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Comment by IAmNotACellist | Hacker News Reader

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IAmNotACellist

How does Claude Code at $200 compare to their basic one, at $20?

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well i'm running claude code 24/7 on a server - instead of short coding sessions

Running on a server? As in, running it yourself?

Maybe in the "infinite number of monkeys writing Shakespeare" way?

I’d guess in a sense that it’s on full-auto most of the time with some minimal check-ins? I was wondering how far can you take TDD-based approach to have Claud continuously produce functional code

https://x.com/ylecun/status/1935108028891861393

Error rate over time increases dramatically.

Can you describe what kind of stuff you do where it can go wild without supervision? I never managed to get to a state where agents code for more than 10 min without needing my input

Same. I pay for $100 but i generally keep a very short leash on Claude Code. It can generate so much good looking code with a few insane quirks that it ends up costing me more time.

Generally i trust it to do a good job unsupervised if given a very small problem. So lots of small problems and i think it could do okay. However i'm writing software from the ground up and it makes a lot of short term decisions that further confuse it down the road. I don't trust its thinking at all in greenfield.

I'm about a month into the $100 5x plan and i want to pay for the $200 plan, but Opus usage is so limited that going from 5x to 20x (4x increase) feels like it's not going to do much for me. So i sit on the $100 plan with a lot of Sonnet usage.

I find I get a _lot_ of Opus with the $200 plan. It's not unlimited, but I rarely cap out (I'm also not a super power user that spins up multiple instances with tons of subagents either, though).

I tend to have two instances going at once often, but i'd be fine with 1x for Opus specifically. Mostly i'm quite limited on how much i can use them because i have to review them pretty hard. Letting several instances go ham for an hour would be far more code than i can review sanely lol.

If you use a single opus instance, you cannot really run out on the 20x plan. When you start running two in parallel, it becomes a lot easier to max out, but even so you need to have them working pretty much nonstop.

That's crazy to me. Maybe i'll give it a try. I find the 5x Opus to be too little to be useful, 4x it seems still insanely small for $100. Wonder if you actually get much more than 4x?

It's exactly the same, but the $20 one will almost certainly run out of its daily token alliance if you try to use it for more than an hour or so.

The token allowance is in 5 hour sessions.

The $20 one doesn't have Opus. (This might or might not matter but it's a difference).

There's also a $100 version that's indeed the same as the $200 one but with less usage.

The $20 one doesn't have Opus

It does.

For Claude Code?

I think it may be that $20/month gets you access to Opus 4 via https://claude.ai but not in Claude Code.

Oh yes, you’re right, I was thinking about claude.ai

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