Until it doesn't...
Honestly, this entire OpenAI reset credit fiasco this past week has convinced me to rip off the Codex and Claude Code bandaids and start building my own proper Pi Coding Agent running models that I select and pay for on openrouter.
And I am feeling a lot better about it now that I've finally got it working.
I don't get the point of this. We all seem to agree that these companies have almost no moat, if one stops being a good deal, you can switch to another. That doesn't invalidate the existence of a deal that is currently good.
My point was that chasing deals like this is just kicking the can down the road. You're going to have to reckon with harsh price increases sooner or later.
So I have resolved to avoid that future-dreading and fixed it, basically.
Seems weird to me to not take advantage of the great deal the frontier labs are currently giving for subscription pricing when there's such an easy fallback in the worst case.
the rest of the comment is about moving from expensive switching costs of what harness you are using to having the difference be closer to changing some config in openrouter
Deepseek V4 Flash 0731 is surprisingly capable and cheap. [0]
Checkout pi coding agent. You can create as many different sub-agents as you wish, to specialize and understand and tackle or pass off any problem you like. It's refreshing, really. I feel like a coder in control again.
Huh, what's happened? I'm on the 20x plan and haven't noticed any fiasco, what went down exactly?
But since you don't know when resets are coming, it becomes kind of frustrating trying to game it out. One week they're resetting like crazy so you're trying to burn tokens as fast as possible. The next week they're not resetting at all so you have to adjust your workflow to be more conservative.
This whole thing sounds crazy to me, why are you so focused on making sure you hit 0% usage left when it's supposed to reset? Why can't you just use what you have and if it resets, it resets, and if it doesn't, it doesn't?
I've calculated I can spend about ~12% of usage every day, more or less, this is my "budget". If it resets, then the "12% per day" gets reset for that day, but that's it. Sounds crazy to me that I'd "invent work out of nowhere" just to spend more usage, why on earth would I adopt such a workflow? Sounds like you're burning tokens just to burn tokens???
Sure, in a video game where you have one attribute and you can minmax a strategy just focusing on that, but that's not how real-life works.
You can't just stack pending work on top of each other, expect yourself to be able to stay equally on top of everything and have the same results as if you didn't. With this comes the consideration about the tradeoffs of "produce mediocre but large body of works" vs "produce high quality but small body of works".
Who's to say what's more "rational" or not, it's not a straight-forward calculation which culminates in "Must consume all available usage to maximize resource usage" like some robot, as we are not.
It's quite literally inventing work out of nowhere as you wouldn't put the agent to do that and forcing yourself to be conscious about that work until it completes, unless you actually had the usage available. Asked another way, wouldn't your workflow clearly change if you had unlimited usage available? You'd probably attack tasks/problems that you didn't consider actually spending time/energy solving.
Not really. The AI will output the same sort of code at a certain skill level regardless of speed, it's not a human so the above is a false dichotomy. Also, it's sort of strange that you're saying it's inventing work out of nothing, you've never heard of a backlog? In companies that can grow very long and the more usage means the more that can be tackled.
> You'd probably attack tasks/problems that you didn't consider actually spending time/energy solving.
Yes? But that's probably after the backlog is complete unless they are truly low hanging or high priority fruit. So not sure how that reasons with your point.
It'll output the same code given the same prompts yes, but you don't just accept whatever it puts out, it requires iterations before it's actually ready to be committed as none of the agents write perfect code on their first try. So, it's not a "false dichotomy", I'm just looking at larger things than "LLM does inference"