Perhaps not coincidentally, that's what efficient (or "lazy", you choose) developers do as well.
Since the last couple of updates I don't seem to have those problems as prominently any more. Plus it seems to have greatly improved its context handling as well -- I've encountered far fewer occurrences where I've had to compact manually.
- Burning tokens with constant incorrect command-line calls to read lines (which it eventually gets right but often needs to self-correct 3+ times for every single read)
- Writing the string "EOF" to the end of the file it's appending to with cat
- Writing "\!=" instead of "!="
- Charged me $7 to write basically like 23 lines (admittedly my fault since I forgot I kept "/model opus" on)
Minus the bizarre invalid characters I have to erase, the code in the final output was always correct, but definitely not impressive since I've never seen Cursor do things like that.
Otherwise, the agent behavior basically seems the same as Cursor's agent mode, to me.
I know the $7 for a single function thing would be resolved if I buy the $100/month flat fee plan, but I'm really not sure if I want to.
The $100/mo max plan lets you use a Claude Code with a fixed bill. There’s some usage limits though.
Hello,
Your Pro plan just got way more powerful with three major upgrades previously available only to Max, Team, and Enterprise users.
Claude Code is now included
Claude Code is a command line tool that gives you direct access to Claude in your >terminal, letting you delegate complex coding tasks while maintaining full control. You can now use Claude Code at no extra cost with your Pro subscription.See this sort of asinine behavior with cursor too sometimes although it's less grating when you're not being directly billed by the failed command line attempt. Also it's in a text editor it fully controls why is it messing around in the command line to read parts of files or put edits in, seems to be a weird failure state it gets into a few times a project for me.
What are you doing that costs that much?
I refactored a whole code base in cursor for < $100 (> 200k lines of code).
I don't use completions though. Is that where the costs add up?
You can configure it so that you use your API keys, which means you just pay cost but o3 is expensive
How do you own Cursor for 3 years, when even ChatGPT is not that old? The earliest Cursor submission to HN was on October 15, 2023 --- not even 2 years old [0].
I definitely wouldn't be surprised if a small startup was engaging in their own posts, something I do find shameful. But that's quite a far shot from a wildly successful startup with 100M ARR engaging in some kind of scheme where accounts with active history are making automated comments. Just seems not only unnecessary but also unlikely given the risk and effort involved.
I think it's much more likely that out of the 300k users or whatever they have, a lot of them are on hackernews and have good things to say about the product and a 1.0 is a significant event.
And no I'm not a bot but feel as you wish.
I have been using the Claude.ai interface in the past and have switched to Aider with Anthropic API. I really liked Claude.ai but using Aider is a much better dev experience. Is Claude Code even better?
ChatGPT Codex is on another level for agentic workflow though. It's been released to (some?) "plus" ($20/month) subscribers. I could do the same thing manually by making a new terminal, making a new git worktree, and firing up another copy of aider, but the way codex does it is so smooth.
They both can just use api credits so I’d suggest spending a few dollars trying both to see which you like.
I'm not saying it is better if they run commands without my approval. This whole thing is just doesn't seem as exciting as other people make it out to be. Maybe I am missing something.
It can literally be a single command to ssh into that machine and check if the systemd service is running. If it is in your history, you'd use ctrl+r to lookback anyway. It sounds so much worse asking some AI agent to look up the status of that service we deployed earlier. And then approve its commands on top of that.
Philosophically speaking (not practically) it's like living the industrial revolution again. It's lit! But it's also terrifying and saddening.
Personally it makes me want to savor each day as the world would never be the same again.
I mean most software engineering jobs are not especially exciting. I have done web dev for smaller companies that never had more than a few hundred concurrent users. It is boring CRUD apps all day every day.
Still at least you could have a bit of fun with the technical challenges. Now with AI it becomes completely mind numbing.
But a beginner in system administration can also do it fast.
Running commands one by one and getting permission may sound tedious. But for me, it maps closely to what I do as a developer: check out a repository, read its documentation, look at the code, create a branch, make a set of changes, write a test, test, iterate, check in.
Each of those steps is done with LLM superpowers: the right git commands, rapid review of codebase and documentation, language specific code changes, good test methodology, etc.
And if any of those steps go off the rails, you can provide guidance or revert (if you are careful).
It isn't perfect by any means. CC needs guidance. But it is, for me, so much better than auto-complete style systems that try to guess what I am going to code. Frankly, that really annoys me, especially once you've seen a different model of interaction.
And as of the latest release, has VSCode/Cursor/Windsurf integration.
Claude code now automatically integrates into my ide for diff preview. It's not sugar, but it's very low friction, even from the cli.
I still prefer Cursor for some things - namely UI updates or quick fixes and explanations. For everything else Claude Code is superior.
At least Cursor is affordable to any developer. Because most of the time, even if it’s totally normal, companies act like they’re doing you a favor when they pay for your IDE so most people aren’t going to ask an AI subscription anytime soon.
I mean, it will probably come but not today.
It's companies asking programmers to use AI, not vice versa.
> Except that in most of the world outside SV
You just need a 4% increase of productivity to make those $200 worth it.
lolololol
> You just need a 4% increase of productivity to make those $200 worth it.
who “needs” that and who pays for it?
the employer for both?
high school economics class is not how the world works, regrettably.
They'd rather have an employee spend 2 weeks on a task than shell out a few bucks at it, because they don't realize the 2 weeks of salary is more expensive than the external expense.
Plus development work is quite bursty — a productivity gain for developers does not necessarily translate into more prospects in a sales pipeline.
You can generally do map-reduce, also you can have separate git worktrees and have it work on all your tickets at the same time.
am i missing that much ?
For more than a year, Anthropic has engaged in an extensive guerrilla marketing effort on Reddit and similar developer-oriented platforms, aiming to persuade users that Claude significantly outperforms competitors in programming tasks, even though nearly all benchmarks indicate otherwise.
The GP account above with only one comment that is singing the praises of a particular product is obviously fake. They even let the account age a bit so that wouldn't show up as a green account.
Keep in mind much of the guide is about how to move from 30s chats to doing concurrent 20min+ runs
----
Spending
Claude Code $$$ - Max Plan FTW
TL;DR: Start with Claude Max Pro at $100/mo.
I was about $70/day starting day 2 via the pay-as-you-go plan. I bought in $25 increments to help pace. The Max Plan ($100/mo) became attractive around day 2-3, and on week 2 I shifted to $200/mo.
Annoyingly, you have to make the plan decision during your first login to Claude Code, which is confusing as I wanted to trial on pay-as-you-go. (That was a mistake: do Max Pro.) The upgrade flow is pretty broken from this perspective.
The Max Plan at the $100/mo level has a cooldown of 22 question / 5 hour: That does go by fast when your questions are small and get interrupted, or you get good at multitasking. By the time you are serious, the $200/mo is fine.
Other vibe IDEs & LLM providers $$$
I did anywhere from about 50K to 200K tokens a day on Claude 3.7 Sonnet during week 1 on pay-as-you-go, with about a ratio of 300:1 of tokens in:out. Max Plan does not report usage, but for periods I am using it, I expect my token counts to now be higher as I have gotten much better at doing long runs.
The equivalent in OpenAI of using gp4-4o and o3 would be $5-40/day on pay-as-you-go, which seems cheaper for using frontier models… until Max Pro gets factored in.
Capping costs
Not worrying about overages is typically liberating. Max Pro helps a lot here. One of my next experiments is seeing about self-hosting of reasoning models for other AI IDEs. Max Pro goes far, but to do automation and autonomy, and bigger jobs, you need more power.
That’s exactly what a paid comment would say
user: christophilus
created: October 16, 2014
karma: 11683
I do wonder how much astroturfing these companies do though...
Accusations of shilling are explicitly not allowed, but they make the brain of the average hacker news feel large so nobody downvoting that one.
What's the best about it, it's open source, costs nothing, and is much more flexible than any other tools. You can use any model you want, either combine different models from different vendors for different tasks.
Currently, I use it with deepseek-r1-0528 for /architect and deepseek-v3-0325 for /code mode. It's better than Claude Code, and costs only a fragment of it.
Once something, like in this case AI, becomes a commodity, open source beats every competition.
Also, Copilot's paid version is free for developers of popular FOSS projects.
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/about-github-copilot/plan... / https://archive.vn/HxHzc