Posted by kmelve 9/2/2025
“The future of agentic coding with Claude Code”
Is this another case of someone using API keys and not knowing about the claude MAX plans? It's $100 or $200 a month, if you're not pure yolo brute-force vibe coding $100 plan works.
For context: that's 1-2% of a senior engineer's fully loaded cost. The ROI is clear if it delivers even 10% productivity gain (we're seeing 2-3x on specific tasks).
You're right that many devs can start with MAX plans. The higher tier becomes necessary when running multiple parallel contexts and doing systematic exploration (the "3-attempt pattern" burns tokens fast).
I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think it was value for money. I've always been a cost-conscious engineer who weighs cost/value, and with Claude, I am seeing the return.
What if what feels like a productivity gain is actually a productivity loss?
https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
(see link in the article to a study showing developers thought AI gave them a 20% gain in productivity, but measuring this showed they instead had a 20% loss)
I refine that spec and then give that to planning mode and then go from there.
I’ve found if I jump straight into planning mode I miss some critical aspects of what ever it is I am building.
Claude code can access pretty much all those third party services in the shell, using curl or gh and so on. And in at least one case using MCP can cause trouble: the linear MCP server truncates long issues, in my experience, whereas curling the API does not.
What am I missing?
I just haven't heard others express the same over-engineering problem and wonder if this is a general observation or only shows up b/c my requests are quite simple.
(I have found that prompting it for the simplest or most efficient solution seems to help - sometimes taking 20+ lines down to 2-3, often more understandable.)
P.S. I tend to work with data and a web app for processes related to a small business, while not a formally trained developer.
For me, stuff like that is the same weird uncanny valley that you used to see in AI text, and see now in AI video. It just does such inhuman things. A senior developer would NEVER think to manually mutate the cache, because it's such desperate hack. A junior dev wouldn't even realize it's an option.
I agree it's wasteful, but from a long-form view of what spending looks like (or at least should/used to look like). Those who see 1.5k/month as "saving" money typically only care about next quarter.
As the old adage goes: a thousand dollars saved this month is 100 thousand spent next year.
Also, there may be selfish reasons to do this as well: (1) "Should We Respect LLMs? A Cross-Lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performance" https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14531 (2) "Three Things to Know About Prompting LLMs" https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/three-things-to-know-abo...
1. I don't see the output of the compiler, as in, all I get is an executable blob. It could be inspected, but I don't think that I ever have in my 20+ year career. Maybe I lie and I've rocked up with a Hex editor once or twice, out of pure curiousity, but I've never got past looking for strings that I recognise.
2. When I use Claude, I am using it to do things that I can do, by hand, myself. I am reviewing the code as I go along, and I know what I want it to do because it's what I would be writing myself if I didn't have Claude (or Gemini for that matter).
So, no, I have never congratulated the compiler (or interpreter, linker, assembler, or even the CPU).
Finally, I view the AI as a pairing partner, sometimes it's better than me, sometimes it's not, and I have to be "in the game" in order to make sure I don't end up with a vibe coded mess.
edit: This is from yesterday (Claude had just fixed a bug for me - all I did was paste the block of code that the bug was in, and say "x behaviour but getting y behaviour instead)
perfect, thanks
Edit You're welcome! That was a tricky bug - using rowCount instead of colCount in the index calculation is the kind of subtle error that can be really hard to spot. It's especially sneaky because row 0 worked correctly by accident, making it seem like the logic was mostly right. Glad we got it sorted out! Your Gaps redeal should now work properly with all the 2s (and other correctly placed cards) staying in their proper positions across all rows.
In my opinion this should be the default config. Increasing the quality of the plans gives you a much better experience using Claude Code.