I did a Show HN for it a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43710576
- Aider - https://aider.chat/ | https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider
- Plandex - https://plandex.ai/ | https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex
- Goose - https://block.github.io/goose/ | https://github.com/block/goose
Why doesn’t Claude Code usage count against the same plan that usage of Claude.ai and Claude Desktop are billed against?
I upgraded to the $200/month plan because I really like Claude Code but then was so annoyed to find that this upgrade didn’t even apply to my usage of Claude Code.
So now I’m not using Claude Code so much.
I'm surprised at the complexity and correctness at which it infers from very simple, almost inadequate, prompts.
Claude Code uses the API interface and API pricing, and writes and edits code directly on your machine, this is a level past simply interacting with a separate chat bot. It seems a little disingenuous to say it's "hostile" to users, when the reality is yeah, you do pay a bit more for more reliable usage tier, for a task that requires it. It also shows you exactly how much it's spent at any point.
Genuinely interested: how's so?
A nice addition would be having something like /cost but to check where you are in regards to limits.
If your staff engineers are mostly doing things AI can do, then you don't need staff. Probably don't even need senior
- L3 SWE II - $193,712 USD (before overheads)
- L4 SWE III - $297,124 USD (before overheads)
- L5 Senior SWE - $377,797 USD (before overheads)
These tools and foundational models get better every day, and right now, they enable Staff+ engineers and businesses to have less need for juniors. I suspect there will be [short-to-medium-term] compression. See extended thoughts at https://ghuntley.com/screwed
Delivery via LLMs is predictable, fast, and any concerns about outcome [quality] can be programmed away to reject bad outcomes. This form of programming the LLMs has a one-time cost...
I get a lot of value out of LLMs but when I see people make claims like this I know they aren’t “in the trenches” of software development, or care so little about quality that I can’t relate to their experience.
Usually they’re investors in some bullshit agentic coding tool though.
Using the proper techniques, Sonet 3.7 can generate code in the custom lexical/stdlib. So, in my eyes, the path to Stage 3 is unlocked, but it will chew lots and lots of tokens.
1. My company cannot justify this cost at all.
2. My company can justify this cost but I don't find it useful.
3. My company can justify this cost, and I find it useful.
4. I find it useful, and I can justify the cost for personal use.
5. I find it useful, and I cannot justify the cost for personal use.
That aside -- 200/day/dev for a "nice to have service that sometimes makes my work slightly faster" is much in the majority of the world.
A 2.5 hour session with Claude Code costs me somewhere between $15 and $20. Taking $20/2.5 hours as the estimate, $100 would buy me 12.5 hours of programming.
On average, one line of, say, JavaScript represents around 7 tokens, which means there are around 140k lines of JS per million tokens.
On Openrouter, Sonnet 3.7 costs are currently:
- $3 / one million input tokens => $100 = 33.3 million input tokens = 420k lines of JS code
- $15 / one million output tokens => $100 = 3.6 million output tokens = 4.6 million lines of JS code
For one developer? In one day? It seems that one can only reach such amounts if the whole codebase is sent again as context with each and every interaction (maybe even with every keystroke for type completion?) -- and that seems incredibly wasteful?
All of the gate keeping around llm code tools are amusing. But whatever, I’m shipping 10x and making money doing it.
The point is to get a pipeline working, cost can be optimized down after.
But every Claude Code user is a 1000 requests per day user, so the economics don't work anymore.
I am not saying Claude should stop making money, I'm just advocating for giving users the value of getting some Code coverage when you migrate from the basic plan to the pro or max.
Does that make sense?
Anthropic make it seem like Claude Code is a product categorized like Claude Desktop (usage of which gets billed against your Claude.ai plan). This is how it signs off all its commits:
Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.ai/code)
Once I had purchased the $200/month plan, I did some reading and quickly realized that I had been too quick to jump to conclusions. It still left me feeling like they had pulled a fast on one me.
I think it's just oversight on their part. They have nothing to gain by making people believe they would get Claude Code access through their regular plans, only bad word of mouth.
This is definitely not malicious on their part. Just bears pointing out.
It’s less autonomous, since it’s based on the Claude chat interface, and you need to write “continue” every so often, but it’s nice to save the $$
Some base usage included in the plan might be a good balance
It would definitely get me to use it more.
If everyone used the plan to the limit, the plan would cost the same as the API with usage equal to the limit.
I find LLM-based tools helpful, and use them quite regularly but not 20 bucks+, let alone 100+ per month that claude code would require to be used effectively.
I find this argument very bizarre. $100 is pay for 1-2 hours of developer time. Doesn't it save at least that much time in a whole month?
After 2 years of GPT4 release, we can safely say that LLMs don't make finding PMF that much easier nor improve general quality/UX of products, as we still see a general enshittification trend.
If this spending was really game-changing, ChatGPT frontend/apps wouldn't be so bad after so long.
If they just helped you to ship something valueless, you paid $75 for entertainment, like betting.
> Again, absolutely bizarre that people can’t see the value here, even as these tools are still working through their kinks.
Far from that, I use AI daily, regularly. I just won't pay more than 20 dollars/month for it and definitely not going to pay for usage because using it for a long time, I know that I will waste money in the long run. Generating code is not my bottleneck in my current project a long time ago, which AI indeed helped me get there. But not spending 100$ per session.
On a serious note, there is no clear evidence that any of the LLM-based code assistants will contribute to saving developer time. Depends on the phase of the project you are in and on a multitude of factors.
In most cases, it is because I am asking the model to do too much at once. Which is fine, I am learning the right level of abstraction/instruction where the model is effective consistently.
But when I read these best practices, I can't help but think of the cost. The multiple CLAUDE.md files, the files of context, the urls to documentation, the planning steps, the tests. And then the iteration on the code until it passes the test, then fixing up linter errors, then running an adversarial model as a code review, then generating the PR.
It makes me want to find a way to work at Anthropic so I can learn to do all of that without spending $100 per PR. Each of the steps in that last paragraph is an expensive API call for us ISV and each requires experimentation to get the right level of abstraction/instruction.
I want to advocate to Anthropic for a scholarship program for devs (I'd volunteer, lol) where they give credits to Claude in exchange for public usage. This would be structured similar to creator programs for image/audio/video gen-ai companies (e.g. runway, kling, midjourney) where they bring on heavy users that also post to social media (e.g. X, TikTok, Twitch) and they get heavily discounted (or even free) usage in exchange for promoting the product.
There are ways to use LLMs cheaply, but it will always be expensive to get the most out of them. In fact, the top end will only get more and more costly as the lengths of tasks AIs can successfully complete grows.
It would be no different than me saying "it sucks university is so expensive, I wish I could afford to go to an expensive college but I don't have a scholarship" and someone then answers: why should it be cheap.
So, allow me the space to express my feelings and propose alternatives, of which scholarships are one example and creative programs are another. Another one I didn't mention would be the same route as universities force now: I could take out a loan. And I could consider it an investment loan with the idea it will pay back either in employment prospects or through the development of an application that earns me money. Other alternatives would be finding employment at a company willing to invest that $100/day through me, the limit of that alternative being working at an actual foundational model company for presumably unlimited usage.
And of course, I could focus my personal education on squeezing the most value for the least cost. But I believe the balance point between slightly useful and completely transformative usages levels is probably at a higher cost level than I can reasonably afford as an independent.
You can protect your files in a non-AI way: by simply not giving write access to Aider.
Also, apparently Aider is a bit more economic with tokens than other tools.
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If you get a hang of controlling costs, it's much cheaper. If you're exhausting the context window, I would not be surprised if you're seeing high cost.
Be aware of the "cache".
Tell it to read specific files (and only those!), if you don't, it'll read unnecessary files, or repeatedly read sections of files or even search through files.
Avoid letting it search - even halt it. Find / rg can have a thousands of tokens of output depending on the search.
Never edit files manually during a session (that'll bust cache). THIS INCLUDES LINT.
The cache also goes away after 5-15 minutes or so (not sure) - so avoid leaving sessions open and coming back later.
Never use /compact (that'll bust cache, if you need to, you're going back and forth too much or using too many files at once).
Don't let files get too big (it's good hygiene too) to keep the context window sizes smaller.
Have a clear goal in mind and keep sessions to as few messages as possible.
Write / generate markdown files with needed documentation using claude.ai, and save those as files in the repo and tell it to read that file as part of a question. I'm at about ~$0.5-0.75 for most "tasks" I give it. I'm not a super heavy user, but it definitely helps me (it's like having a super focused smart intern that makes dumb mistakes).
If i need to feed it a ton of docs etc. for some task, it'll be more in the few $, rather than < $1. But I really only do this to try some prototype with a library claude doesn't know about (or is outdated). For hobby stuff, it adds up - totally.
For a company, massively worth it. Insanely cheap productivity boost (if developers are responsible / don't get lazy / don't misuse it).
I definitely get value out of it- more than any other tool like it that I've tried.
I use Aider. It's awesome. You explicitly specify the files. You don't have to do work to limit context.
I do find Claude Code to be really good at exploration though - like checking out a repository I'm unfamiliar with and then asking questions about it.
Unfortunately I can only give an anecdotal answer here, but I get better results from Cursor than the alternatives. The semantic index is the main difference, so I assume that's what's giving it the edge.
The only problem is that this loss is permanent! As far as I can tell, there's no way to go back to the old conversation after a `/clear`.
I had one session last week where Claude Code seemed to have become amazingly capable and was implementing entire new features and fixing bugs in one-shot, and then I ran `/clear` (by accident no less) and it suddenly became very dumb.
And there's CLAUDE.md. it's like cursorrules. You can also have it modify it's own CLAUDE.md.
Then, you can edit the file at your leisure if you want to.
And when you want to load that context back in, ask it to read the file.
Works better than `/compact`, and is a lot cheaper.
Edit: It so happens I had a Claude Code session open in my Terminal, so I asked it:
Save your current context to a file.
joshstrange•7h ago
> Have multiple checkouts of your repo
I don’t know why this never occurred to me probably because it feels wrong to have multiple checkouts, but it makes sense so that you can keep each AI instance running at full speed. While LLM‘s are fast, this is one of the annoying parts of just waiting for an instance of Aider or Claude Code to finish something.
Also, I had never heard of git worktrees, that’s pretty interesting as well and seems like a good way to accomplish effectively having multiple checkouts.
m0rde•6h ago
How do you keep tabs on multiple agents doing multiple things in a codebase? Is the end deliverable there a bunch of MRs to review later? Or is it a more YOLO approach of trusting the agents to write the code and deploy with no human in the loop?
rfoo•4h ago