I got invited to a UN conference on climate change. It was a huge deal of course that I could get in; however, the whole time I "felt" important. Everyone did. I question how many of the tens of thousands of people involved actually did important work.
Everyone knew we will miss the 1.5 degree target, btw. This was a few years ago.
Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable.
They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling:
"You can only use Fable for a week as a part of your plan"
"Be ready! You have to start paying per token!"
"Nevermind! we extended it for a couple more weeks"
"Wait, now it's up to half your usage"
"Ok, now its..."
Most people want to not care. We want our AI like electricity -- Kind of just there no matter how easy/hard is for the supply. You don't want your electricity company to be on the brink of cutting you off any second.
That's Anthropic. You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game. That forces people to look beyond the walled garden. There, they find models that are fine... and without the shenanigans.
Yeah, I agree with this. The constant state of "...will the rug be pulled?!?" does discourage relying on it as a model and building a workflow on it. Anthropic used to just be a reliable thing you could play with. Now it's this constant source of anxiety.
It also didn't help that the government yanked it which adds another source of anxiety since OpenAI is on much better terms with the administration and the administration seems corrupt enough that they would mess with Anthropic if they got a big enough donation from OpenAI.
But anyway after Sol entered the picture, I don't think Anthropic can get away with this as much and I also think they're going to face a massive backlash from Max subscribers if they do end up ending the +50% promotion at the end of the month because Sol is a Fable peer and priced very competitively.
My wife's startup made the mistake of building her internal operations around Claude Team.
Then she hired a VA in the Philippines. Anthropic promptly banned her account without warning once the VA connected to the account. It took her weeks to get her account reinstated, at which point she had already moved on to OpenAI.
How many big tech companies let you talk to a human to get support.
Automation is wonderful to cut cost for them but for the users being unable to get support is a horrible experience.
But you cannot go elsewhere because they are the only player in town.
How can small companies with 1000x less money able to provide live support, but if you pay 20, 100, 200 dollars for a subscription you dont have a phone number to call ?
I work with music streaming, I don't really know how to judge what is low-ticket vs high-ticket. However it is a medium-to-high margin business.
Our free tier is time-limited but we still look at all tickets even from non-paying customers (in the hopes of converting them). A 1-hour intervention from a customer rep can result in a multi-year paying customer.
Vanguard does get some support right as they tier their support based on how much you're worth. Businesses need to focus on Lifetime Value of their customers and realize that some of their marketing budget would be better spent in support.
>Automation is wonderful to cut cost for them but for the users being unable to get support is a horrible experience. But you cannot go elsewhere because they are the only player in town.
I can't tell you how many times I've experienced this with comcast. The last time I had to deal with it, was when I bought a new cable modem. I call in to provision it, the automated system assumes I have one of their modems and fails. For some reason I can't get technical support on the line and finally I resort to yelling 'cancel my account' over and over again until I finally get someone on the phone.
The guy was able to solve the issue in 5 minutes flat. The problem with automation is it's only ever going to be able to handle the 'happy path'
It feels so degrading talking to the bot. Last time I did it I was trying to upgrade my service to take advantage of a 2.5GbE modem I bought and I almost said screw it because it was so frustrating with the long pauses after everything I said!
The company solves the happy path every time. Your problem is they are solving their happy path which is profit optimization. The system is not poorly designed, it is working as intended.
The solution here is removing corporate monopolies and political power.
> How can small companies with 1000x less money able to provide live support, but if you pay 20, 100, 200 dollars for a subscription you dont have a phone number to call ?
They spend the money which can drastically cut into their profits.
Part of it is scale. If you have a small number of clients/users it is possible to provide that support. If you have millions or billions of users then you can't scale the support to handle the support requests, so some form of automation becomes inevitable.
If you scale up customers, you scale up support. If you don't want to serve new customers, tell them to take their business elsewhere. But if you want to be a big boy, you need to play like you are one.
If your maximum addressable market is “the whole economy,” as seen in SpaceX filings, then a city-sized call centre (distributed, of course) really is ‘t that much of an ask.
If you think you hit a limit where you can't support any new customer anymore, you just tell them you have no capacity at the moment. Like any normal practice does.
If firms had a base degree of customer support they were expected to provide, they would still exist. They would just not be as profitable, but customers would be better off.
I seem to remember there was a time when S/W was also designed with the aim to be easy to use, so that the need for support was reduced. It feels like the lesson learned was to keep costs low, not to ensure users were ok.
So you overextend, such that the quality of your support suffers? You can just call it what it is: greed. Have you considered that maybe a company shouldn’t have millions or billions of users? That’s a lot of eggs to put in one basket.
If you could be profitable with 50 customers providing excellent support, you can be MORE profitable spreading that excellent support across a larger customer base.
Just because none of the big corpos choose to do this does not mean it isn't possible. It's JUST greed.
A lot of companies seem to want to lock in to one solution or the other - like picking Oracle or SQL Server. The landscape is far too unsettled for that imo.
This is why I re-did the AI operating system I originally placed in Claude. For my 2.0 version I pulled it into OpenClaw (then eventually migrated to Hermes). All our work can be preserved after we change the model, even at a moment's notice or temporarily.
Right now we're using OpenAI's models by default since (unlike Anthropic) will allow us to use our pro subscription rather than token metering, but I've already had the joy of being able to change it to Kimi K3 (via OpenRouter) for an hour to try it out, and there were zero hiccups.
we have 7 coworkers we have been trying to re-instate for nearly 4 months now. All using the same google workspace sso, so there really was no special reason to ban them...
I had my GMail account locked for 1-2 years because I accessed it from my parents house (in the same country but in a different county) while on holiday. That was because they detected the account being used from a different IP address.
How do you know there wasn't account sharing though?
I've seen some amazingly dodgy stuff when hiring people from south east Asia, sharing a paid account with friends worth a months rent there seems milquetoast in comparison.
This is such a tough problem. Anthropic would need access to some kind of technology that could, like, intelligently handle unforeseen circumstances and nuances. Yeah, that’s definitely not something we should expect of them.
Just use any product going all in on AI hype. In 5 minutes you will see annoying bugs, server is down, non-sensical press releases, confusing UI. This is GitHub, this is Cursor, this is Anthropic, this is Google, this is all of them.
Including most of vide coded apps one sees, even from people who they'd trust before.
Anecdotal example, I downloaded a new alerting app recently from an indie dev who had a small following back in the day in iOS space. It asked for a subscription, like $20/year.
I thought, let me try this the (final version, from Mac App Store) app first. Well, it's a barely-there vibecoded shit. There's a bare-bones list, everything looks like my nephew designed it, the macOS "app" is a iPhone-size view of the iOS one, it has a bug that if you click on it it opens multiple duplicates of the same list view for no reason that you have to manually close, and in general it barely works.
Not to mention if their tools were so clearly useful they wouldn’t spend so much time making UI updates designed to force, trick, or confuse me into using their tool when it wasn’t my intention. SaaS companies with assistant integrations are the worst about this (looking at you, HubSpot)
Agreed. I think LLMs are best used as pair programmers or typists for users who already know what they’re doing. Or as tutors for users who want to learn.
Vibe coding is mostly garbage. But it can be useful for creating instant, disposable prototypes to investigate an idea or design direction.
Well a VA would need access to her account, just like how they would need email access etc.
But Anthropic has clearly picked the enterprise side of things, small teams and startups without millions of dollars in token budgets are irrelevant to them. I’m surprised they even got their account back to be honest.
And yet enterprises will be the first to move to on-prem LLMs as soon as they become feasible. The next generation of TPU chips already promises 5x efficiency and enough RAM to run a 1TB+ model, and Kimi K3 is about as good as Fable for a lot of tasks, so we'll be there much sooner than anyone anticipated.
As soon as I started using Fable I was like, okay, this is probably as good a model as I will need for software engineering going forward. I still feel that way. I don’t need a better model, I need a faster Fable.
The thing I miss most about programming is flow, and the constant bouncing between terminal tabs sucks. I’d love to do one thing at a time, with Fable, quickly.
Yeah StackOverflow which was either telling you to use google or it was so specific, that no one wanted/could respond.
Even a year ago when i was trying to do a hugo template manually with the help of the documentatin /tutorial, it was shit. The LLM at that time, was better helping me than the documentation.
I personally do not remember this time of Stack Overflow.
I had some helpful people helping me on IRC / Quakenet.
But the hugo example i found very interesting because it was the latest hugo ducumentation and I don't think I was able to find a tutorial. I tried it without an LLM first.
And now I'm getting 10-20x as much done. I'd say the trade off is worth it.
I'm struggling to scale myself even further. This tech is unreal and I have so many things I can do.
For the first time, tech feels like the 90's-00's again. Everything is greenfield and exciting and big tech is struggling to figure out what to do about it.
People are just hacking all kinds of stuff, and it's awesome. Feels like techno utopia.
> For the first time, tech feels like the 90's-00's again.
It feels like the opposite of 90s - 00s: they were filled with periods where a person could self-study technology and get a job using those skills that few others had.
Where we are going (according to the AI-proponents) is children being able to replace you.
In brief; the 90s - 00s were a skill-valuation time, now we are looking at a skill devaluation time.
Unless you meant to say "Just like how any kid who could write broken HTML t put up a webpage could pretend to be a skilled professional, that's where we are now"...
We used to get paid to code now we think we need to pay a subscription fee just to write software. They push marketing campaigns saying Manual coding no more, just vibe code, gain 10x speed for $100.
Then they hit you with hourly and weekly limits, you are wondering when you are going to get cut off. Since LLM at probabilistic it often feels like pulling the lever of a slot machine, hoping our prompt is the jackpot.
To make sure we win, we come up with systems, convoluted agents, context pipelines, rags to load . It feels like it's working, then bam you reach weekly limits.
(Just pay more if you want to keep winning).
I think developers need to wake up.
I myself started to use AI like a fancy debugger ,explainer. I make it walk me though every single line of code it writes.
I notice that i run into limits less, if i get cutoff, i can still make changes
The only thing you have to worry about is regulatory capture - if Dario and Sam can convince the US government to regulate and outlaw open source AI, then we're in for a world of hurt.
The barrier and time between idea and usable implementation is almost zero now. I don't have to imagine. I can just write something and see it work before making larger decisions. I really like this. Many of my ideas were abandoned because I needed to study some obscure library. Now, I can learn the parts that I find interesting and just have the AI chew through the grunt parts easily. That's the good.
I started coding with a line editor on a small Casio handheld "computer" and used to keep programs in my head. I more or less knew what happened on each line without seeing the line. With larger programs, I had a mental model of what was going on where and a big part of the input to that was the effort of writing everything by hand. That's gone. It's not really important as far as the output of usable programs is concerned but there's a certain feeling of satisfaction that came with digesting a larger codebase and having it surrender it's secrets to you that's missing.
I've seen this exact comment what feels like twice a day for the last 2 years, and not once have I seen the person making it back it up and show something even remotely impressive.
I dislike these comments just as much. What do you want people to show you? Most of us work on projects for other people where tasks that used to take a week take a day or less. It’s also a no true Scotsman as nothing we could show would be “good enough” because it’s just the same software engineering as before but faster.
But for instance I used to work in 1-2 client projects at a time and they take months now I can do 4-5 at once and they take a month. That’s a huge improvement
Piling on to the other responses, I don't really want to see anything at all from you. What I want to see to believe that any meaningful number of people out there are generating 10x the value they used to is a visibly more valuable world.
My skepticism is we're not getting that because the world mostly doesn't need more software and it doesn't need all software to be ultra-personalized to each user, either. There are plenty of valuable problems that may be solved via computation, but thus far, it seems we're getting the software equivalent of movie theaters disappearing and being replaced with people watching TikTok from bed. It re-routes the monetary value extraction from consumers of audio-visual entertainment, and TikTok probably has at bare minimum 1000x the content-length of the Criterion Collection, but it isn't making the world 10x better for anyone but the owners of TikTok.
It reminds me of my best friend from college, who was bipolar. His goal in life was to become a writer and he eventually did become an Emmy winner, but back in school, he's go into manic episodes in which he'd stay up all night five nights in a rows and churn out thousands upon thousands of pages of free-form text that incorporate prose, poetry, play scripts. It was definitely more than 10x the output of a non-manic period, and there were nuggets here and there of intensely evocative single phrases, snippets of dialogue that looked like they could come from a more compelling story, but they were ultimately sketches and drafts, not anything publishable that another person would want to read.
Would we call him 10x as productive when he was writing more total output as measured by number of words or when we was writing much less but in a form that millions of other people enjoyed and remembered?
If we purely mean economic productivity, that is pretty straightforward in a case like yours. If you were previously completing 4 projects every 3 months and now you're completing 42 every 3 months, are you earning 14x as much money as you used to?
I wonder if the project you build are more one off Disposable(sorry for my choice of words) software.
Do you have project that needs to be maintained. I am also interested in your workflow. Do you Vibe code , never look at the code or do you hold the LLM agent's hand.
I work on real projects with paying customers with the occasional mvp here, but I tend to select for people who have distribution so mvps become apps that need maintenance almost every time.
If anything maintenance is where it gets easier the mvp stage is where more focus is required
The issue is that the amount of useful software written—or more broadly, the value, or even profits, businesses are making—hasn't increased in any measurable way.
I don't dispute that your tasks are taking less time, but I suspect that to be temporary. This is a forum of AI frontrunners and early adopters, so I expect it's a matter until people catch on, and recalibrate their expectations for amount of output a programmer can produce in a given timeframe.
What I dispute is that this increased output amounts to actual value. There may very well be a HN-wide 10x productivity boost, if HN measures productivity in Jira tickets per day. But if that's the only measurable result, we should expect the only long term change to be a 10x increase in Jira tickets once orgs catch on.
> not once have I seen the person making it back it up and show something even remotely impressive.
heh this is funny because this reaction was all the rage in the 90s early 00s too. You'd put together something you thought was cool and then post a link on a forum only to be told how it wasn't even "remotely impressive". I'm glad people didn't give up back then and i hope no one gives up now.
Right, instead of having 20+ tmux panes with docs, specs and whatever, I just have 20+ tmux panes with various Codex sessions for various purposes instead, some of them been idling for days now, waiting for me to come back.
Things just moved up on the abstraction-ladder, but it's still there, hidden beneath all the TUI sessions instead.
There is GPT 5.6 Sol on Cerebras if you want to try that experience for an ungodly sum of money (not getting into GPT 5.6 Sol vs Fable, but only one is available on Cerebras) for an 11x speedup.
I have lower standards than you: I pay for deepseek-v4-flash-0731 tokens from a fast and reliable US vendor and I feel like working on one task at a time is fast and gets almost everything done I need.
It changed for the better a few weeks ago. Obviously it depends on what one is doing but I haven’t had an issue with my biology related material since that update
You may or may not like agents mode. I also hate flipping tabs, but I enjoy using agent mode with well named sessions. I still stick with a single session until I must move to another, then I leave them around for a few days until I’m sure I won’t need to pick up where I left off again.
I don’t think they were complaining about literally flipping tabs but rather just needing to context switch so often. This doesn’t sound like it helps with that.
I used Fable a bit when it was available. I didn't get the senae is was dramatically better than OpenAI. Now I am considering canceling my Claude sub since I can no longer experiment with their best models.
> That forces people to look beyond the walled garden.
Every time I get "you used your quota, come back in 3 hours, or 2 days" -> that is experimentation time with their competition, leading to changed service plans. When they said "claude -p" will be billed at API pricing even for plan users I moved my harness off claude. After I integrated codex, then it was never going to be a full claude project again.
What business encourages users to try their competition and adapt their usage to the competing products?
Qwen 3.8 is excellent. With the right harness, it does about 95% of what Opus can do, in my case automation software development. Since 3.8 came out, I have significantly revised my expectations for a local model. Give it another year or two, and we'll be running fast and free local models for nearly everything that matters, and these costly subscriptions will be a thing of the past. I've always believed that AI should be free for everybody, like TV and radio. We're almost there.
Free tv and radio? Where do you live? Where I live you either pay taxes for it, alternatively, it is so ad infested that it is not possible to watch it.
I suspect the same will/is happening with AI. Either you will pay for it, or it will be so ad infested that it will become useless.
Not op, but check out open code; you can turn on K/V quantization to help with increasing context if you have not already. I think K needs to stay at least 8 but I hear V can go down to 4?
I am running it on 32GB and I did not saw model loosing it context even after 4-5 compactions in pi. I am running sessions for few days sometimes. I think it looped once, but loop police extension stopped it. The only problem I have know is how pi compaction works, which is forcing full prefill which takes time and it is erroring a lot. I wrote my own compaction that should remove full prefil but it does not work. But this is the only problem with this setup and it is more problem with pi then the model. I much more prefer it to use Qwen then paid models: Claude forces me to do reauth every other day and codex models either are too costly or not capable enough.
I've a 32gb and 64gb (work) MBP. 32 works - just and sits at around 28/29gb of 32. 64 works great, so the 48gb laptop with MLX + MTP should be fine. I'm using Ollama.
I initially used the Claude Code harness on 3.6 A3B, but found that tooling would break as Claude released new versions and things would go weird. I've since written my own harness which has basic operations: read, find, bash (which can write files, python etc...) & web_fetch, all within a mac container. Works amazing. You don't need anything complicated to go very far.
Low hanging fruit would be Pi or OpenCode. If you really want a much better understanding of what your hardware is capable of then give writing your own a go.
Additional tip: Low Power mode reduces some token speed, but stops the laptop over heating and the fans going crazy.
Yes, they sent an email about it. You can also use the Claude SDK with an OAuth token ("claude setup-token" output) and it counts against the regular limit. Maybe they were afraid of losing users dependent on ACP (Zed editor and other compatible tools), since Claude Code does not have native ACP support and integrates only through the SDK?
Update June 15: We're pausing the changes to Claude Agent SDK usage described below. For now, nothing has changed: Claude Agent SDK, claude -p, and third-party app usage still draw from your subscription's usage limits. The previously announced monthly credit, which would have been available to eligible claimants in connection with these changes, isn't available. We’re working to update the plan to better support how users build with Claude subscriptions. When we have an update, we'll share it before anything takes effect.
> What business encourages users to try their competition and adapt their usage to the competing products?
If you are selling something, and losing $10 on each sale, you also would want to limit how much you sell.
I mean, sure, you are losing money on each sale so you can landgrab, but you still have to balance the land-grabbing with how much money you can actually lose.
>™Every time I get "you used your quota, come back in 3 hours, or 2 days" -> that is experimentation time with their competition, leading to changed service plans.
I guess this is why they're pushing Claude code hard (not supporting agents.md, not allowing third party harnesses, etc) but when switching to another provider is as easy as opening a new terminal and typing omp/pi/codex your moat is effectively zero.
They can compete on price, quality or value but anything else is just madness. Currently they (arguably) own quality but this won't last.
I'm surprised no one mentions about their recent privacy violation(s).
The breaking point for me was the privacy violation. They've been fingerprinting every request and violating users' privacy hoping no one would notice. Too bad, someone found out and that was the day when I cancelled my subscription.
No, that was the very first time that article was submitted to HN. That's not called "talking about" it. Talking about it means highlighting this enough in discussions so users really know their privacy is being compromised. I have more respect for AI companies that openly talk about selling user data than the ones pretending to be privacy heroes while doing the opposite.
As Anthropic does this, OpenAI Is giving everybody resets like every other day now on Twitter.
I'm strongly considering biting the bullet and just ditching my $200/month Claude Code plan for the Codex one instead, especially because I keep running into my weekly limits (even sticking to Opus.)
I ditched Claude Code $200/month a couple of months ago in favor of Codex $200/month. The value is night and day.
1. No 5 hour usage limit
2. Weekly usage gets reset CONSTANTLY. It's crazy. The longest I've ever seen it go without a reset is maybe 5 days?
3. I don't feel like OpenAI is constantly trying to fuck with me. Unlike Anthropic. I would way rather have Sol all day every data, consistently, than a slightly better Fable for like, 1 prompt every 5 hours, and only when Anthropic decides to not treat me like a cyber criminal. Believe in yourself as much as Claude believes your CRUD app is going to hack the pentagon.
4. Getting access to image generation, though I don't use it too much, is a nice perk compared to Anthropic.
edit: Should mention that I had like 4 banked manual resets as well. It feels like OpenAI wants me to use their product, whereas Anthropic wants my money while giving me a nerfed experience
>I would way rather have Sol all day every data, consistently, than a slightly better Fable for like, 1 prompt every 5 hours, and only when Anthropic decides to not treat me like a cyber criminal.
I have used Fable heavily on the lower Max plan and you are really exaggerating the limits here. I've had many multi-hour sessions with Fable on Max.
I got the AI ultra plan for gemini, the models are lower quality than claude and codex for sure but it comes with a pretty high limit for my purposes and I haven’t reached the weekly limit yet after about 3 weeks of usage. I have enterprise claude at work, the budget isn’t particularly great and I keep running out within a week tops with any serious work. Not even considering it for a personal plan with how quickly the tokens run out for even the mid-tier model/effort combinations.
I’m sticking with gemini for now given the 20TB cloud storage and youtube premium that comes with it but I’m still open to switching to codex (which I’ve had a long term plus plan for). If google keeps delaying the pro models for much longer or makes them excessively expensive, I’m likely to switch out.
> I’m sticking with gemini for now given the 20TB cloud storage and youtube premium that comes with it
I used to have the Google One with Gemini and Drive space and YT Premium separately for my family. A credit card expiration lapse lead to closing YT Premium and being locked away. Why? it was because Google One plan bundles YT Premium Lite as an extra. So they actively blocked me from getting Premium back for a month.
Now I moved to YT Premium on my wife's account and downgraded One to lowest tier. Never heard of a company forbidding users to upgrade their plans before this. I suspect Google really wants users on Google One no matter what they want. I was barely using Gemini anyway, already have claude and codex plans.
I've got the AI pro plan for Gemini and the limits as absolutely abysmal when using 3.7 flash in antigravity, If I use swarms then I can't even finish a single prompt without it reaching the limit.
> They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling:
The consumer side cheap monthly plans exist for the same reason companies like Cloudflare and Vercel have a free tier: When it’s cheap and easy to get developers familiar with the tools, they will push their companies to pay the real money for those tools.
It’s a hard balance with LLM serving because you can’t really make it free. $20/month is close to free, but the $200/month plans are in a difficult place where they’re big enough that many small companies pay for $200/month plans for their employees and ignore the enterprise features you get with the full expensive arrangements. So the companies are continually adjusting the $20-$200 plans to keep them from being reliable options for businesses, which is where the real money is.
There’s a short sighted cheering on of the 3rd tier and lower companies offering lower rates, but we’re already seeing them ratchet up the pricing and keep larger models closed after they get market attention.
> There’s a short sighted cheering on of the 3rd tier and lower companies offering lower rates, but we’re already seeing them ratchet up the pricing and keep larger models closed after they get market attention.
Sorry, but people are cheering on Chinese companies (of whom your are unduly dismissive with your '3rd rate' comment given how good GLM-5.3, Kimi K3 are) not only because they are more economical, but also because they do not constantly refuse to do legitimate tasks and provide you with the weights for self hosting these models.
I feel like many VC driven companies have completely forgotten how to compete on basic value for product and instead tie themselves into knots with meta-competitiveness games.
"We have the smartest model in the world but our company consistently does stupid things" is not a sustainable business model.
Maybe Anthropic's enterprise sales are going brilliantly, and the rest of us are just pixel dust to them.
Still. Brand perception is a thing, and between rug-pull usage policies, weirding verbedly output quality, and "I'm sorry Dave I can't do that" pushback, Anthropic are clearly having strategy issues.
I agree they’ve done a bit too many pricing / usage promotions and A/B tests.
The period was also marked with many billing bugs, like spending people’s usage credits for included Fable for a few hours (gave me a huge shock), but to their credit they refunded it.
They are fumbling the bag hard. AI's utility is for general purpose. The floor is rapidly improving from below them. With chatgpt I'm uploading all my day to day stuff. Meanwhile Claude is only for occasional super hard tech problems which are rapidly improving with being solvable easily by Sol. So what's the value add?
Their disrespect for their users is also another problem. You only get one shot to make a good impression.
If I got cut off from asking chatgpt what the status of a spreadsheet is for handling my personal bills due to my rate limit from coding work I would not be coding on it at all. Glad someone over there realized this obvious fact.
I'd go further and say chatgpt offering continuing service just with degraded model keeps me in their 'free web use' tier. I have API keys for coding stuff, but for most of my day to day use of public llm, I know I won't get 'blocked' using ChatGPT. Yes, the model may change, and I'll get 'worse' output, but usually I can't tell the difference. Using Claude for day to day stuff, I get completely locked out after so many hours. Again, I have API keys for Claude as well, and use it for 'pro' work, but day to day chat stuff... it's not my daily driver.
Also, for whatever software engineering work I throw at Fable 5, Opus 5 also does fine. Apparently Fable is supposed to do better at long running tasks (in other words - burning more tokens without interacting with the user), but that's not the kind of work I'm doing.
After Fable 5 launched, it was better than Opus 4.8 for sure. Then they rug-pulled Fable from me (EU), and later released Opus 5. Now I only reach for fable when Opus 5 API returns 529 for the millionth time this year.
Fable was really excellent before the whole fiasco with the US government. Once they brought it back it was not the same at all. I have switched over to ChatGPT now for most things, its answers are way better than Fable in my experience. I still use Opus 5 for purely coding tasks.
This is why I think open weight models will win out in the end. Right now there’s too much going on behind the scenes with the models. Day to day you never know if you’re going to get smart Claude or dumb Claude.
that part is extremely frustrating, I can't tell if it's a placebo or if the model quality does actually vary. the uncertainty makes me more hesitant to rely on it heavily as some days it just seems incredibly dumb to the point of being useless.
For browser game generation, Fable 5 consistently produces much better game prompts and playable 2D or 3D prototypes than Opus 5 (based on 500+ prototypes I created using different models). It has a much better grasp of how visual elements work together and implementing game mechanics.
They haven't communicated well the fact that the default model should be Sonnet 5, which should give you unlimited use for common coding tasks (say with occasional subagents use) on the Pro plan. Instead they're pushing Opus and even Fable, to try and get people addicted to the higher tier, without realizing that nearly everybody has a Sonnet for peanuts via DeepSeek V4 on OpenRouter, or completely free through Qwen 3.8 locally. I predict major trouble for Anthropic, now that OpenAI's models are closing in, are cheaper for daily use and don't have those silly 5 hours limits - and that Chinese models are getting really good and are even cheaper.
Sonnet 5 is a trash model and stupidly expensive if you accidentally set reasoning tokens high - more expensive than fable - it absolutely should not be the default lmao. If the common coding tasks you use ai for is doable with sonnet or local qwen - you're either not using Claude code (if you are, you'll very quickly see that sonnet 5 in Claude code is not a model for "occasional subagent use" - spinning up subagents is the only thing it's good at and it does it way too much. It can spin up subagents and waste huge amounts of tokens but it can't write good code lol.) or you've got Claude code workflow that is very human in the loop where you are significantly steering and controlling the models. And in that case your default should be to use gpt. Claude models are stupid slow.
Claude Code also doesn't make it easy to make _efficient_ use of the different models to reduce overall cost. There are many tokenmaxxing features (e.g. ultracode that spawns dozens of subagents) to burn through the 5-hour limit in minutes, but if you want to let an Opus planning agent use Sonnet for implementing you have to orchestrate your own workflow. I'm pretty sure that's because the Anthropic employees working on Claude Code have unlimited token budgets so they're mostly on tokenmaxxing workflows themselves.
I don't think Anthropic wants a stable experience on their consumer subscription plans. It is just used for customer acquisition who will then ask their employer to pay for enterprise plan(assuming most employer care about data control) which is based on tokens.
Most coders don't pay for tokens themselves. It's just on reddit and HN you would think that everybody does.
I would guess that it's hard to compete with Google without a consumer component. Most enterprises already have contracts and policies with Google, so anything driven from the top-down is likely to prefer Google.
(And failing that, there was a real risk for OpenAI to be the default for enterprises.)
To defeat that, you need to frontline employees the chance to experience better tooling and models which is where the subsidized subscriptions come in.
I pay for my tokens for my own projects, at least when the ones Google seems willing to keep throwing at me for free don't cut it. I'd think that's not too uncommon, especially here where there's likely a high ratio of hobby coders (whether also professionals or otherwise).
Free tier Gemini is good enough for my personal projects and hopefully a local model can replace it before i ever personally pay for a single token from anyone.
local models are getting pretty close. they still require some serious hardware to run at a reasonable rate but they're about smart enough to be useful.
Yeah i just don't have the hardware to run them at a reasonable rate and am not ready to invest that much at today's prices. My tinkering with DeepSeek last year was promising but the minutes-per-response made it unusable.
Add to that at one point Claude was the go to models for the very basic use case for LLMs - text generation.
With newer models text generation outputs have gone from probably human readable text to dense philosophical treatise about "load bearing" and incomplete sentences. So much so that now you need skills or another LLM to just parse the output. Simple answers and text generation just doesn't exist.
Their truth is “we don't have compute and are working to improve capacity”
People would root for that
Instead they got people rushing to escape the permanent underclass until they have a mental health crisis just to beat the fake deadline. $100, $200, is a lot for those people
The problem isn't the confusion from pricing and ToS changes, but the constant feeling they don't give a fuck about their customers, and they'll fuck them up with lock-in tactics and high prices at any chance they get.
I think an important part is communication, so many of these issue could be fixed by saying "Hey we're seeing our utilisation go over x% over the weekdays so we need to implement "surge usage" during this period starting in 2 weeks.
Instead often it feels like they make a change, then wait for someone to figure it out. Then Anthropic ends up being reactive as opposed to proactive in communication.
It is kind of funny because surprises from OpenAI tends to be positive (Tibo resets), on the Anthropc side I dread them.
In my case it's been kind of unhealthy, just constantly waiting for the token limit to reset, always feeling like I'm wasting a resource if I'm not using subscription right now.
I just put $30 on openrouter, switched to Pi, and I finally have a calm mind. Since I actually pay per request I want to maximize efficiency rather than utilization
Opus and Sonnet 5 babble like crazy - this’ one reason. At some point one feels as if staring at the Random himself, not a conversation. Fable is super expensive.
From a cost-effective perspective the GPT models are much cheaper - one can easily tell it takes longer with GPT5.x to exhaust limits and this matters A LOT.
I can’t say which of these corpos I despise more though. I though for a while Dario was cool, but a massive distrust is piling and the first third player offering decent experience (and showing some decency) will win me over.
For the record - I’m also unsure whether I despise more Exxon or BP or burning fuel as a whole. Hope u get the point...
The fact is that demand for tokens at electric bill rates so far outstrips what can be supplied currently not just with frontier models, but with open weights cheap models too. Running an always on Deepseek flash agent would cost three figures a month at API prices.
Total costs sure, electricity only costs no. My two DGX Sparks run DS4 Flash at about 50tok/s concurrency=1 which is more than suitable; at about 150W total wall power when generating.
That’s about A$16 a month in electricity if I ran it 7x24x30.
Yes, this was a bit upsetting for me. I found myself organizing my work hours and availability around perceived or actual fable quota limits / trial periods - only to find out multiple times it didn't matter, there is no seeming strategy or rhyme or reason to it. Enormously frustrating, and I did end up just settling for a while with cheaper models.
I'm not saying this with any undue derision, it's genuine - do they have a real product team or are they clauding that too? The direction makes little sense.
Not just with the pricing models and avaiability, also with how the tool behaves. Currently I am fighting "auto-mode" that was introduced recently - and enabled by default without warning - and now I have to watch all the time that it does not got reenabled somehow again, depending on project and device I am developing it.
Also that the behavior of the models change, suddenly more fluff in the comments etc is annoying, but that is probably being part of using cutting edge tech.
Not only that but it appears as if they're also treating the platform that customers actively use in such a way as well - heavily A/B testing features and behavior of the platform with little regard for customer comfort in terms of platform use, moving targets for subscription limits, etc etc. I suppose most of us chalk it up to the technology being new and evolving, but I'm not so sure everyone shares that same sentiment clearly.
Isn't it just tipping the hand at where the actual businesses are going to end up inevitably?
The only B2C is going to be watered down ad-driven BS, and they will charge B2B via tokens.
The $50/mo - $200/mo consumer LLM subscription is not something I expect to last long / or to drive much of the revenue share... like individuals paying for Gmail vs Googles overall business.
Not entirely sure how OpenAI is any different. Their quota system seems random to me. I can use up my quota in a single day, and the next day it gets refilled for no apparent reason. But another time, I also used up my quota in a single day, and there was no refresh; I was made to wait six more days.
To me, all of these are just exercises in getting me to pay for more tokens at API rates.
it also feels like they are optimizing their models to output more tokens, because everyone is saying inference is profitable, they wan't to close the gap between training and inference cost by increasing output token count (which also increases input tokens in agentic use cases), with 5 min TTL, this means you almost don't have a cache
Yup. It also seems like the latest and greatest is a smaller and smaller gap everytime. I will continue using the second best more affordable model until a new model comes out, everyone talks about how great it is, and the last greatest model becomes the second best and costs the same as the previous model I was using.
I stopped using Claude because of this BS. If I pay for a service, I want to know what I’m paying for, I want it to be predictable.
Anthropic have been anything but. Flip flopping on model availability, model access behind an opaque filter, their past behaviour of model degradation as they prepared their next model… these are not signs of a reliable service.
I’ve mostly settled on using a mixture of open weights models through Together.ai and Fireworks.ai, a MiniMax subscription for high-token-use tasks that don’t need the best model (for $20 I get what feels like infinite tokens), and codex for the occasional high complexity task, although with Kimi K3 and hopefully soon GLM 5.3, it’s becoming increasingly less important. Deepseek 4 flash is my cheap main with delegation to other models as needed.
I’ve also found LFM2.5 8B surprisingly useful for single-focus tasks like “does this diff touch anything that isn’t related to the task”, and it’s incredibly cheap ($0.03/0.12 per M in/out).
Yes, I feel like you can just sense the garbage coming. Age/identity verification, mandatory data sharing, morality policing, "Answer Engine Optimization" ads and influence peddling... it's going to be so painful to watch it all enshittify.
OP made the "electricity" analogy, and that's really all people want. I want to plug something into the wall and have it work. I don't want to have to worry that my electric company is going to rug-pull me because I plugged the wrong appliance in, or I didn't agree to some TOS, or I used the electricity to run grow lights for my pot farm, or this or that or the other.
The analogy is apt because I feel this is exactly what keeps Anthropic and OpenAI's owners up at night -- becoming the utility company the People want them to be. Ironically their behavior may accelerate their fears. And yes, the so-called safety features are ridiculously invasive and the worst is agreeing to have surveillance cameras installed in every room that occasionally detect any attempt to grow plants with LED strips as a pot farm. After a false alarm of almost having my ChatGPT account terminated for cybersecurity abuse and appeals auto-denied twice (I did nothing even close to hacking), I have started doing everything I can to decrease switching costs and thus the bargaining power of the suppliers and I'm doing the same for my company.
Basically I want most companies to be selling basic, reliable commodities. I don't want their stupid value-add or lock-in. I don't want my electric company to sell me "MyElectric+, a subscription service that lets me (and them) enable and disable my appliances from the cloud and share my meter readings with friends." Just get the "electricity" part right, and I'm good. I don't want my water company to sell me "MyWater+, a subscription service that lets me (and them) flavor and carbonate my water with an advanced cloud service that...blah...blah...blah..." Just stop! Fire all your idea guys and just supply the base product. Hell, I'd be happy with a phone that no apps pre-installed. Look at phones today, so much built-in uninstallable crapware that it would make Gateway in the 90's jealous.
Not just that once I hit my Fable limit I naturally experimented with other options and realized that 5.6 Sol + Grok 4.6 gives me same quality of results
as Fable + 5.6 Sol so not really that reliant on Fable anymore.
DeepSeek is doing pretty much the same thing they said they weren’t going to change their prices after the 75% discount for the foreseeable future. That foreseeable future turned out to be two months.
It did not exactly help that we saw traffic to DS (over OpenCode) jump from around 1.6T tokens per day, to over 14T token in a matter of days. Nobody has the compute to deal with such increases.
This keeps happening with every good new model release. People jumping from one to another, and as prices get lower, they start using the models even more.
People make not like to hear it but prices and usage limits are ways to shape traffic. The third option is the nuclear one like Kimi did, by just stopping to sell subscription at all. But that is something that DeepSeek can not do as all they offer is API.
Even OpenAI despite having the most compute is not immune to client influx = capacity issues. As people found their usage dropping, despite the push to the easier to run Luna models.
Reality is, that compute can not keep up with demand, especially when models get more capable and cheaper. What trigger people being using them more, what trigger compute crisis's.
This constant up and down cycle is going to keep happening for a long time, as this new market grows and eventually, somewhere in the future stabilizes. But yea, that is still going to be a few more years for sure.
The whole fable thing really did the company a number. Their filters are incredibly sensitive now and I got banned for bootstrapping a react app. 13 days and still no response, and they haven't even refunded the subscription as the FAQ says they should have. Their support system is designed around using your account to contact support, and if you are banned you cannot. How are you supposed to build trust around that. The last half year has been more and more haphazard.
OpenAI is also now actively discounting their model. They just offered a free month to users. Both companies seem spooked by what I have to imagine is slowing user growth.
>You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game
We all know that the subscription prices are not at all sustainable for these providers. You all do, right?
Yes, they're struggling to segment the market and find a way to make money, and that basically relies upon emptying the pockets of whales. As someone enjoying a hilariously subsidized Max plan, I understand that, and I don't think they're trying to scam me in some way.
And both sides of this equation understand that the market is competitive, and maybe more competitive than they thought it would be. Like, would you rather they did pull Fable when they first said they would? Or that they'd cut quota? I wouldn't. But I'm glad that Kimi K3 and GPT 5.6 Sol and the latest GLM and Qwen and...I love that this has forced Anthropic to change plans. I'm not going to hold that against them.
> We all know that the subscription prices are not at all sustainable for these providers. You all do, right?
I don’t think it is fair to expect from people to know or understand this.
If you buy something or subscribe to a service there is a price tag on it.
You get X for Y amount of price.
That is how consumers conditioned for decades. They do not care what is your customer acquisition strategy. If Antrophic cannot provide reliable services on that price, customers will be unsatisfied.
>If Antrophic cannot provide reliable services on that price, customers will be unsatisfied.
The complaint wasn't "I paid for X and now they say they aren't going to give me X", it was "I paid for X, and they said hey guess what we're doing a promo and you get a bonus extra 2X, and also you get special limited time access to our new product Y", that's a hell of a thing to complain about.
Look, I pay a lot of money to Anthropic and I'm pretty happy that competitors have forced them to abandon their plans to add premium charges on these bonuses, but it's pretty ridiculous seeing the whining and gnashing, somehow turning this into complaints. It very much has a "oh no my lobster is too buttery, my blanket too warm" kind of feel to it.
Do you have actual data on the marginal costs of inferencing, or are you using the term 'subsedizing' loosely as in 'discount', meaning a lower price compared to another price for the same offer?
Look up the burn rate for OpenAI and Anthropic. Despite the fact that these companies have managed to hook a lot of F500 companies into paying millions for token-level API pricing, they are bleeding cash at a catastrophic rate. And we know subscription tokens come at about a 1/30th the cost of the API pricing (presuming you use your quota).
Yes, they are most certainly subsidizing the subscription plans. I mean, at least for people who utilize them to the quota.
The question is specifically about the marginal cost of the inferencing part exclusively. Not the R&D spend. AFAIK, there has never been a statement on that from neither OpenAI nor Anthropic. What it actually costs to serve one more token determines wether it is "subsidized" at a certain price point. That it is sold for more elsewhere is not evidence.
How would that number help at all or change the discussion? Is R&D not a real expense?
I mean, this argument would have merit if they built something that they're going to monetize for decades, but cutting edge models now grow obsolete in a 6 month time window.
There is zero financial analysis where they aren't massively subsidizing the subscriptions, and people have to invent ignorant "oh just ignore most of the cost of providing the product" to try to pretend there is.
I dont see why user should care. OK, they are selling at loss so that they can build a monopoly. That is not something positive or good, not something to cheer on.
There is a consumer unfriendly ethic behind this. Overly long answers are a cunning was to increase token cost and therefore profit. Consumers are savvy and will prohibit monopoly whilst there is still plentiful competition.
If they actually became a token merchant it'd be amazing. But they didn't. They tried to hide the chain of thoughts tokens. They banned accounts for using third-party harnesses with Claude subscription. Their tokens are also not very at a very competitive price.
I was going to say that the model of the electricity market OP is talking about hasn't existed in 15 years and it's only getting worse with more intermittent renewables entering the market. And no, batteries are not the answer because physics doesn't care how much greenwashing lobbyists do.
Future solutions nothwithstanding, the metaphor does not make sense according to the reality of many people as of today. Many live in locales where the Grid has made the grid capacity into the consumers’ problem via time-of-use pricing and adjusting pricing according to some max-use scheme. It is absolutely not just something you set and forget if you have to worry about not using the stove at the same time as you use the AC.
But this seems apropos in a roundabout way since LLMs cost a lot of energy.
This battle of giants is so interesting I can't wait for the next information-filled reply to teach me something new about the batteries vs no batteries battle.
I love how both of you are arguing about what the solution is, yet the problem isn't even clearly defined yet :P
There are thriving Ai video communities who are trying to replicate big budget productions with indie resources. Look up Gossip Goblin. There's a parallel explosion of memes at the same time, like Balenciaga Harry Potter
So brainrot? I don't want to belittle anyone's creative pursuits, but really, I struggle to see how "Balenciaga Harry Potter" is any more artistic than "Italian Animals".
The building science community has not buy and large came to the agreement that the CO2 itself is the cause of the cognitive decline. It could be the Canary in the coal mine telling us there is an accumulation of compounds causing the decline.
Why that matters? You need good ventilation regardless, but instead of just thinking of CO2, try to minimize compounds in your air by selecting things for the room that smell less and off-gas less.
> The new "Plus" plans are tailored to each individual app, with Facebook Plus and Instagram Plus focused more on social expression, while WhatsApp Plus focuses on personalization and messaging.
If only Google Plus lived long enough to see this day...
My question is, and this is genuinely a question: Do you think YC-backed companies would have respected this guideline if it was posted on some other website they wanted to operate in?
They're asking a question, not making an equivalence. And I'll add that YC founders/companies do have some specific advantages on this forum, so it's worth knowing if they are held to any standard.
I never understood why we believe humans don't backprop. Isn't it that during the day we fill up our context (short term memory) and sleep is actually where we use that to backprop? Heck, everyone knows what "sleep on it" means.
Brains are not doing linear algebra, and they don't follow a concise algorithm.
What LLM do is even farther away from what neural nets do, and even there - artificial neurons are inspired by but not reimplementing biological neurons.
You can understand human thought in terms of LLMs, but that is just a simile, like understanding physical reality in terms of computers or clockworks.
Using ChatGPT without a clue, it appears to assume you are talking aboutcoming back from the car wash. It reasons, the con for walking is that you have to come back later for the car. And yes, when you say it's an intelligence test, it quickly gets it
I'm just imagining following ChatGPT's advice and walking to the car wash, asking the clerk to wash my car, and then when she asks where it is, I say "oops, left it at home." and walk back home.
This game started slow for me many years ago but I now absolutely love this game. Not just because of all the open source effort that has gone into it, because of the strategy. You have to make yourself vulnerable to get stronger.
Wanna grow fast? Train workers who can't fight, but are resource efficient to make. Risk being badly weakened if getting attacked, for the benefit of the workers giving you much more resources to then raise an army.
Everyone knew we will miss the 1.5 degree target, btw. This was a few years ago.
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