ago
  • ninkendo 5mo ago
    If you’re sitting under a tree in the rain and it gets soaked through and you start getting wet, finding another tree won’t help you. The whole industry is adjusting to the reality that the expected output of an engineer is much higher than it used to be. It’s not local to one company. You may find a better environment for the time being, but this is the direction everything is headed.
    • some-guy 5mo ago
      I don’t disagree that the expectations are higher, but token output hardly correlates to code output worthy of merging.
      • Insanity 5mo ago
        Code quality matters to engineers. Find a senior manager who cares. Or worse, find a customer who cares. While they obviously want a high quality product, no outages, a responsive system etc, I don’t think they necessarily understand why you need to avoid creating god-objects, need to reason about abstractions, etc.
        • vips7L 5mo ago
          Code quality directly correlates to everything you describe.
          • Insanity 5mo ago
            Yea, but I’m not sure customers or mgmt get that
        • drob518 5mo ago
          Nobody cares until the code gets so twisted in knots that bugs and security issues predominate.
          • HeyLaughingBoy 5mo ago
  • gchamonlive 5mo ago
    Maybe once we get universal income we can start recommending this. Until then the individual isn't to blame when the only option to keep providing is to keep grinding in a toxic environment. But I'd agree that everyone can start planning a career shift that'll span a few months to some years in order to seek better working conditions. Passively accepting all work degradation because that's life and money is needed is partly responsible for the current situation too.
• gchamonlive 5mo ago
  > I have the constant threat hanging over my head of being fired if I don't churn out code quickly enough. And the tragedy is that this isn't sustainable, and we all involved deeply in tech know this. There is eventually going to be a big reality check the companies will have to pay, because you can't force creativity and quality, not even with AI, because actual intelligence lies with us at least for now and for the foreseeable future. However when the rope eventually snaps these executives at best will fall upwards, with big severance bonuses and a list of "contributions" we have to be grateful for. We are the ones that will suffer through the next big layoffs.
  • drob518 5mo ago
    Unfortunately, I think this is correct. Such as it ever has been with technological change. The folks at the bottom bear the brunt of the dislocation and the folks at the top pat themselves on the back for being so forward looking and get huge payouts regardless of the actual results. Further, the folks at the top are always incentivized to go along with the herd of their peers because if it works then they were on the bandwagon, and if it doesn’t work, well then, how could they have known because “Everyone was deceived.”
    • joquarky 5mo ago
      > because if it works then they were on the bandwagon, and if it doesn’t work, well then, how could they have known because “Everyone was deceived.” They call themselves "risk takers" to justify their high pay.
      • confidantlake 5mo ago
        They are far too busy for that. They have pr people to say it for them.
  • rebolek 5mo ago
    How much creativity do you need to fix bugs in corporate code? Almost zero. It’s maintenance, not creative work. Nothing against it, it’s needed, but let’s be real, would anybody be really sad if this work is overtaken by LLMs? I certainly won’t be, let them do it.
• Terretta 5mo ago
  Anyone (including ANTHROP\C) "recommending selective use of cheaper models" is spending costly human time (which costs more over time) on correcting the machine (which costs less over time). This is a bad trade. In cost per line of code, we have verified this is always an error unless your time is worth less than the machine (unlikely unless you consider your time to have no cost rather than considering it as your hourly rate). The worst thing for our productivity has been Claude Code or Claude Cowork taking a complex problem and turning around and writing bad instructions for dumb model agents then synthesizing the dumb answers into an orchestra of badness. The single best fix for results-per-total-cost is to ensure it reads and thinks about whole content, not snippets, and thinks with the smartest model, not agents. Agents should toil. Agents should neither think*, nor decide what to think about which itself is thinking. * Agents should “think” like ants or bees or beavers think. Any human-like thinking, *especially* intuition-like thinking, should be thought by the best model available. ** Nobody should be “churning out code”. In a hierarchy of coders who translate detailed specs to some computer language, developers who write software that ships on a project timeline, and engineers who accomplish business goals, engineers should “churn out” engines structured for business outcomes. Measured by that, the machine is leverage while reducing a variety of costs. At the same time, because most training data doesn't grok this, the machine doesn't grok it either. So it needs you to shape its toil.
  • epistasis 5mo ago
    I disagree heartily with everything here, both in personal experience from the models, and in values about coding. I don't care bout cost, I care about getting good results fast. Cost per line of code is not a suitable metric for anything. It's as silly as measuring engineers' performance by lines of code. More lines of code is worse than fewer lines of code. When you say "we have verified" whoever that "we" is makes a big difference, but you're posting pseudonymously, how are we to even guess at that "we"? I get better results with some older cheaper models, faster. In particular older Claude models than Opus 4.7. Maybe the more expensive model churns out more lines, more complexity faster. That is a worse outcome for me. The complexity must be avoided at all costs. The simpler, smaller, answer is always better, and scales to bigger code bases. The more the model guesses at intent rather than checking intent, the more the model is clever rather than clear and simple, the worse the outcome, the more that the model turns into an architecture astronaut, the worse the outcome.
• lumost 5mo ago
  This, I happily used the opus 4.6 fast mode to the tune of 5k for a project. The delivery of the project justified the 5k, if I only spent 500 but delivered the project 1 month later - I would have been in the dog house.
  • apsurd 5mo ago
    Your project cost $5k in tokens? How does that work? over what time? My understanding is that most developers are given pro max plans at $200/m and are expected to max that out. I've been getting by on the $200/year plan by smoothing usage continuously over time. The pay per use is for the API so does it mean you're using the API in a custom setup?
    • lumost 5mo ago
      Maxed out the 200 dollar per month plan then incurred the overage. This was over the span of 1 month or so.
      • apsurd 5mo ago
        thanks, yeah i thought how'd it have to be time constrained, maxed out the monthly allotment. that makes sense. also using the latest model will burn those tokens. I've been so psychologically frugal with my token usage that's why i'm very curious about it all. it's a different paradigm, as an engineer, to go from "software should be free" to watching a meter tick at every turn. thanks for sharing.
        • lumost 5mo ago
          The economics of tokens are still favorable for reasonably well defined tasks at the top tier. I can build out a detailed design and then spend a few k turning it into reality. Compared to spreading such work across multiple engineers the economics are simple. The more nuanced question is what are the economics for tasks with ambiguous roi. I spent 100 dollars optimizing a build/ci system on Friday because it made me “feel” more productive. The result of about 24 hours of gpt5.5 in codex was a build time reduction of 75%.
• giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  My real comment is, why were they not just using their self-hosted copies of it? Do they pay back Anthropic for use of it in Azure? Broker a deal, let Anthropic charge you drastically less to use their model AND Anthropic could have made Claude Code work directly with Azure for Microsoft employees. Pennies on the dollar, and Microsoft could do it using low use GPUs to save on cost, or stack underused GPU compute (this is how serverless was born btw - its the unused resources in a web server somewhere). When you consider that xAI's old data center was enough to bring Anthropic back ahead, it tells me Microsoft could host their own on underutilized previous gen GPUs that are sitting there wasting server real estate.
• bob1029 5mo ago
  I think quantifying tokens used is analogous to quantifying the amount of sawdust generated on a construction site. Churning out useful code quickly is not solved by using more tokens per unit time. Most non-technical leaders can grasp this one and are likely more interested in the strategic game theoretical dynamics that are being forced by way of implied token consumption expectations (competition between developers). If you want to hold out as long as possible and don't really care about anything other than the compensation package, you should at least play along with this new game in a half-assed manner. Try to goldilocks your token usage between any established extremes. You want to be in the statistical barycenter of every AI report that management can create.
  • cwsx 5mo ago
    Suddenly, LoC returned
    • arw0n 5mo ago
      With the rise of agentic coding, this has become a sign of quality for me in my own PRs and reviews: New features implemented in less than a thousand lines of productive code. When I'm working on code that was heavily vibecoded, most of my PRs are reducing LoC by a couple hundreds of lines while fixing bugs or implementing a new feature. My job kind of feels like being a garbage man, luckily my current employer appreciates it. Personally I think the current style of vibecoding only kinda works, because models are getting better fast enough to keep the shitpile from overflowing completely. Betting on the harnesses + models getting good enough to clean up after themselves is a bet, and I don't like gambling, but even I admit the odds don't seem to be bad.
    • rcleveng 5mo ago
      Slowly and then suddenly :) """ Steve Ballmer In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 5OK-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing. """ From https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
• bogota 5mo ago
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• locknitpicker 5mo ago
  > The comments I see recommending selective use of cheaper models doesn't match the reality I experience working in the industry. I have the constant threat hanging over my head of being fired if I don't churn out code quickly enough. I'm not willing to gamble with my livelyhood by using a less effective model. I don't buy it. Old models such as GPT4.1 were faster than newer reasoning models, and their output was as good. Newer models end up wasting an ungodly amount of time with chain-of-thought steps which can be a complete waste of time if you have a structured prompt such as a plan or a spec. My experience in the real world is that users have to ration requests, and x0 models actually tend to be used far more because expensive models are left for more complex tasks.
  • maleldil 5mo ago
    Are you saying you found GPT 5.5 to be as good as 4.1 for coding?
• Quitschquat 5mo ago
  > I don't churn out code quickly enough Curious what industry that is.