Ask HN: Has Claude Code been (mostly) usable for you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has Claude Code been (mostly) usable for you?

I have just had my 3rd session in less than a week when I had to eventually quit Claude Code and do a task using another model/subscription.

Am I just unlucky?

EDIT: it is working again. Today I was asking for research and I kept getting warnings that the model was unavailable (Opus 4.8)

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I've been using Claude Code for about a month. I'm on the $20/month plan. I mostly use whatever the current Sonnet model is, as it does the level of coding/reasoning I need without chewing up a ton of my credits, only switching to Opus or Fable when I had something deeper to chew on, like building some ongoing skills to apply to my whole project or doing a deep dive to check Sonnet's work on my overall code. I must say that I've never had a time when Claude was not usable. The closest I've been is the session saying it lost connection to GitHub and that I should create a new session, which was probably a good idea anyway, to save on token usage.

I am reading this on hnafterdark - the HN proxy in golang that renders HN in dark mode. Claude wrote it for me, including gitea actions, and deployed to my home server while I was nap-trapped by a sleeping baby. Because I wanted to read HN while nap trapped, without shedding too much light. So: yes.

I've used Claude Code for many hours every day since the original Sonnet so I'd have to say.. yes?

Are you using the $20/month subscription? I don't use it much, perhaps two 20-minute sessions a day so I don't get close to using my quota.

When it works, it is a great system, but now three times in a week it wasted some of my time.

I'm on the Max plan. I think it's $200 now but when I signed up it was only $100 and it never went up so I suppose I'm a lucky early adopter. Having said that, even at $200 I'd say it's completely worth it for myself because I use it quite a lot. If you plan to build lots of things or maybe very large projects I would recommend it. If you're more on the just-getting-started end of the spectrum, the $20/mo plan is perfectly fine, use a cheaper model like Opus 4.8 or 5 (or even Sonnet 5 is probably more than capable at that level). If you code a lot you will run into token limits, I used to hit the limit after an hour or two of work, then you get a message saying like "limit reached. you can continue at 4:35pm" and so you just take a break or you switch to another frontier model for an hour or two.

Why not use Opus 5?

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