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Comment by tgtweak | Hacker News Reader

Is it considerably more cost effective than cline+sonnet api calls with caching and diff edits?

Same context length and throughput limits?

Anecdotally I find gpt4.1 (and mini) were pretty good at those agentic programming tasks but the lack of token caching made the costs blow up with long context.

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If you use Claude Code with a subscription and run `ccusage` [0] you can get an idea of your "true usage" and cost.

[0] https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage

I'm on the basic $20/mo sub and only ran into token cap limitations in the first few days of using Claude Code (now 2-3 weeks in) before I started being more aggressive about clearing the context. Long contexts will eat up tokens caps quickly when you are having extended back-and-forth conversations with the model. Otherwise, it's been effectively "unlimited" for my own use.

YMMV I'm using the $100/mo max subscription and I hit the limit during a focused coding session where I'm giving it prompts non-stop.

Unfortunately there's no easy tool to inspect usage. I started a project to parse the Claude logs using Claude and generate a Chrome trace with it. It's promising but it was taking my tokens away from my core project.

Check out ccusage, it sounds like the tool you’re describing: https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage

That's neat. According to the tool I'm consuming ~300m tokens per day coding with a (retail?) cost of ~125$/day. The output of the model is definitely worth $100/mo to me.

This is a good bar to know. I see the warnings but not sure how much I really have left.

Do you mostly use opus?

Mostly sonnet because of the usage limits.

Makes sense. Seeing some posts about how the system can slow down or decrease in quality at certain times of day.

Neat tool thanks!

ccusage on GitHub.

Yes, it’s much better.

It uses way less tokens or much more effectively when running locally.

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