That in my experience is never the bottleneck, at least not for professionals. Letting Claude code is the easy part of the job. Gathering the requirements, Drafting a good story for claude, guiding claude through the endless mistakes it usually commits, reviewing the output of claude, steering the ship, this is the bottleneck. Unfortunately, no AI can't steer the ship currently, not o3 pro, not gemini, not opus 4, not any of their fancy cli agent tools, no matter how clever the md instruction files and other gimmicks. And boy, i'd be the first one to cheer if AI could do this. But currently, it's useless without fulltime attention of a senior experienced human.
If you’re on a Pro account, it’s common to hit the usage limit in the middle of a long-running task. Claude Code will tell you you’re out of quota, and the reset time might be something like 3 AM.
If you’re asleep by then, you miss the chance to resume right when it resets. The script is just a workaround to automatically pick up where you left off as soon as the quota is restored.
Exactly. I've spent the weekend trying my hand at making an AI assistant SaaS (I can't believe this doesn't exist yet!), and the biggest lesson I learnt is that I need to pay attention to what Claude Code does. I need to be specific in my instructions, and I need to review the output, because it will sometimes not know how to do things and it will never say "I don't know how to do that", it'll just endlessly write more and more code to try to appease you.
I think I'm faster with Claude Code overall, but that's because it's a tradeoff between "it makes me much faster at the stuff I'm not good at" and "it slows me down on the stuff I am good at". Maybe with better prompting skills, I'll be faster overall, but I'm definitely glad I don't have to write all the boilerplate yet again.
It helps when the agent automatically uses diagnostics, logs, and tests. If it resolves two or three problems by itself, that saves you the effort of doing so.
This over reliance on llms is crazy. People are going to forget how to code. Sometimes the llm makes up shit or uses the wrong version of the API. Sometimes it's easier to look up the documentation and write some code.
All you need is a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
Years ago I interviewed at Rackspace. They did a data structures and algorithms type interview. One of the main questions they had was about designing a data structure for a distributed hash table, using C or equivalent, to be used as a cache and specifically addressing cache invalidation. After outlining the basic approach I stopped and said that I have used a system like that in several projects at my current and former jobs and I would use something like Redis, memcache, or even Postgres in one instance, and do a push to cache on write system rather than a cache server pulling values from the source of truth if it suspected it had stale data. They did not like that answer. I asked why and they said it’s because I’m not designing a data structure from scratch. I asked them if the job I am applying for involved creating cache servers from scratch and they said “of course not. We use Redis.” (It might have been memcache, I honestly don’t remember which datadore they liked). Needless to say, this wasn’t a fit for either of us. While I am perfectly capable of creating toy versions of these kinds of services, I still stand by using existing battle tested software over rolling your own.
If you worry about forgetting how to code, then code. You already don’t know how to code 99% of the system you are using to post this comment (Verilog, CPU microcode, GPU equivalents, probably MMU programming, CPU-specific assembly, and so on). You can get ahead of the competition by learning some of that tech. Or not. But technically all you need is a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
Jokes aside, while I'm almost sure that the ability to code can be lost and regained just like training a muscle what I'm more worried is the rug pull and squeeze that is bound to happen sometime in the next 5 to 10 years unless LLMs go the way of Free Software GNU style. If the latter happens then LLMs for coding will be like calculators and such more or less and personally I don't know how more harmful that would be compared to the boost in productivity.
That said if the former becomes reality (and I hope not!) then we're in for some huge existential crises when people realize they can barely materialize the labour part of their jobs after doing the thinky part and the meetings part.
This rhymes with the discussion we had when higher level languages became popularized. And many of us did forget how to write assembly! What might the world have looked like otherwise?
I think it's more like every engineer will either become like a lead or a principal or have problems. I'm a principal. I have for years had multiple teams building things that I prototyped designed or worked with them on the specs for. There's a level of touch and letting go that you have to employ to not over burden them or you getting bogged down in details that don't matter and missing those that do.
One of the skills I've developed is spinning (back) up on problems quickly while holding the overall in my head. I find with AI I'm just doing that even more often and I now have 5 direct reports (AI) added to the 6 teams of 8 I work with through managers and roadmaps.
Pretty much me with some IDEs and their code inspections and refactoring capabilities and run profile configurations (especially in your average enterprise Java codebase). Oh well.
The future is going to be great for us that have been resisting going all in. Unfortunately I feel a lot of work will be detangling the mess these llms make in larger repos.
I mean, it’s just like having an army of interns that works for (near) free. It’s a huge positive for productivity, and I don’t think we will forget how. I’m more concerned with how we make new senior/staff engineers from now on, since the old “do grunt work for a couple years, then do simple well defined work for a few years” is 100% not a career path that exists even now.
This is a problem for new generations that should be mindful of but then again how many people can whip some assembly? Certainly not the majority of developers and it is certainly not required for most programming tasks. We might end up in the same situation - most of the plumbing will be done by high-level coding with the help of AI agents.
Since downgrading from max to pro.... i have been using sonnet 4 a TON and i havent even been limited yet. The usage allowance is awesome since gemini cli released.
I love these work-arounds and generous tiers. A bit of a tangent, but with very cheap essentially unlimited code generation, are there any active projects that just run this for days straight with an ambitious goal like "Develop an operating system" with instructions to just make all the necessary decisions to continue work?
I would love to see what a system like Claude Code could cook up running continuously for weeks. But I imagine it would get stuck in some infinite recursive loop.
Yes I tried pushing it as far as possible over the course of a couple days to invent, build and prioritize the direction of a new programming language (trying to give it as much freedom as possible and make its own decicions while steering it only to not get stuck). After around $50 in tokens it kinda got lost in the complexity it had created and just kept adding more and more useless trivialities while overlooking fundamental unsolved problems.
E.g. it wanted to build a data query language with temporal operations but completely forgot to keep historical data.
It currently lacks the ability to focus on the overall goal and prioritize sub-tasks accordingly and instead spirals into random side quests real quick.
I think you might be aiming too low. Tasked with writing a "perfect and most useful program" this would surely yield something more than merely writing 42 to stdout.
Current llms get lost fairly quickly in larger projects. They still benefit from reduced scope when promoting. Context is the biggest bottleneck right now by far. You can only summarize so much before the information is too vague to make meaningful changes.
Feels like we are incredibly early into pricing LLM usage. I suspect we are going to look back in the days these scripts were useful with some rose tinted glasses.
I assume they have very peaky demand, especially when Europe + N American office hours overlap (though I'm assuming b2b demand is higher than b2c). I'm also assuming Asian demand is significantly less than "the west", which I guess would be true given the reluctance to serve Chinese users (and Chinese users using locally hosted models?).
I know OpenAI and Anthropic have 'batch' pricing but that's slightly different as it's asynchronous and not well suited for a lot of code tasks. Think a more dynamic model for users would make a lot more sense - for example, a cheaper tier giving "Max" usage but you can only use it 8pm-6am Eastern time, otherwise you are on Pro limits.
Why is the API usage-based billing so much more expensive than the $20/month tier? Like you can literally burn through $20 of usage in a day with the same amount of usage that you get included with the $20/month plan
How much people use these APIs? It seems Clause API costs $3 or $15 per 1M tokens (I suppose for different models, it seems difficult to find first-party pricing information), so people who would use these daily would then use a lot more than that?
Claude Code with an API token, even when told: "Iterate until github is green without stopping" will sometimes just stop and wait to be told to continue.
For a POC, I've wrapped it with another LLM that makes some judgements and sends the appropriate (Keep going, do xyz) messages. Worked well enough for basic tasks
Seems convenient. I have a couple of different Claude accounts, so I switched between them when one gets exhausted. Sometimes they both get exhausted. If other people have a couple of accounts then that would be a nice feature to add to this: switching between accounts and then resuming when either of them becomes available again.
oc1|7 months ago
suchuanyi|7 months ago
If you’re asleep by then, you miss the chance to resume right when it resets. The script is just a workaround to automatically pick up where you left off as soon as the quota is restored.
stavros|7 months ago
I think I'm faster with Claude Code overall, but that's because it's a tradeoff between "it makes me much faster at the stuff I'm not good at" and "it slows me down on the stuff I am good at". Maybe with better prompting skills, I'll be faster overall, but I'm definitely glad I don't have to write all the boilerplate yet again.
amelius|7 months ago
Yeah, well it would be the next major step towards human irrelevance.
Or at least, for developers.
danjl|7 months ago
whazor|7 months ago
karaterobot|7 months ago
magic_man|7 months ago
IgorPartola|7 months ago
Years ago I interviewed at Rackspace. They did a data structures and algorithms type interview. One of the main questions they had was about designing a data structure for a distributed hash table, using C or equivalent, to be used as a cache and specifically addressing cache invalidation. After outlining the basic approach I stopped and said that I have used a system like that in several projects at my current and former jobs and I would use something like Redis, memcache, or even Postgres in one instance, and do a push to cache on write system rather than a cache server pulling values from the source of truth if it suspected it had stale data. They did not like that answer. I asked why and they said it’s because I’m not designing a data structure from scratch. I asked them if the job I am applying for involved creating cache servers from scratch and they said “of course not. We use Redis.” (It might have been memcache, I honestly don’t remember which datadore they liked). Needless to say, this wasn’t a fit for either of us. While I am perfectly capable of creating toy versions of these kinds of services, I still stand by using existing battle tested software over rolling your own.
If you worry about forgetting how to code, then code. You already don’t know how to code 99% of the system you are using to post this comment (Verilog, CPU microcode, GPU equivalents, probably MMU programming, CPU-specific assembly, and so on). You can get ahead of the competition by learning some of that tech. Or not. But technically all you need is a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
aquariusDue|7 months ago
Jokes aside, while I'm almost sure that the ability to code can be lost and regained just like training a muscle what I'm more worried is the rug pull and squeeze that is bound to happen sometime in the next 5 to 10 years unless LLMs go the way of Free Software GNU style. If the latter happens then LLMs for coding will be like calculators and such more or less and personally I don't know how more harmful that would be compared to the boost in productivity.
That said if the former becomes reality (and I hope not!) then we're in for some huge existential crises when people realize they can barely materialize the labour part of their jobs after doing the thinky part and the meetings part.
Arubis|7 months ago
fassssst|7 months ago
cft|7 months ago
alwillis|7 months ago
Your code should have tests the AI can use to test the code it wrote.
And thanks to MCP, you can literally point your LLM to the documentation of your preferred tool [1].
[1]: https://context7.com/about
grogenaut|7 months ago
One of the skills I've developed is spinning (back) up on problems quickly while holding the overall in my head. I find with AI I'm just doing that even more often and I now have 5 direct reports (AI) added to the 6 teams of 8 I work with through managers and roadmaps.
KronisLV|7 months ago
Pretty much me with some IDEs and their code inspections and refactoring capabilities and run profile configurations (especially in your average enterprise Java codebase). Oh well.
dawnerd|7 months ago
xp84|7 months ago
_pdp_|7 months ago
danjl|7 months ago
amelius|7 months ago
Which is a problem when exactly? When civilization collapses?
zackify|7 months ago
nxobject|7 months ago
bko|7 months ago
I would love to see what a system like Claude Code could cook up running continuously for weeks. But I imagine it would get stuck in some infinite recursive loop.
0x000xca0xfe|7 months ago
E.g. it wanted to build a data query language with temporal operations but completely forgot to keep historical data.
It currently lacks the ability to focus on the overall goal and prioritize sub-tasks accordingly and instead spirals into random side quests real quick.
v7n|7 months ago
throwaway314155|7 months ago
edit:
https://www.twitch.tv/claudeplayspokemon
dawnerd|7 months ago
gpsx|7 months ago
totaa|7 months ago
akmarinov|7 months ago
You can technically hack the API key from the subscription, but that’s probably brittle.
Or is there some other meta I’m missing?
mehdibl|7 months ago
martinald|7 months ago
I assume they have very peaky demand, especially when Europe + N American office hours overlap (though I'm assuming b2b demand is higher than b2c). I'm also assuming Asian demand is significantly less than "the west", which I guess would be true given the reluctance to serve Chinese users (and Chinese users using locally hosted models?).
I know OpenAI and Anthropic have 'batch' pricing but that's slightly different as it's asynchronous and not well suited for a lot of code tasks. Think a more dynamic model for users would make a lot more sense - for example, a cheaper tier giving "Max" usage but you can only use it 8pm-6am Eastern time, otherwise you are on Pro limits.
megadragon9|7 months ago
mehdibl|7 months ago
You can even pause. I will public a CLI that is doing same base on same syntax. And it use github claude action yaml syntax: https://github.com/codingworkflow/claude-runner/blob/main/.g...
subarctic|7 months ago
raincole|7 months ago
That being said it will not surprise me if subscribers actually are losing Claude money and only API is profitable.
_flux|7 months ago
bravura|7 months ago
theblazehen|7 months ago
raylad|7 months ago
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
bad_haircut72|7 months ago
fourthark|7 months ago