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Comment by Crowberry | Hacker News Reader

I’ve recently tried out Claude Code for a bit, I’ll make sure to give the suggested approach a go! It sounds like a nice workflow.

But I’m negatively surprised with the amount of money CC costs. Just a simple refactoring cost me about 5min + 15min review and 4usd, had I done it myself it might have taken 15-20min as well.

How much money do you typically spend on features using CC? Nobody seems to mention this

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You can sign up for a subscription and pay from $20-$200 flat with some daily/weekly restrictions on token usage.

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

Indeed, switching partially from Cursor to Claude Code increased the bill by a lot! Fortunately I use Claude Code mostly at work and I had no trouble to convince my boss to pay for it. But I’m still not sure how I’ll continue building side projects with Claude Code. Not sure I want to spend $20 each time I want to bootstrap an app in an evening just for fun…

Why not to subscribe to pro or max? I calculated my CC usage this month (I'm on a Max 200$ plan), it’s close to 2.5k$... Its just crazy to use API at price right now.

I wish I could, but they banned me and won't disclose why.

That being said, Claude Code produces the best code I've seen from an AI coding agent, and the subscriptions are a steal.

I heard Codex CLI is doing good things now, might give that a go (I have not yet).

Try Crush

Same with my account. My only conclusion is because I use a VPN. Gave them my real phone number so they already know my actual country, but still banned after a few months of on/off usage. I might consider setting up another PC for it someday, but they clearly don't want anyone to use them via VPN. Another option I considered is OpenRouter.

the investor bull case in AI is to cannabalize the labor markets at 15% margin, so 1:1 labor:AI budget is where we are headed next - e.g. $100k/100k for a senior dev. The AI share will come out of dev budgets, so expect senior salaries to fall and team sizes to shrink by a lot if this stuff works. Remember we’re in the land grab phase, all subsidized by VCs, but we’re speed running through the stages as and this phase appears to be ending based on twitter VC sentiment. There’s only so many times you can raise another $500M for 9 months of operating cost at -100% gross margin.

What if once the 100k dev jobs are gone the equivalent value in terms of AI is nowhere near that. Say it is 5k instead?

Due to oversupply. First you needed humans who can code. But now you need scalable compute.

Equivalent would be hiring those people to wave a flag infront of a car. They are replaced bt modern cars, but you dont get to receive the flag wavers wage as captured value for long if at all.

lets call that stage 2 when the labor/ai spend drops below 1.0, to understand what that might look like i would compare to surgeon model. so like $500k for a Surgeon to manage outcomes with 10x AI leverage. Arguments for: managers are compensated proportional to the capital risk they are responsible for so it makes sense that as the leverage increases the comp increases, even if the ratio drops before it u-turns and climbs. Four arguments against: 1) the economy is going to look very different with different dynamic equilibrium in surprising places; 2) this assumes software best practices remain as they are today with no disruptive breakthroughs which is unlikely, 3) systems that promote inequality are vulnerable to constant attack so it may not be a stable equilibrium 4) it may not even work - code complexity scales faster than linearly with lines of code, where is the break even point and is it higher or lower on the complexity curve than the breakeven point today?

You either get the 20 EUR/m for Sonnet and 100 for Opus. I used Sonnet and switched to Opus eventually. But Sonnet was also good. For my purposes I don't run out of the token limits, although I can't speak for the future.

When you start to refactor 100k+ lines code base it adds up even more… Some Docker builds, run the linters and the tests, you quickly exceed $40

This is why you make the linters and tests as quiet as possible. The LLM doesn't need to know every successful test, it just needs know if it passed or not.

> had I done it myself it might have taken 15-20min as well.

Could you spend that 15-20min on some other task while this one works in the background?

Well the 15 minutes code review are still there.

Not really, or I guess I could if i let it run wild. But I wanted to check what it was doing and had to steer it in other directions sometimes.

I treat it as pair programming with a junior programmer on speed!

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