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Comment by canto | Hacker News Reader

This is merely scratching the surface.

LLMs (Claude Code in particular) will explicitly create token intensive steps, plans and responses - "just to be sure" - "need to check" - "verify no leftovers", will do git diff even tho not asked for, create python scripts for simple tasks, etc. Absolutely no cache (except the memory which is meh) nor indexing whatsoever.

Pro plan for 20 bucks per month is essentially worthless and, because of this and we are entering new era - the era of $100+ monthly single subscription being something normal and natural.

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I assume you're using Opus.

I'm on the Pro plan. If I run out of tokens, which has only happened 2 or 3 times in months of use, I just work on something else that Claude can't do, or ...write the code myself.

You do have to keep a close eye on it, but I would be doing that anyway given that if it goes haywire it's wasting my time as well as tokens. I'd rather spend an extra minute writing a clearer prompt telling it exactly what I want it to do, than waste time on a slot machine.

>LLMs (Claude Code in particular) will explicitly create token intensive steps, plans and responses - "just to be sure" - "need to check" - "verify no leftovers", will do git diff even tho not asked for, create python scripts for simple tasks, etc. Absolutely no cache (except the memory which is meh) nor indexing whatsoever.

Most of these things can be avoided with a customized CLAUDE.md.

Not in my projects it seems. Perhaps you can share your best practices? Moreover, avoiding these should be the default behaviour. Currently the default is to drain your pockets.

P.S CLAUDE.md is sometimes useful but, it's a yet another token drain. Especially that it can grow exponentially.

I agree it should be the default, but it isn't. I also tend to think it's mainly to make money by default.

Another thing that helps is using plan mode first, since you can more or less see how it's going to proceed and steer it beforehand.

codex seems chill

And yet when my $100 CC Pro renewed last month my instinctive thought was wow is that all?

That can be read in two ways:

1) It's only $100, well worth the money.

2) Surprisingly little value was provide for all that money.

I'm not sure how you'd read it the second way.

$100 per month is a lot of money, in that case "wow is that all?" must refer back to how little you got from it.

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