Opus + extended thinking + deep research = 3-5 messages/reports per five hour limit. That’s the fastest way I’ve found to blow through the Pro plan.

Some stuff I’ve used it for in the last day: figuring out what a family member needs for FAFSA as a nontraditional student, help identify and authenticate some rare first editions and incunabula for a museum collection I volunteer at, find a list of social events in my area (based on my preferences) that are coming up in the next week (Chatgpt Agent works surprisingly well for this too), adapting Directus and Medusa to my project’s existing schema and writing up everything I need to migrate, and so on.

Deep research really hits the Claude limits hard and that’s the best way to avoid hallucinations when asking an important question or making it write complex code. I just switch from Claude to ChatGPT/Gemini until the limits reset but Claude’s deep research seems to handily beat Gemini (and OpenAI isnt even in the running). DR queries take much longer (5-10 min in average) but have much more in depth and accurate answers.

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steve_adams_86 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I hadn't considered that. I'm using it almost exclusively to validate logic, kind of like a fuzzer in nature ("What if we need to do this with this logic/someone tries to do that/what am I missing/etc"), or to fill in specifications ("what feature would compliment this/what could be trimmed to achieve MVP more easily/does this spec appear to be missing anything according to this set of requirements"), which requires a lot of review, and using more expensive models like Opus doesn't appear to provide meaningfully better results. After prompting it, I typically have a lot to think about and the terminal goes quiet, or I prompt it on a related matter that will similarly require my eyes and brain for long enough that I won't be able to limit out.

I can see how work involving larger contexts and deeper consideration would lead to exhausting limits a lot faster though, even if you aren't using it like a slot machine.

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theshrike79 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"find a list of social events in my area"

Isn't this something you can do with a simple Google search? Or Perplexity?

No need to shove by far the most expensive LLM (Claude Opus 4) at it.

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throwup238 5 days ago | parent [-]

Not for the Los Angeles metro area. There isn’t a single calendar or event aggregator that covers the entire area and with an LLM I can give it complex schedules (i.e. a dump of my calendar for that week) and preferences to filter the list of events for the stuff I like, including vague stuff like “I like country music in the style of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ but not modern country radio”.

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theshrike79 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

That sounds like a startup for me.

Collate all the LA Metro area events from different sources and whip up an app or web site where people can filter them and subscribe to the events in Google Calendar or in .ical format.

You can even have Claude vibe code it for you :)

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tkiolp4 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Killing a fly with a cannonball.

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throwup238 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Doesn’t really matter when the marginal cost of the cannonball is effectively zero - I’m already paying the monthly subscription.

Then not using the canonball is just a waste of time, which is a heck of a lot more valuable than some purist aversion to using LLMs to save time and effort.

	▲	steve_adams_86 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		One could argue this is like paying a subscription for gasoline and saying you better use it up or it's a waste. There's an externality at play. I know LLMs aren't as much of an environmental scourge as people sometimes make them out to be, but if they're used eagerly and aggressively, their impacts certainly have a capability of scaling in concerning ways.

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Zopieux 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Gosh I so despise this new normal. Just when I thought I could fight bloat and unnecessary tech in my own tiny corner of the world, only for a few to ruin it with ridiculous LLM (ab)use.

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xboxnolifes 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Where is the fly swatter at?

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Terretta 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

When you say not even in the running, is that including Deep Research on o3-pro?

	▲	throwup238 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I haven't tried o3-pro, but my fundamental problem with ChatGPT Deep Research is that it only searches for a few dozen sources, whereas Claude and Gemini regularly use 400+ sources.