nah, there are low powered tools and there’s high powered tools. If people want $20/month happy meal toys in business that business will get left behind. Ignore the consumer market, make Bugatti’s instead - https://ghuntley.com/redlining

ps - catchup for social zoom beers?

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If that's the case you should stop using it, because there's no way you see any ROI when you spend that much to just do some coding stuff.

It would be cheaper to your company to literally pay your salary while you do nothing.

Claude Max is less than a 1/2 percentage point of a Jr. Devs average salary. If you can't make that work then....

If you're using Cursor with Claude it's gonna be pretty much the same thing. Personally I use Claude Code because I hate the Cursor interface but if you like it I don't think you're missing much.

I'll add on to this: I don't really use agent modes a lot. In an existing codebase, they waste a lot of my time for mixed results. Maybe Claude Code is so much better at this that it enables a different paradigm of AI editing—but I'd need easy, cheap access to try it.

Doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve spent over $1,000 on Claude Code at this point and the return is worth it. The spend feels cheap compared to output.

In contrast - I’m not interested in using cheaper, less-than, services for my livelihood.

Have I got bad news for you.... Microsoft announced imposing limits on "premium" models from next week. You get 300 "free" requests a month. If you use agent, you consume about 3-4 requests per action easily, I estimate to burn through 300 in about 3-5 working days.

Basically anything that isnt gpt4o is premium, and I find gpt4o near useless compared to Claude and Gemini in copilot.

Whoever is paying for your time should calculate how much time you’d save between the different products. The actual product price comparison isn’t as important as the impact on output quality and time taken. Could be $1000 a month and still pay for itself in a day, if it generated >$1000 extra value.

This might mean the $10/month is the best. Depends entirely on how it works for you.

(Caps obviously impact the total benefit so I agree there.)

> The problem is that this is $100/mo with limits

Limits are a given on any plan. It would be too easy for a vibe coder to hammer away 8 hours a day for 20 days a week if there was nothing stopping them.

The real question is whether this is a better value than pay as you go for some people.

Is any of the ~$20/month with unlimited usage tooling actually profitable though? It goes without saying that if all else is equal then the product sold at a greater loss will be more popular, but that only works until the vendor runs out of money to light on fire.

I've tried every variation of this very thing. Even managed to build a quick and dirty ticketing system that I could assign to the LLM of my choosing. WITH context. Talking Graph Codebase's diagrams, mappings, tree structure of every possibility, simple documentation, complex documentation, a bunch of OSS to do this very thing automatically etcetcetc.

In the codebase I've tried modularity via monorepo, or faux microservices with local apis, monoliths filled with hooks and all the other centralized tricks in the book. Down to the very very simple. Whatever I could do to bring down the context window needed.

Eventually.....your return diminish. And any time you saved is gone.

And by the time you've burned up a context window and you're ready to get out. Now you're expeciting it to output a concise artifact to carry you to the next chat so you don't have to spend more context getting that thread up to speed.

Inevitably the context window and the LLMs eagerness to touch shit that it's not supposed (the likelihood of which increases with context) always gets in the way.

Anything with any kind of complexity ends up in a game of too much bloat or the LLM removing pieces that kill other pieces that it wasn't aware about.

/VENT

Yes. For small apps, as well distributed systems.

You have to puppeteer it and build a meta context/tasking management system. I spend a lot of time setting Claude code up for success. I usually start with Gemini for creating context, development plans, and project tasking outlines (I can feed large portions of codebase to Gemini and rely on its strategy). I’ve even put entire library docsites in my repos for Claude code to use - but today they announced web search.

They also have todos built in which make the above even more powerful.

The end result is insane productivity - I think the only metric I have is something like 15-20k lines of code for a recent distributed processing system from scratch over 5 days.

Yes. It costs me a few bucks per feature, which is an absolute no-brainer.

If you don't like what it suggests, undo the changes, tweak your prompt and start over. Don't chat with it to fix problems. It gets confused.

Absolutely stellar for 0-to-1-oriented frontend-related tasks, less so but still quite useful for isolated features in backends. For larger changes or smaller changes in large/more interconnected codebases, refactors, test-run-fix-loops, and similar, it has mostly provided negative value for me unfortunately. I keep wondering if it's a me problem. It would probably do much better if I wrote very lengthy prompts to micromanage little details, but I've found that to be a surprisingly draining activity, so I prefer to give it a shot with a more generic prompt and either let it run or give up, depending on which direction it takes.

Claude Code runs in the terminal

If your employer spends $20k a month on you (salary + everything else), $200 a month breaks even at around a 1% boost in productivity.