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Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

I’m usually one of the people complaining about hype cycles, and it’s usually been correct to be pessimistic about them.

But in this particular case I have to think a lot of people just haven’t tried it in its best form. No, not a local model on your MacBook. No, not the web interface on the free plan. Go lay down $300 into API credits, spend a weekend (or maybe two) fully setting up aider, really give it a shot. It’s ultimately a pretty small amount of money when it comes to figuring out whether the people who are telling you there’s an existential risk to your livelihood on the horizon are onto something, don’t you think?

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I find myself much the opposite - I don't usually complain about hype cycles, thinking we should wait and see before reserving judgement. In this case I feel like we've seen enough to know LLMs are not capable of performing anyone's job.

$300? That much sounds like it would last a year. You don't need to spend anywhere near $300 just to try things out

RTFA, agents churn through credits. Further enforcing my belief that the vast majority of people have not actually tried it yet.

> RTFA, agents churn through credits.

I literally use Claude Code as part of my job, so either the "FA" is wrong, or my costs are only low because work just happens to have a codebase that reduces costs (lol)

We're using Cline, and it's very easy to blow through $20-40 if you get going. The value proposition is absolutely there so we eat the cost, but OP is correct in that agentic coding eats tokens like there's no tomorrow.

I burned through $50 credits in a sitting the first time I used Claude Code to see what I could vibe-code from scratch. You're pushing whole files of tokens through it every time you interact with it.

Huh, maybe the reason it doesn't use this much for me is because my work has mostly source files that are far too large for Claude Code to read. It always has to ask for permission to use grep because it can't figure out how to use the read tool properly. I've done entire new features on probably around $15 of credit max.

for better or worse, Claude code is less parsimonious with tokens compared to aider for the same thing.

How much does the Deepseek's equivalent cost?

I know this isn't what you were asking, but the answer is $300. And if I wrote $3000 in the original comment, the answer would be the same. You cannot have enough money.

> It’s ultimately a pretty small amount of money when it comes to figuring out whether the people who are telling you there’s an existential risk to your livelihood on the horizon are onto something, don’t you think?

Nope. I'd rather buy some books or a Jetbrains subscription.

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