Posted by GavinAnderegg 4 days ago
Only for people to start screwing around with his database and API keys because the generated code just stuck the keys into the Javascript and he didn't even have enough of a technical background to know that was something to watch out for.
IIRC he resorted to complaining about bullying and just shut it all down.
I thought we are currently in it now ?
Sure there are many more people building slop with AI now, but I meant the peak of "vibe coding" being parroted around everywhere.
I feel like reality is starting to sink in a little by now as the proponents of vibe coding see that all the companies telling them that programming as a career is going to be over in just a handful of years, aren't actually cutting back on hiring. Either that or my social media has decided to hide the vibe coding discourse from me.
As an old man, this is hilarious.
One trick is to write goto statements that don't go anywhere.
So I ran a bourn shell in my emacs, which was the style at the time.
Now just to build the source code cost an hour, and in those days, timesheets had hours on them.
Take my five hours for $20, we'd say.
They didn't have blue checkmarks, so instead of tweeting, we'd just finger each other.
The important thing was that I ran a bourn shell in my emacs, which was the style at the time...
In those days, we used to call it jiggle coding.
First, use Claude's plan mode, which generates a step-by-step plan that you have to approve. One tip I've seen mentioned in videos by developers: plan mode is where you want to increase to "ultrathink" or use Opus.
Once the plan is developed, you can use Sonnet to execute the plan. If you do proper planning, you won't need to worry about Claude skipping things.
It's a bit annoying having to swap back and forth tbh.
I also find planning to be a bit vague, where as i feel like sonnet benefits from more explicit instructions. Perhaps i should push it to reduce the scope of the plan until it's detailed enough to be sane, will give it a try
> Tries to fix some tests for a while > Fails and just .skip the test
Seems like he's still going on about being able to replicate billion dollar companies' work quickly with AI, but at least he seems a little more aware that technical understanding is still important.
Unless models get better people are not going to pay more.
If people stop bothering to ask and answer questions online, where will the information come from?
Logically speaking, if there's going to be a continuous need for shared Q&A (which I presume), there will be mechanisms for that. So I don't really disagree with you. It's just that having the model just isn't enough, a lot of the time. And even if this sorts itself out eventually, we might be in for some memorable times in-between two good states.
The biggest 'rug pull' here is that the coding agent company raises there price and kills you're budget for "development."
I think a lot of MBA types would benefit from taking a long look at how they "blew up" IT and switched to IaaS / Cloud and then suddenly found their business model turned upside down when the providers decided to up their 'cut'. It's a double whammy, the subsidized IT costs to gain traction, the loss of IT jobs because of the transition, leading to to fewer and fewer IT employees, then when the switch comes there is a huge cost wall if you try to revert to the 'previous way' of doing it, even if your costs of doing it that way would today would be cheaper than the what the service provider is now charging you.
Spending a bunch of money on GPUs and running them yourself, as well as using tools that are compatible with Ollama/OpenAI type APIs feels like a safe bet.
Though having seen the GPU prices to get enough memory to run anything decent, I feel like the squeeze is already happening there at a hardware level and options like Intel Arc Pro B60 can't come soon enough!
This feels like a bit of a leap?
That's like saying "I just bought the JetBrains IDE Ultimate pack and some other really cool tools, so we no longer need a founding engineer!" All of that AI stuff can just be a force multiplier and most attempts at outright replacing people with them are a bit shortsighted. Closer to a temporary and somewhat inconsistent freelance worker, if anything.
That said, not wanting to pay for AI tools if they indeed help in your circumstances would also be like saying "What do you need JetBrains IDEs for, Visual Studio Code is good enough!" (and sometimes it is, so even that analogy is context dependent)
I'm reminded of rule 9 of the Joel Test: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
I've been using a tool I developed (https://github.com/stravu/crystal) to run several sessions in parallel. Sometimes I will run the same prompt multiple times and pick the winner, or sometimes I'll be working on multiple features at once, reviewing and testing one while waiting on the others.
Basically, with the right tooling you can burn tokens incredibly fast while still receiving a ton of value from them.
AI is a large motivating factor in data center build outs, and data centers are projected to form an increasing portion of new energy usage. An individual query may not use much but the macro effect is quite serious, especially considering the climate crisis we are already failing to manage. It’s a bit like throwing plastic out your window on the highway and ignoring the garbage patch floating in the middle of the Pacific.
But based on my costs, yours sounds much much higher :)
I use and abuse mine, running multiple agents, and I know that I'd spend the entire month of fees in a few days otherwise.
So it seems like a ploy to improve their product and capture the market, like usual with startups that hope for a winner-takes-all.
And then, like uber or airbnb, the bait and switch will raise the prices eventually.
I'm wondering when the hammer will fall.
But meanwhile, let's enjoy the free buffet.
Love the idea by the way! We do need new IDE features which are centered around switching between Git worktrees and managing multiple active agents per worktree.
Edit: oh, do you invoke normal CC within your tool to avoid this issue and then post-process?
Surprised that this works, but useful if true.
`pathToClaudeCodeExecutable`!
I'm on $100 and i'm shocked how much usage i get out of Sonnet, while Opus feels like no usage at all. I barely even bother with Opus since most things i want to do just runout super quick.
Usage for Opus is my only "complaint", but i've used it so little i don't even know if it's that much better than Sonnet. As it is, even with more generous Opus limits i'd probably want a more advanced Claude Code behavior - where it uses Opus to plan and orchestrate, and Sonnet would do the grunt work for cheaper tokens. But i'm not aware of that as a feature atm.
Regardless, i'm quite pleased with Claude Code on $100 Max. If it was a bit smarter i might even upgrade to $200, but atm it's too dumb to give it more autonomy and that's what i'd need for $200. Opus might be good enough there, but $100 Opus limits are so low i've not even gotten enough experience with it to know if it's good enough for $200
In their dreams.
Does "one" Claude Opus instance count as the full model being loaded onto however many GPUs it takes ?
For anything moderately complex, use Claude's plan mode; you get to approve the plan before turning it loose. The planning phase is where you want to use a more sophisticated model or use extended thinking mode.
Once you have a great plan, you can use a less sophisticated model to execute it.
Even if you're a great programmer, you may suck at prompting. There's an art and a science to prompting; perhaps learn about it? [1]
Don't forget; in addition to telling Claude or any other model what to do, you can also tell them what not to do in the CLAUDE.md or equivalent file.
[1]: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-...
I worry, with an article like this floating around, and with this as the competition, and with the economics of all this stuff generally... major price increases are on the horizon.
Businesses (some) can afford this, after all it's still just a portion of the costs of a SWE salary (tho $1000/m is getting up there). But open source developers cannot.
I worry about this trend, and when the other shoe will drop on Anthropic's products, at least.
I'm very bullish on the future of smaller, locally-run models, myself.
That said, I suspect a lot of the value in Claude Code is hand-rolled fined-tuned heuristics built into the tool itself, not coming from the LLM. It does a lot of management of TODO lists, backtracking through failed paths, etc which look more like old-school symbolic AI than something the LLM is doing on its own.
Replicating that will also be required.
The underlying inference is not super expensive. All the tricks they're pulling to make it smarter certainly multiply the price, but the price being charged almost certainly covers the cost. Basic inference on tuned base models is extremely cheap. But certainly it looks like Anthropic > OpenAI > Google in terms of inference cost structure.
Prices will only come up if there's a profit opportunity; if one of the vendors has a clear edge and gains substantial pricing power. I don't think that's clear at this point. This article is already equivocating between o3 and Opus.
But $200/month is unbearable for open source / free software developers.
Last I checked no one is still there who was there originally, except the vendor. And the vendor was charging around $90k/mo for integration services and custom development in 2017 when my team was let go. My team was around $10k/mo including rent for our cubicles.
That was another weird practice I've never seen elsewhere, to pay rent, we had to charge the other departments for our services. They turned IT and infrastructure into a business, and expected it to turn a profit, which pissed off all the departments who had to start paying for their projects, so they started outsourcing all development work to vendors, killing our income stream, which required multiple rounds of layoffs until only management was left.
He would have considered that company to be running a perfectly controlled cost experiment. Though it was so perfectly controlled they forgot that humans actually did the work. With cost accounting projects, you pay morale and staffing charges well after the project itself was costed.
I hadn’t thought of that since the late 90s. Good comment but how the heck did I get that old??? :)
Second largest private university of my state, 30000 students. They cut 5 software development positions that were halfway on their rewrite, then purchased a blank slate ERP for 1 million (50% discount, imagine that!), and had spent a few years and around 2-3 million on customising said ERP with consultants by the time I left them.
They even had one of their vendors extend a job offer to me for slightly more than I was making, but I couldn't in good conscience take that offer. Fool me once, and all that.
But yeah, doesn't explain non-payment for AI tools.
Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay for it.
That seems like the worst of all worlds from their perspective.
By not paying for it they introduce a massive security concern.
My read was the article takes it as a given that $200/m is worth it.
The question in the article seems more: is an extra $800/m to move from Claude Code to an agent using o3 worth it?
Any employer with 2 brain cells will figure out that you are more productive as a developer by using AI tools, they will mandate all developers use it. Then that's the new bar and everyone's salary stays the same.
Here in EU, if not stated in your work agreement, it's pretty common people work full time job and also as a self-employed contractor for other companies.
So when I'm finished with my work, HO of course, I just work on my "contractor" projects.
Honestly, I wouldn't sign a full time contract banning me from other work.
And if you have enough customers, you just drop full time job. And just pay social security and health insurance, which you must pay by law anyway.
And specially in my country, it's even more ridiculous that as self-employed you pay lower taxes than full time employees, which truth to be told are ridiculously high. Nearly 40% of your salary.
Freelancing as a side hustle may be forbidden if your employer refuses
And it makes sense to pay more taxes since you also have more social benefits (paid leaves, retirement money and unemployment money), nothing is free
First time I'm hearing this. Where in the EU are you? I don't know anybody doing this, but it could depend on the country (I'm in the nordics).
There are always loopholes and ways to work around which our tax code will happily discover and kill year on year.
So you get to pick how you want to pay tax but the amount usually isn’t much different when you get to the highest brackets
Absolutely not a common thing in my corner of the EU.
By the way, this also applies to the "Free market" ideal...
There being problems with absolute libertarian free markets doesn't mean all policies that evoke the free market ideal must be disregarded, nor does the problems with communism mean that all communist actions must be ignored.
We can see a problem with an ideal, but still wish to replicate the good parts.
For example, mislabelling socialism as communism. The police department, fire department, and roads are all socialist programs. Only a moron would call this communism and yet for some reason universal healthcare...
There's also this nonsense when someone says "That's the free market at work", and I'm like, if we really lived in a free market then you'd be drinking DuPont's poison right now.
Using the words "Communism" and "Free market" just show a (often intentional) misunderstanding of the nuance of how things actually work in our society.
The communism label must be the most cited straw man in all of history at this point.
There is nothing ideal about communism. I'd rather own my production tools and be as productive as I want to be. I'd rather build wealth over trading opportunities, I'd rather hire people and reinvest earnings. That is ideal.
If you don't address that, you'll end up with a "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Who in the actual real world with any authority at all is telling you you can't be as productive as you want to be, build wealth, hire people, and reinvest your earnings?
Just because it hasn't been "successfully implemented" according to your personal opinion doesn't mean it cannot be scrutinized.
That's like if there is a sign that says "do not cross 3km/h" when someone says "that's too slow" you go "a-hah! straw man! How do you know you can't go 300kmph with that in place? nobody implemented that sign before!". Socrates would be proud.
OK but that's irrelevant to my post. There's lots of books and manifestos that say lots of stupid things. You're arguing as if this manifesto is a real threat, and I'm saying "show me this threat". This isn't a real person with any impact on your day to day, like say a politician. It's a fantasy opposition.
> Just because it hasn't been "successfully implemented" according to your personal opinion doesn't mean it cannot be scrutinized.
OK sure, where? Where is this real world communism that meets the manifesto you are railing against?
> That's like if there is a sign that says "do not cross 3km/h" when someone says "that's too slow" you go "a-hah! straw man! How do you know you can't go 300kmph with that in place? nobody implemented that sign before!". Socrates would be proud.
OK that's an awkward analogy. It's more like someone wrote a manifesto that said cars shouldn't go over 3km/h and you want to use this "slow manifesto" to argue that any laws that would slow you down are some sort of slippery slope in to "slowmunism".
No one with any authority in the real world is trying to implement the communist manifesto on to you. Not even the terrifying Bernie Sanders wants anything to do with communism. For the love of god, there is no communist threat. You can relax.
But I get it. You are basically arguing that nothing and nobody exists or ever existed or do or does anything to anything or anyone or had any ideas and arguing ideas or what people do or could do or would do is pointless.
Well, have fun with that. Sorry all this thread space was a waste.
And so now you are just putting words in my mouth I assume because you have no argument. I can’t even parse this.
You started an argument with a stance I never took by railing against a bogeyman I never advanced. And now you’re doing it again.
If communism was anything more than an impractical ideal then you should have been able to point out where it actually exists. But of course it doesn’t exist. It’s just a fantasy. Maybe you want it to exist so you can point a finger and say “see what happens when you don’t do what I want?”?
your salary stays x1
and your work hours stay x1
Productivity multiplies x2 You keep your job x0.5 Your salary x0.8 (because the guy we just fired will gladly do your job for less) Your work hours x1.4 (because now we expect you to do the work of 2 people, but didn’t account for all the overhead that comes with it)
tbh, if im gonna bust my ass I'd rather own the thing.
99% of startups die off worthless and your equity never realises.
Capitalism encourages you to put your butt in your own seat and reap the rewards of your efforts.
Of course it also provides you the decision making to keep your butt in someone else’s seat if the risk vs. reward of going your own isn’t worth it.
And then it allows your employer to put another butt in your seat if you don’t adopt efficiency patterns.
So: capitalism is compatible with communism as an option, but it’s generally a suboptimal option for one or both parties.
but the state keeps meddling and making oligarchs and friends have unfair advantages.
It's hard to compete when the system is rigged from the start.
In true capitalist market you end up with oligarchy.
This might also just be a feature of the change in problem size - perhaps the larger problems that necessitate o3 are also too open-ended and would require much more planning up front. But at that point it's actually more natural to just iterate with sonnet and stay in the driver's seat a bit. Plus sonnet runs 5x faster.
I'm fortunate in that my own use of the AI tools I'm personally paying for is squished into my off-time on nights and weekends, so I get buy with a $20/month Claude subscription :).
Sources
Is it? Many hobbies cost much more money. A nice bike (motorbike or road bike, doesn't matter), a sailing boat, golf club/trips, a skiing season pass ... $100/month is significantly less than what you'd burn with those other things. Sure you can program in your free time without such a subscription, and if you enjoy that then by all means, but if it takes away the grunt work and you are having more fun, I don't see the issue.
Gym memberships are in that order of magnitude too, even though you could use some outdoor gym in a city park for free. Maybe those indoor perks of heating, lights, roof and maintained equipment are worth sth? Similar with coding agents for personal projects...
That's the only reason I subscribed to GitHub Copilot. Currently using it for Aider.
Can't have your cake and eat it too.
Behold the holy trifecta of: Number of Projects - Code Quality - Coding Agent Cost