Oddly though, when using at home I'm using Sonnet via the standard chat interface and that, whilst it will produce substandard code in its output is still reasonably capable - even in more niche tasks. Granted though that my personal projects are far simpler than the codebase I handle at work.
i just refuse to use openai/google/anthropic subscriptions, i only use open source models with ZDR tokens.
- i like privacy in my work, and i share when i wish. somehow we accepted that our prompts and work may be read and moderated by employees. would you accept people moderating what you write in excel, google docs, apple pages?
- i want a consistent tool, not something that is quantised one day, slow one day, a different harness one day, stops randomly.
- unless i am missing something, the closed source models are too slow for me to watch what they are doing. i feel comfortable with monitoring something, usually at about 200-300tps on GLM 5. above that it might even be too fast!
Owning is expensive. Not owning is also expensive.
Energy in germany is at 35 cent/kwh and skyrocketed to 60 when we had the russian problem.
I'm planning to buy a farm and add cheap energy but this investment will still take a little bit of time. Until then, space is sparse.
there are many cloud providers of zero data retention llm APIs, and even cryptographic attestation.
they are not throttled, you can get an agreed rate limit.
If my company pays for it, i do not care.
If i have a hobby project were it is about converting an idea in my spare time in what i want, i'm happily paying 20$. I just did something like this on the weekend over a few hours. I really enjoy having small tools based on single html page with javascript and json as a data store (i ask it to also add an import/export feature so i can literaly edit it in the app and then save it and commit it).
For the main agent i'm waiting for like the one which will read my emails and will have access tos ystems? I would love a local setup but just buying some hardware today costs still a grant and a lot of energy. Its still sign cheaper to just use a subscription.
Not sure what you mean though regarding speed, they are super fast. I do not have a setup at home which can run 200-300 tps.
you can get subscriptions to use the APIs, from synthetic, or ollama, fireworks.
But if i would use some API stuff, probably openrouter, isn't that easer to switch around and also have zero konwledge savety?
i then decided to trust one company with most stuff.
Also as I said, I would use something different for my personal stuff. But i'm waiting for the right hardware etc.
Unilaterally changing the deal to give customers less for the same price should not be legal, but companies have slowly boiled the frog in such a way that now we just go "welp, it's corporations, what can you do", and forget that we actually used to have some semblance of justice in the olden days.
Contrary to the popular opinion here, there are other services beyond Claude Code. These usage limits might even prompt (har har) people to notice that Gemini is cheaper and often better.
Fixed costs, exact model pinning, outage resistant, enshittification resistant, better security, better privacy, etc...
There are just so many compelling reasons to be on-prem instead of dependent on a 3rd party hoovering up all your data and prompts and selling you overpriced tokens (which eventually they MUST be, because these companies have to make a profit at some point).
If the only counterbalance is "well the api is cheaper than buying my own hardware"...
That's a short term problem. Hardware costs are going to drop over time, and capabilities are going to continue improving. It's already pretty insane how good of a model I can run on two old RTX-3090s locally.
Is it as good as modern claude? No. Is it as good as claude was 18 months ago? Yes.
Give it a decade to see companies really push into the "diminishing returns" of scaling and new models... combined with new hardware built with these workloads in mind... and I think on-prem is the pretty clear winner.
Has that BS stopped?
Oh well.
It's possible some people offload too much to LLMs but personally, my brain is still doing a lot of work even when I'm "vibecoding".
“Can you give me an example of how to read a video file using the Win32 API like it’s 2004?” - me trying to diagnose a windows game crashing under wine
"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is why so few people do it" — attrib Henry Ford
Now we have tools that can appear to automate your thinking for you. (They don't really think, but they do appear to, so...)
There's many things to worry about but which LLM provider you choose doesn't really lock you in right now.
Note the word "any." Like cloud services there will be unique aspects of a tool, but just like cloud svc there is a shared basic value proposition allows for migration from one to another and competition among them. If Gemini or OpenAI or Ollama running locally becomes a better choice, I'll switch without a care.
Subscription sprawl is likely the more pressing issue (just remembered I should stop my GH CoPilot subscription since switching to Claude).
And no, they're not as capable as SOTA models. Not by far.
However they can help reduce your token expenditure a lot by routing them the low-hanging fruit. Summaries, translations, stuff like that.
Otherwise you should look into running e.g. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B or Qwen3.5-27B on your own computer. They're not Opus-level but from what I've heard they're capable for smaller tasks. llama.cpp works well for inference; it works well on both CPU and GPUs and even split across both if you want.
otherwise check the list of providers on openrouter and you can see the pricing, quantisation, sign up directly rather than via a router. ensure to get caching prices, do not get input/output API prices.
GLM 5 is a frontier model, Kimi 2.5 is similar with vision support, Minimax M2.7 is a very capable model focused on tool calling.
If you need server side web search, you could use the Z AI API directly, again ZDR; or Friendli AI; or just install a search mcp.
For the harness opencode is the normal one, it has subagents and parallel tool calling; or just use claude code by pointing it at the anthropic APIs of various providers like fireworks.
You've hit your limit · resets 2am (America/Los_Angeles)
I waited until the next day to ask it to do it again, and then:
You've hit your limit · resets 1pm (America/Los_Angeles)
At which point I just gave up
Just a shockingly constrained service tier right now.
One reddit user reverse engineered the binary and found that it was a cache invalidation issue.
They are doing some hidden string replacement if the claude code conversation talks about billing or tokens. Looks like that invalidates the cache at that point.
If that string appears anywhere in the conversation history, I think the starting text is replaced, your entire cache rebuilds from scratch.
So, nothing devious, just a bug.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1s7zg7h/investi...
The lack of transparency and accountability behind all of this is incredible in my perception.
What makes it worse is the lack of transparency. If there were clear, hard limits, people could plan around it. Instead it’s this moving target that makes it impossible to trust for real work.
At some point it stops feeling like a bug and starts feeling like a pricing experiment on users.
The only way out is government regulation which means we are screwed in the US (our government is too far gone to represent average citizen interests in any meaningful way) but Europeans maybe have a chance if they get it together and demand change.
My organization has the concept of "premium models" where our limits reset every month. I hit my limit pretty quickly last month because I was burning tokens doing things that would have been a simple bash loop in the past - all because I was used to interfacing with Claude at the chat layer for all my automation needs and not thinking any more about it.
There's no other way that these companies can compete against the likes of Google, and Facebook unless they sell themselves to these companies. With AWS and GCP spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year, there's no way that Anthropic or OpenAI can continue competing unless they make an absurd amount of money and throw that at resources like their own datacenters, etc and they can't do that at $20/month.
Input $5 / M tokens Output $25 / M tokens
GPT Codex 5.3:
Input $1.75 / M tokens Output $14 / M tokens
> Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'
No shit, Sherlock.
It was a big disappointment and it just burned through tokens so fast that I hit first limit after 30 minutes while it was gathering info on my project and doing websearches.
My experience was that when I wanted to use it, maybe 2-3 days per week, Pro sub was not enough. On some days I did not use it at all. The daily or weekly token limit was really restrictive.
elephanlemon•1h ago
master_crab•1h ago
bensyverson•1h ago
Also: sub agents do not get you free usage. They just protect your main context window.
piva00•1h ago
bensyverson•44m ago
master_crab•1h ago