8 ms·

My answer to this is simply rolling back to the pro plan for interactive usage in the coming month, and forcefully cutting myself over to one of the alternative

by g-mork 6mo ago

My answer to this is simply rolling back to the pro plan for interactive usage in the coming month, and forcefully cutting myself over to one of the alternative Chinese models to just get over the hump and normalise API pricing at a sensible rate with sensible semantics. Dealing with Claude going into stupid mode 15 times a day, constant HTTP errors, etc. just isn't really worth it for all it does. I can't see myself justifying $200/mo. on any replacement tool either, the output just doesn't warrant it. I think we all jumped on the AI mothership with our eyes closed and it's time to dial some nuance back into things. Most of the time I'm just using Opus as a bulk code autocomplete that really doesn't take much smarts comparatively speaking. But when I do lean on it for actual fiddly bug fixing or ideation, I'm regularly left disappointed and working by hand anyway. I'd prefer to set my expectations (and willingness to pay) a little lower just to get a consistent slightly dumb agent rather than an overpriced one that continually lets me down. I don't think that's a problem fixed by trying to swap in another heavily marketed cure-all like Gemini or Codex, it's solved by adjusting expectations. In terms of pricing, $200 buys an absolute ton of GLM or Minimax, so much that I'd doubt my own usage is going to get anywhere close to $200 going by ccusage output. Minimax generating a single output stream at its max throughput 24/7 only comes to about $90/mo.

zdragnar 6mo ago
> I think we all jumped on the AI mothership with our eyes closed Oh no, there's plenty of us willing to say we told you so. What's more interesting to me is what it's going to look like if big companies start removing "AI usage" from their performance metrics and cease compelling us to use it. More than anything else, that's been the dumbest thing to happen with this whole craze.
SkyPuncher 6mo ago
I literally hit my 5 hour window limit in 1.5 hours every single day now. 2 weeks ago, I had only hit my limit a single time and that was when I had multiple agents doing codebase audits.
- estimator7292 6mo ago
  They've been running a "double credits" promo for several weeks, which expired on the first of this month.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  Anthropic had a special extra usage promotion going on during non-peak hours that ended recently. They didn’t do a great job of explaining it. I wonder how many people got used to the 2X limits and now think Anthropic has done something bad by going back to normal
  - stavros 6mo ago
    They also reduced the peak time limits, so it's not just the promotion.
  - paulddraper 6mo ago
    Could it also have anything to do with Anthropic being deliberately opaque about usage in general?
  - SkyPuncher 6mo ago
    Naw, it's not that. This is business-day usage for all of it.
  - greenavocado 6mo ago
    Irrelevant. I had at least ten times more usage then at any time
- Razengan 6mo ago
  I've been using Codex extensively, 5.4 at "Extra High" and yet to hit a limit. The $20 plan
  - scotty79 6mo ago
    It very much depends on the workloads. If you inspect existing code (that somebody else wrote over the years) usage runs out quickly. If you are building your own greenfield stuff the sky is the limit.
colechristensen 6mo ago
Every service is being sold at a deep discount chasing market share, but it's not lasting forever.
- g-mork 6mo ago
  Speaking only personally of course, I'm completely over the chat idiom in almost every way. Where is all this future demand coming from? By the time Android lands a God mode ultimate voice assistant it's pretty much guaranteed I will be well beyond the point where I'd want to use it. The whole thing is starting to remind me of 3G video calling where the networks thought it'd change everything, and by the end of it with all the infrastructure in place, the average user has made something like 0.001 3G-native video calls over the lifetime of their usage. Would really love some path forward where the AI parts only poke out as single fields in traditional user interfaces and we can forget this whole episode
  - colechristensen 6mo ago
    I don't understand this perspective. I can't imaging a point where I won't want to ask "what's the weather like?" "please turn off the lights" "what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?" likewise chatting through directing it to build something or solve a problem, voice or typing will each have their place. And video calling did take off, plenty of people use facetime and almost everybody working in an office uses some form of video calls. Criticizing the early attempts at getting video calling working because they hadn't taken off yet (I remember them being advertised on "video phones" with 56k modems), of course someone was going to have the idea and implement before it was quite reasonable.
    - neonstatic 6mo ago
      > I can't imaging a point where I won't want to ask "what's the weather like?" "please turn off the lights" To help with understanding that perspective, I cannot imagine a scenario where I would ask a device connected to the internet to turn off the lights. I literally never wanted this. A physical switch is a 100% non negotiable for me. I feel the same way about non-mechanical car doors. Perhaps due to that outlook I was always puzzled about the entire idea of an "assistant". It's interesting for me to see, that there are people out there who actually want that "assistant".
danpalmer 6mo ago
Please don't use grossly offensive terms in this forum. That sort of language is not welcome here.
- g-mork 6mo ago
  Oops, fixed
- klohto 6mo ago
  Since when are you a moderator?
  - imp0cat 6mo ago
    Since when are you a meta-moderator? ;)
  - danpalmer 6mo ago
    We're all a part of deciding what culture we want to have in our communities. Culture is what we make it, and I don't want a space where people use that sort of language regardless of whether anyone is a mod or not.
Aurornis 6mo ago
> I think we all jumped on the AI mothership with our eyes closed and it's time to dial some nuance back into things. I’m kind of confused by these takes from HN readers. I could see LinkedIn bros getting reality checked when they finally discover that LLMs aren’t magic, but I’m confused about how a developer could go all-in on AI and not immediately realize the limitations of the output.
- krupan 6mo ago
  It has indeed been baffling. Ad I dig deeper into what developers are doing with AI, it's basically like what I did customizing and tweaking emacs when I was younger (and fine, I'll admit I still do it sometimes). They are having so much fun playing with these new tools that they aren't really noticing how little the new tools are actually helping them
- Flere-Imsaho 6mo ago
  > immediately realize the limitations of the output. I'm "all-in" on AI code generation. I very much realise their limitations, it's like any tool really. I do think they're magic, you just need to learn how to weld the power.
bethekind 6mo ago
I think my next steps are: 1) try out openai $20/month. I've heard they're much more generous. 2) try out open router free models. I don't need geniuses, so long as I can see the thinking (something that Claude code obfuscates by default) I should be good. I've heard good things about the CLIO harness and want to try openrouter+clio
- beering 6mo ago
  Word on the street is that Opus is much much larger of a model than GPT-5.4 and that’s why the rate limits on Codex are so much more generous. But I guess you could also just switch to Sonnet or Haiku in Claude Code?
- admiralrohan 6mo ago
  Openrouter free models have 50 requests per day limit + data collection. As per their doc.
  - nodja 6mo ago
    You can charge $10 on the account and get unlimited requests. I abused this last week with the nemotron super to test out some stuff and made probably over 10000 requests over a couple of days and didn't get blocked or anything, expect 5xx errors and slowdowns tho.
- Flere-Imsaho 6mo ago
  I'm taking a bet on local models to do the non genius work. Gemma 4 (released yesterday) has been designed to run on laptops / edge devices....and so far is running pretty well for me.
  - neal_jones 6mo ago
    How’s Gemma 4 been?
    - renewiltord 6mo ago
codybontecou 6mo ago
Are you using the Chinese models through their individual services or via an intermediary layer?
- mark_l_watson 6mo ago
  I am not the person you are responding to but I have tried both: using OpenRouter and also giving a Chinese company $5 on my credit card to buy tokens. If I know what model I want to experiment with, I much prefer to just pay $5 and have plenty of tokens to experiment. On a yearly basis, this is a very tiny expense for the benefits of getting plenty of tokens to experiment with.
rhodysurf 6mo ago
This is what I did, downgraded to pro and pay for opencode zen for the open models. I like the combo of the two
- mark_l_watson 6mo ago
  Oh, https://opencode.ai/zen https://opencode.ai/zen looks good. I like pay as you go plans since I usually don’t use many tokens compared to vibe coders. I regret paying Google for a one year AI subscription last spring (although it was a deep discount over the regular $20/month cost) because it has kept me from experimenting with many venders (but it was a fantastic deal financially). I just put a reminder on my calendar to try OpenCode zen when my subscription ends.
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.
jimbob45 6mo ago
constant HTTP errors Dealing with these right now with ChatGPT. Bricked a thread which I didn’t even know was possible.

by g-mork 6mo ago

zdragnar 6mo ago

> I think we all jumped on the AI mothership with our eyes closed Oh no, there's plenty of us willing to say we told you so. What's more interesting to me is what it's going to look like if big companies start removing "AI usage" from their performance metrics and cease compelling us to use it. More than anything else, that's been the dumbest thing to happen with this whole craze.

SkyPuncher 6mo ago

I literally hit my 5 hour window limit in 1.5 hours every single day now. 2 weeks ago, I had only hit my limit a single time and that was when I had multiple agents doing codebase audits.

estimator7292 6mo ago
They've been running a "double credits" promo for several weeks, which expired on the first of this month.
Aurornis 6mo ago
Anthropic had a special extra usage promotion going on during non-peak hours that ended recently. They didn’t do a great job of explaining it. I wonder how many people got used to the 2X limits and now think Anthropic has done something bad by going back to normal
- stavros 6mo ago
  They also reduced the peak time limits, so it's not just the promotion.
- paulddraper 6mo ago
  Could it also have anything to do with Anthropic being deliberately opaque about usage in general?
- SkyPuncher 6mo ago
  Naw, it's not that. This is business-day usage for all of it.
- greenavocado 6mo ago
  Irrelevant. I had at least ten times more usage then at any time
Razengan 6mo ago
I've been using Codex extensively, 5.4 at "Extra High" and yet to hit a limit. The $20 plan
- scotty79 6mo ago
  It very much depends on the workloads. If you inspect existing code (that somebody else wrote over the years) usage runs out quickly. If you are building your own greenfield stuff the sky is the limit.

colechristensen 6mo ago

Every service is being sold at a deep discount chasing market share, but it's not lasting forever.

g-mork 6mo ago
Speaking only personally of course, I'm completely over the chat idiom in almost every way. Where is all this future demand coming from? By the time Android lands a God mode ultimate voice assistant it's pretty much guaranteed I will be well beyond the point where I'd want to use it. The whole thing is starting to remind me of 3G video calling where the networks thought it'd change everything, and by the end of it with all the infrastructure in place, the average user has made something like 0.001 3G-native video calls over the lifetime of their usage. Would really love some path forward where the AI parts only poke out as single fields in traditional user interfaces and we can forget this whole episode
- colechristensen 6mo ago
  I don't understand this perspective. I can't imaging a point where I won't want to ask "what's the weather like?" "please turn off the lights" "what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?" likewise chatting through directing it to build something or solve a problem, voice or typing will each have their place. And video calling did take off, plenty of people use facetime and almost everybody working in an office uses some form of video calls. Criticizing the early attempts at getting video calling working because they hadn't taken off yet (I remember them being advertised on "video phones" with 56k modems), of course someone was going to have the idea and implement before it was quite reasonable.
  - neonstatic 6mo ago
    > I can't imaging a point where I won't want to ask "what's the weather like?" "please turn off the lights" To help with understanding that perspective, I cannot imagine a scenario where I would ask a device connected to the internet to turn off the lights. I literally never wanted this. A physical switch is a 100% non negotiable for me. I feel the same way about non-mechanical car doors. Perhaps due to that outlook I was always puzzled about the entire idea of an "assistant". It's interesting for me to see, that there are people out there who actually want that "assistant".

danpalmer 6mo ago

Please don't use grossly offensive terms in this forum. That sort of language is not welcome here.

g-mork 6mo ago
Oops, fixed
klohto 6mo ago
Since when are you a moderator?
- imp0cat 6mo ago
  Since when are you a meta-moderator? ;)
- danpalmer 6mo ago
  We're all a part of deciding what culture we want to have in our communities. Culture is what we make it, and I don't want a space where people use that sort of language regardless of whether anyone is a mod or not.

Aurornis 6mo ago

> I think we all jumped on the AI mothership with our eyes closed and it's time to dial some nuance back into things. I’m kind of confused by these takes from HN readers. I could see LinkedIn bros getting reality checked when they finally discover that LLMs aren’t magic, but I’m confused about how a developer could go all-in on AI and not immediately realize the limitations of the output.

krupan 6mo ago
It has indeed been baffling. Ad I dig deeper into what developers are doing with AI, it's basically like what I did customizing and tweaking emacs when I was younger (and fine, I'll admit I still do it sometimes). They are having so much fun playing with these new tools that they aren't really noticing how little the new tools are actually helping them
Flere-Imsaho 6mo ago
> immediately realize the limitations of the output. I'm "all-in" on AI code generation. I very much realise their limitations, it's like any tool really. I do think they're magic, you just need to learn how to weld the power.

bethekind 6mo ago

I think my next steps are: 1) try out openai $20/month. I've heard they're much more generous. 2) try out open router free models. I don't need geniuses, so long as I can see the thinking (something that Claude code obfuscates by default) I should be good. I've heard good things about the CLIO harness and want to try openrouter+clio

beering 6mo ago
Word on the street is that Opus is much much larger of a model than GPT-5.4 and that’s why the rate limits on Codex are so much more generous. But I guess you could also just switch to Sonnet or Haiku in Claude Code?
admiralrohan 6mo ago
Openrouter free models have 50 requests per day limit + data collection. As per their doc.
- nodja 6mo ago
  You can charge $10 on the account and get unlimited requests. I abused this last week with the nemotron super to test out some stuff and made probably over 10000 requests over a couple of days and didn't get blocked or anything, expect 5xx errors and slowdowns tho.
Flere-Imsaho 6mo ago
I'm taking a bet on local models to do the non genius work. Gemma 4 (released yesterday) has been designed to run on laptops / edge devices....and so far is running pretty well for me.
- neal_jones 6mo ago
  How’s Gemma 4 been?
  - renewiltord 6mo ago

codybontecou 6mo ago

Are you using the Chinese models through their individual services or via an intermediary layer?

mark_l_watson 6mo ago
I am not the person you are responding to but I have tried both: using OpenRouter and also giving a Chinese company $5 on my credit card to buy tokens. If I know what model I want to experiment with, I much prefer to just pay $5 and have plenty of tokens to experiment. On a yearly basis, this is a very tiny expense for the benefits of getting plenty of tokens to experiment with.

rhodysurf 6mo ago

This is what I did, downgraded to pro and pay for opencode zen for the open models. I like the combo of the two

mark_l_watson 6mo ago
Oh, https://opencode.ai/zen https://opencode.ai/zen looks good. I like pay as you go plans since I usually don’t use many tokens compared to vibe coders. I regret paying Google for a one year AI subscription last spring (although it was a deep discount over the regular $20/month cost) because it has kept me from experimenting with many venders (but it was a fantastic deal financially). I just put a reminder on my calendar to try OpenCode zen when my subscription ends.

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.

jimbob45 6mo ago

constant HTTP errors Dealing with these right now with ChatGPT. Bricked a thread which I didn’t even know was possible.