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Comment by stilesja | Hacker News Reader

I burned though my weekly fable usage last night on the $200 plan. I had $200 in promotional usage credits and was in the middle of executing a moderate sized coding plan. Ran on usage credits for about 1h 15m and burned $120 in usage credits. I was astounded to see how fast the $ usage added up. One problem was that I was using sub-agent execution so multiple agents were running simultaneously and I realized at the end that claude had "Forgotten" my directive to use cheaper models as appropriate for sub-agent tasks so I was running multiple instances of Fable at once. Still hard to imagine paying per token. $200 a month is high, $200 per night is crazy.

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I am too young (most of us on here are) to have lived through the paying for time on time-share machines in the 60s/70s, but this is giving me creepy memories of paying for sprintnet/telenet and tymnet... And I guess aol, compuserv, delphi. Are we really doing this computing model again?

That is really a great insight!

If I remember well, visual studio/ msdn used to be like 5k-10k per year... Basically any IT tool cost a shit load of money.

I have in mind 50k-100k ish for 3d studio max or was it softimage? (Well seems softimage https://www.awn.com/animationworld/siggraph-news-announcing-... ).

So... Basically we are back to this era.

I think you were able to buy VS Pro perpetual licenses for one time 500-1000 at all times. Of course they had higher tiers and a subscription model which were more expensive but in reality for most people there was little to no added value.

>subscription model which were more expensive but in reality for most people there was little to no added value

The value was the multiple CDs of MSDN documentation and code samples which where very handy considering the slim pickings on the internet in 1995.

These weren't included with an IDE perpetual license retail box.

yeah. those msdn cd's were very valuable back then. it was before the market was flooded with tech books also. aside from Russinovich's stuff, you basically needed that cd set to do any hardcore windows coding up til probably 15ish years ago.

well spotted, I couldn't place the feeling, me it's like paying per minute phone costs when downloading on a modem. You know it will cost, but you do it anyway.

The other weird thing about the subs is that if the agents aren't grinding if feels like I'm losing money.

I still remember searching really hard for shareware apps and games between 1 to 3 megs, though I am sure I used more minutes looking for them than the downloads would have taken. Back then, if we weren't limited by our dialups, we were surely limited by our very low storage capabilities. But man, code was so much better and tighter then. Haven't seen much focus on this in vibe coding, sadly.

I stopped using sub agents after they caused me to hit my limit to quickly. Had to create a separate account and pay for another max plan to unblock myself temporarily

Yeah sub-agents are a scam and the results are always worse since you lose all context, caching, etc.

I used fable to design a front-end, and damn! It's good! Frontend coding is dead. Design in a way also.

And it was damn cheap too! The main page cost was like 5 dollar.

My current 30-day Codex usage amounts to over 15,000 USD in tokens.

You're good.

Dude that topped Meta's tokenmaxxxing board before it was shut down used 265 billion tokens in a month. I kid you not.

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