However, as long as Microsoft is offering copilot at (presumably subsidized) $10/mo, I'm not interested in paying 10x as much and still having limits. It would have to be 10x as useful, and I doubt that.
Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o3s of the world still don’t match up to Claude.
I started using Claude code once it became a fixed price with my Claude max subscription. And it’s taken a little getting used to vs Cline, but I think it’s closer to Cline in performance rather than cursor (Cline being my personal gold standard). $100 is something most people on this forum could make back in 1 day of work.
$100 per month for the value is nothing and for what it’s worth I have tried to hit the usage limit and the only thing that got me close was using their deep research feature. I’ve maxed out Claude code without hitting limits.
I expect so. The question is "How many days does the limit last for?"
Maybe they have a per-day limit, maybe it's per-month (I'm not sure), but paying $100/m and hitting the limit in the first day is not economical.
How Rate Limits Work: With the Max plan, your usage limits are shared across both Claude and Claude Code:
Shared rate limits: All activity in both Claude and Claude Code counts against the same usage limits.
Message variations: The number of messages you can send on Claude varies based on message length, conversation length, and file attachments.
Coding usage variations: Expected usage for Claude Code will vary based on project complexity, codebase size, and auto-accept settings.
On the Max plan (5x Pro/$100), average users:
- Send approximately 225 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR
- Send approximately 50-200 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours
On the Max plan (20x Pro/$200), average users:
- Send approximately 900 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR
- Send approximately 200-800 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours
But basically you get ~300Mn input tokens and ~100Mn output tokens per month with Sonnet on the $100 plan. These are split across 50 sessions you are allowed, each session is 5 hrs starting from the first time you send a message until 5 hrs after the first message. During this time, you get ~6Mn input and ~2Mn output tokens for Sonnet. Claude Code seems to use a mix of Sonnet and Haiku, and Haiku has 2x the limits of Sonnet.
So if you absolutely maxed out your 50 sessions every month, that's $2400 worth of usage if you instead had used the API. So it's a great deal. It's not $100 worth of API credits you're buying, so they don't run out like that. You can exhaust limits for a given session, which is at most a 5 hr wait for your next one, or you can run out of 50 sessions, I don't know how strongly they enforce that limit and I think that limit is BS, but all in all the value for money is great, way better than using the API.
From the internet, we got used to get everything for nothing, thus ppl beg for a lower price, even if it doesn't make sense.
I might be missing something, but you can use Claude 3.7 in Copilot Chat:
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/using-github-copilot/ai-m...
VS Code with your favorite model in Copilot is rapidly catching up with Cursor, etc. It's not there yet, but the trajectory is good.
(Maybe you meant code completion? But even smaller, local models do pretty well in code completion.)
GitHub is losing money on the subs, but they are definitely trying to reduce the bleed. One way to do that is to cut corners with LLM usage, by not sending as much context, trimming the context window, capping output token limits, these are all things Cursor also does btw, hence why Cline, with almost the same tech (in some ways its even inferior tech) achieves better results. I have hit $20 in API usage within a single day with Cline, Cursor lets you have "unlimited" usage for $20 for a month. So its optimised for saving costs, not for giving you the best experience. At $10 per month for Copilot, they need to save costs even more. So you get a bad experience, you think its the AI that is not capable, but the problem is with the companies burning VC money to corner the market, setting unrealistic expectations on pricing, etc.
Id be careful with stating things like these as fact. I asked Gemini for half an hour to write code that draws a graph the way I want, it never got it right. Then I asked Cladue 3.7 and it got it almost right the first try, to the point I thought its compeltely right, and fixed the bug I discovered right after I pointed it out.
Claude is still the gold standard for AI assisted coding. All your Geminis and o3s of the world still don’t match up to Claude.
Out of date I think in this fast moving space.
Sonnet has long been the gold-standard, but that position is looking very shaky at the moment; Gemini in particular has been working wonders for me and others when Sonnet has stumbled.
VS Code/Copilot has improved massively in Cursor's wake, but yes, still some way to go to catch up.
Absolutely though - the value we are getting is incredible.
Basically anything that isnt gpt4o is premium, and I find gpt4o near useless compared to Claude and Gemini in copilot.
It's a hit and miss IMO.
I like it for C#/dotnet but completely useless for the rest of the stuff I do (mostly web frontend).
I'm not sure about my usage but if I hit those premium limits I'm probably going to cancel Copilot.
In contrast - I’m not interested in using cheaper, less-than, services for my livelihood.
i use it for very targeted operations where it saves me several roundtrips to code examples and documentation and stack overflow, not spamming it for every task i need to do, i spend about $1/day of focused feature development, and it feels like it saves me about 50% as many hours as i spend coding while using it.
AI coding saves me a lot of time writing high-quality code, as it takes care of the boilerplate and documentation/API lookups, while I still review every line, and vibe coding lets me quickly do small stuff I couldn't do before (e.g. write a whole app in React Native), but gets really brittle after a certain (small) codebase size.
I'm interested to hear whether Claude Code writes less brittle code, or how you use it/what your experience with it is.
Claude Code was the first assistant that gelled for me, and I use it daily. It wrote the first pass of multi-monitor support for my window manager. It's written the last several commits of my Ruby X11 bindings, including a working systray example, where it both suggested the whole approach and implemented it, and tested it with me just acting as a clicking monkey (because I haven't set up any tooling to let it interact with the GUI) when it ran test scripts.
I think you just needs to test the two side by side and see what works for you.
I intend to give Aider a go at some point again, as I would love to use an open source tool for this, but ultimately I'll use the one that produces better results for me.
The two worst ways of burning API credits I've found with Claude Code are:
1. Getting argumentative/frustrated with the model if it goes off the rails and continuing to try to make something work when the model isn't getting anywhere.
If it really isn't getting something in the first few prompts, stop and rethink. Can you go back and set a smaller task? Like writing test cases that it's broken approach would fail? If it's not making forward progress after a couple of prompts, it's not likely to unless you split up the task and/or provide more details. This is how you burn $10 instead of $0.60 for a task that "should" be simple. It's bad at telling you something is hard.
2. Think about when you either /compact (trims the context but retains important details) or clear the context entirely. E.g. always clear when moving to another task unless they're closely related. Letting it retain a long context is a surefire way of burn through a lot (and it also slows you down a lot, not least because there's a bug that affects some of us - maybe related to TERM settings? no idea - where in some cases it will re-print the entire history to the terminal, so between tasks it's useful to quit and restart)
Also use /init, but also ask it to update CLAUDE.md with lessons learned regularly. It's pretty good at figuring things out, such as how my custom ORM for a very unusual app server I'm working on works, but it's a massive waste of tokens to have it re-read the ORM layer every time instead of updating CLAUDE.md.
This.
I was fighting with Claude for a good chunk of yesterday (usage limits seemed broken so it didn't really time me out) and most of that was getting it to fix one small issue with three test cases. It would fix one test and break the others, round and round we go. After it broke unrelated tests I had to back out all the changes and, by then, I understood the problem well enough so could direct it how to fix it with a little help from Deepseek.
As there are a bunch of other sections of code which suffer from the same problem I can now tell it to "look at the fixed code and do it like that" so, hopefully, it doesn't flail around in the dark as much.
Admittedly, this is fairly complicated code, being an AST to bytecode compiler with a bunch of optimizations thrown in, and part of the problem was a later optimization pass undoing the 'fixes' Claude was applying which took quite a while to figure out.
Now I just assume Claude is being intentionally daft and treat it as such with questions like "why would I possibly want a fix specifically designed to pass one test instead of a general fix for all the cases?" Oh, yeah, that's its new trick, rewriting the code to only pass the failing test and throwing everything else out because, why not?
The best one I've seen is when it tries to disable a test because it can't make the code pass it.
You do need to treat it as if it's trying to sneak stuff past you sometimes because you do get the occasional bout of what in a human I'd have treated as "malicious compliance", at a level well beyond stupidity.
I'm curious, what was the return? What did you do with the 1k?
It's notable to me because there are to my knowledge no other Ruby wm's (there's at least one that allows scripting with Ruby, I believe, but not the whole codebase), the X11 bindings are custom (no Xlib or XCB), and there are few great examples that fits into the structure of my wm. Yet it made it work. The code was ugly, and I haven't committed it yet as I want to clean it up (or get Claude to) but my priority was to be able to use the second monitor without spending more than a few hours on it, and starting with no idea how multi-monitor support in X11 worked.
Since then, Claude Code has added Xinerama support to my X11 bindings, and selection support to enable a systray for my pager, and written the systray implementation (which I also didn't have the faintest clue how worked, and so had Claude explain to me before starting).
I use it for work too, but for these personal projects priority has been rough working code over beauty, because I use them every day and rely on the features, and want to spend as little time as possible on them, and so the work has been very different from how I work with Claude for work projects where I'll work in much smaller chunks, polish the result etc.
(updated for better example)
It is not a challenging technical thing to do. I could have sat there for hours reading the conversion from v1 to v2 to v3 to v4. It is mostly just changing class names. But these changes are hard to do with %s/x/x, so you need to do them manually. One by One. For hundreds of classes. I could have as easily shot myself in the head.
> Could you anonymize and share your last 5-10 prompts?
The prompt was a simple "convert this site from tailwind v1 to v4". I use neovim copilot chat to inject context and load URLs. I have found that prompts have no value, it is either something the LLM can do or not.
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/ca49f356bdd2ab7bb7a366ef...
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/d9f1d9f9b4379d6551ba967c...
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/e74b5b0f714e0429750ef6b0...
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/91f1a08d9c27698310d63e06...
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/7f7cb63aceb7560e51c02a9d...
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/94080dde34bfca3dd9c48f14...
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/ea3a5c3a31799236115abc76...
Taken from 2 recent systems. 90% of my interaction is assurance, debugging, and then having claude operate within the meta context management framework. We work hard to set the path for actual coding - thus code output (even complex or highly integrated) usually ends up being fairly smooth+fast.
When I "wake" CC up I usually use a prompt like this to preface any complex work: https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/d2e4547fc4546eea071b9b68... (the goal is to get all relevant context in-memory).
For most planning I use Gemini. I copy either the entire codebase (if less than ~200k tokens) or select only that parts that matter for the task in large codebases. I built a tool to help me build these prompts, keep the codebase organized well in xml structure. https://github.com/backnotprop/prompt-tower
Could you explain why there is no punctuation?
This might mean the $10/month is the best. Depends entirely on how it works for you.
(Caps obviously impact the total benefit so I agree there.)
Just to give you one example - last BigCo I worked for had a schematic for new projects which resulted in... 2k EUR per month cloud cost for serving a single static html file.
At one point someone up top decided that kubes is the way to go and scrambled an impromptu schematic for new projects which could be simply described as a continental class dreadnought of a kubernetes cluster on AWS.
And it was signed off, and later followed like a scripture.
Couple stories lower we're having hard time arguing for 50 EUR budget for a weekly beer for the team, but the company is A fine with paying 2K EUR for a landing page.
They don't. They toss a coin.
But it doesn't really matter, because the C-level has been consumed by the hype like nothing I've ever seen. It could cost an arm and a leg and they'd still be pushing for it because the bubble is all-consuming, and anyone not touting AI use doesn't get funding from other similarly clueless and sucked-in VCs.
You can try it for cheap with the normal pay-as-you-go way.
They're good about telling you how full your context is, and you can use /compact to shrink it down to the essentials.
But for those of us who aren't Mr. MoneyBags like you all, keeping an eye on context size is key to keeping costs low.
And it seems like community realizes it and invents different solutions. RooCode has task orchestration built in already, there is a claude task-manager that allows splitting and remembering tasks so AI agent can pick it up quicker, there are different solutions with files like memory bank. Windsurf cursor upgraded their .widsurf/rules functionality to allow more solutions like that for instructing AI agents about the codebase/tasks. Some people even write their own scripts that feed every file to LLM and store the summary description in the separate file that AI agent tool can use instead of searching codebase.
I'm eager to see how some of these solutions will become embedded into every AI agent solution. It's one of the missing stones to make AI agents order of magnitude more efficient and productive.
Limits are a given on any plan. It would be too easy for a vibe coder to hammer away 8 hours a day for 20 days a week if there was nothing stopping them.
The real question is whether this is a better value than pay as you go for some people.
Your vibe coders are on a different dimension than mine.
Only reason I can see is you're lacking agregate capacity and are unwilling or unable to build out faster. Is that the case?
I don't think this is the right way to look at it. If CoPilot helps you earn an extra $100 a month (or saves you $100 worth of time), and this one is ~2x better, it still justifies the $100 price tag.
Additionally, when you’re in a compact distribution, being 5% better might be 100x more valuable to you.
Basically, this assumes that the marginal value is associated with cost. I don’t think most things, economically, seem to match that pattern. I will sometimes pay 10x the cost for a good meal that has fewer calories (nutritional value)
I am glad people like you exist, but I don’t think the proposition you suggest makes sense.