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Comment by mohsen1 | Hacker News Reader

Price is playing a big role in my AI usage for coding. I am using Grok Code Fast as it's super cheap. Next to it GPT-5 Codex. If you are paying for model use out of pocket Claude prices are super expensive. With better tooling setup those less smart (and often faster) models can give you better results.

I am going to give this another shot but it will cost me $50 just to try it on a real project :(

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Same here. I've been using GCF1 with opencode and getting good results. I also started using [Serena](https://github.com/oraios/serena), which has been really helpful in a large codebase. It gives you better search than plain grep, so you can quickly find what you need instead of dumping huge chunks of code into Claude or Grok and wasting tokens.

Serena really does feel like a secret weapon sometimes.

I just can't bring myself to get over the grossness factor of using an x branded product.

I really struggle to see the usecase of Grok Code Fast when you have Qwen 3 Coder right there providing much better outputs while still being fast and cheap.

I'm paying $90(?) a month for the Max and it holds up for about an hour or so of in depth coding before it kicks in the 5-hour window lockout (so effectively about 4 hours of time when I can't run it). Kinda frustrating, even with efficient prompt and context length conservation techniques. I'm going to test this new sonnet 4.5, now but it'll probably be just as quick to gobble my credits.

Do you normally run Opus by default? It seems the Max subscription should let you run Sonnet in an uninterrupted way, so it was surprising to read.

I'm on a max ($200) plan and I only use opus and I've _never_ hit a rate limit. Definitely using for 5+ hours at a time multiple days per week.

You have got to have some extremely large files or something. Even with only Opus, running into the limits with the Max subscription is almost impossible unless you really try.

I'm too cheap to pay for any of them. I've only tried gpt-oss:20b because I can run it locally and it's a complete waste of time for anything except code completions.

how are you using grok code fast? what tooling/cli/etc?

It’s currently free in OpenRouter.

Through Opencode.

Same

free in GitHub copilot atm

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