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Comment by SamPatt | Hacker News Reader

>Claude code feels more powerful than cursor, but why? One of the reasons seems it's ability to be scripted. At the end of the day, cursor is an editor, while claude code is a swiss army knife (on steroids).

Agreed, and I find that I use Claude Code on more than traditional code bases. I run it in my Obsidian vault for all kinds of things. I run it to build local custom keyboard bindings with scripts that publish screenshots to my CDN and give me a markdown link, or to build a program that talks to Ollama to summarize my terminal commands for the last day.

I remember the old days of needing to figure out if the formatting changes I wanted to make to a file were sufficient to build a script or just do them manually - now I just run Claude in the directory and have it done for me. It's useful for so many things.

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The thing is, Claude Code only works if you have the plan. It’s impossible to use it on the API, and it makes me wonder if $100/month is truly enough. I use it all day every day now, and I must be consuming a whole lot more than my $100 is worth.

> It’s impossible to use it on the API

What does this mean?

Not OP but probably just cost.

This.

You can EASILY burn $20 a day doing little, and surely could top $50 a day.

It works fine, but the $100 I put in to test it out did not last very long even on Sonnet.

You can definitely use Claude Code via the API

I think he means it's not economically sound to use it via API

A well-known iOS dev used Claude Code to build an iOS app and wrote a custom checking tool for how many tokens it consumed on the plan to compare with API pricing.

He uses two max plans ($200/mo + $200/mo) and his API estimate was north of $10,000/mo

I think it is available on Claude Pro now, so just $20.

It is but very limited. I use API only, since this is the only plan, without usage limits and on demand pricing:

5x Pro usage ($100/month)

20x Pro usage ($200/month)

Source: https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11145838-using-cla...

"Pro ($20/month): Average users can send approximately 45 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR send approximately 10-40 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours."

"You will have the flexibility to switch to pay-as-you-go usage with an Anthropic Console account for intensive coding sprints."

You use it "all day every day", so it makes sense that you would prefer the plan. It's perfectly economical to use it without a plan, if your usage patterns are different. Here's a tool someone else wrote that can help you decide: https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage

Sure, but if your usage pattern is such that you can’t justify the plan, then Cursor is a better option :)

One thing that I am not liking about the LLM world is that it seems to be tilting several things back in favor of BigCorps.

The open source world is one where antirez, working on his own off in Sicily, could create a project like Redis and then watch it snowball as people all over got involved.

Needing a subscription to something only a large company can provide makes me unhappy.

We'll see if "can be run locally" models for more specific tasks like coding will become a thing, I guess.

This is some nightmare fuel vendor lock-in where the codebase isn't understood by anyone and companies have to fork over more and more otherwise their business couldn't grow, adapt, etc

Yikes, you've just perfectly articulated a trajectory that I've been using subconsciously as one of the primary reasons why I want to keep my coding craft sharp.

Visionary, well done. Then comes the claim that AGI can unwind the spaghetti, and then the reality check.

I, for one, welcome our new LLM overlords.

I share this concern - given the trajectory of improvements I do hope that we'll have something close to this level that can run locally within 18 months or so. And of course the closed source stuff will likely be better by then, but I genuinely believe I would choose an open source version of this right now if I had the choice.

The open source alternatives I've used aren't there yet on my 4090. Fingers crossed we'll get there.

I'm very interested to hear what your uses cases are when using it in your Obsidian Vault

Formatting changes across lots of notes, creating custom plugins, diagnosing problems with community plugins, creating a syncing program that compares my vault (with publish:true frontmatter) to my blog repo and if see changes then automatically updates the repo (which is used to build my site), creating a tool that converts inline urls to markdown footnotes, etc.

Obsidian is my source of truth and Claude is really good at managing text, formatting, markdown, JS, etc. I never let it make changes automatically, I don't trust it that much yet, but it has undoubtedly saved me hours of manual fiddling with plugins and formatting alone.

How do you script Claude code? I've been using it as a CLI but haven't thought of invoking Claude code through a script, sounds very interesting.

Read the article. Basically just using aliases for specififc prompts.

I had an LLM sort a crap-tonne of my notes into category folders the other day. My god that was helpful

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