Claude Code is just way too expensive.
These days I’m using Amazon Q Pro on the CLI. Very similar experience to Claude Code minus a few batteries. But it’s capped at $20/mo and won’t set my credit card on fire.
These days I’m using Amazon Q Pro on the CLI. Very similar experience to Claude Code minus a few batteries. But it’s capped at $20/mo and won’t set my credit card on fire.
Seems 4x costlier than my Aider+Openrouter. Since I'm less about vibes or huge refactoring, my (first and only) bill is <5 usd with Gemini. These models will halve that.
It's very much a "Claude Code" in the sense that you have a "q chat" command line command that can do everything from changing files, running shell commands, reading and researching, etc. So I can say "q chat" and then tell it "read this repo and create a README" or whatever else Claude Code can do. It does everything by itself in an agentic way. (I didn't want to say like 'Aider' because the entire appeal of Claude Code is that it does everything itself, like figuring out what files to read/change)
(It's calling itself Q but from my testing it's pretty clear that it's a variant of Claude hosted through AWS which makes sense considering how much money Amazon pumped into Anthropic)
how is this appealing? I think I must be getting old because the idea of letting a language model run wild and run commands on my system -- that's unsanitized input! --horrifies me! What do you mean just let it change random files??
I'm going to have to learn a new trade, IDK
It only has access to files within the directory it’s run from, even if it calls tools that could theoretically access files anywhere on your system. Also had networking blocked, also in a sandboxes fashion so that things like curl don’t work either.
I wasn’t particularly impressed with my short test of Codex yesterday. Just the fact that it managed to make any decent changes at all was good, but when it messed up the code it took a long time and a lot of tokens to figure out.
I think we need fine tuned models that are good at different tasks. A specific fine tune for fixing syntax errors in Java would be a good start.
In general it also needs to be more proactive in writing and running tests.
4k loc per month seems terribly low? Any request I make could easily go over that. I feel like I'm completely misunderstanding (their fault though) what they actually meant.
Edit: No I don't think I'm misunderstanding, if you want to go over this they direct you to a pay-per-request plan and you are not capped at $20 anymore
I've been running this almost daily for the past months without any issues or extra cost. Still just paying $20