Not every problem needs a SOTA generalist model, and as we get systems/services that are more "bundles" of different models with specific purposes I think we will see better usage graphs.

Which, of course, is to donate money to Sama so he can create AGI and be less lonely with his robotic girlfriend, I mean...change the world for the better somehow. /s

On one of the systems I'm developing I'm using LLMs to compile user intents to a DSL, without every looking at the real data to be examined. There are ways; increased context length is bad for speed, cost and scalability.

I managed a deep learning team at Capital One and the lock-in thing is real. Replit is an interesting case study for me because after a one week free agent trial I signed up for a one year subscription, had fun the their agent LLM-based coding assistant for a few weeks, and almost never used their coding agent after that, but I still have fun with Replit as an easy way to spin up Nix based coding environments. Replit seems to offer something for everyone.

And everything, I mean everything after the title is only a downhill:

> saying "this car is so much cheaper now!" while pointing at a 1995 honda civic misses the point. sure, that specific car is cheaper. but the 2025 toyota camry MSRPs at $30K.

Cars got cheaper. The only reason you don't feel it is trade barrier that stops BYD from flooding your local dealers.

> charge 10x the price point > $200/month when cursor charges $20. start with more buffer before the bleeding begins.

What does this even mean? The cheapest Cursor plan is $20, just like Claude Code. And the most expensive Cursor plan is $200, just like Claude Code. So clearly they're at the exact same price point.

> switch from opus ($75/m tokens) to sonnet ($15/m) when things get heavy. optimize with haiku for reading. like aws autoscaling, but for brains.

> they almost certainly built this behavior directly into the model weights, which is a paradigm shift we’ll probably see a lot more of

"I don't know how Claude built their models and I have no insider knowledge, but I have very strong opinions."

> 3. offload processing to user machines

What?

> ten. billion. tokens. that's 12,500 copies of war and peace. in a month.

Unironically quoting data from viberank leaderboard, which is just user-submitted number...

> it's that there is no flat subscription price that works in this new world.

The author doesn't know what throttling is...?

I've stopped reading here. I should've just closed the tab when I saw the first letter in each sentence isn't capitalized. This is so far the most glaring signal of slop. More than the overuse of em-dash and lists.

This has been working great for the occasional use, I'd probably top up my account by $10 every few months. I figured the amount of tokens I use is vastly smaller than the packaged plans so it made sense to go with the cheaper, pay-as-you-go approach.

But since I've started dabbling in tooling like Claude Code, hoo-boy those tokens burn _fast_, like really fast. Yesterday I somehow burned through $5 of tokens in the space of about 15 minutes. I mean, sure, the Code tool is vastly different to asking an LLM about a certain topic, but I wasn't expecting such a huge leap, a lot of the token usage is masked from you I guess wrapped up in the ever increasing context + back/forth tool orchestration, but still