My answer to this is simply rolling back to the pro plan for interactive usage in the coming month, and forcefully cutting myself over to one of the alternative Chinese models to just get over the hump and normalise API pricing at a sensible rate with sensible semantics.

Dealing with Claude going into stupid mode 15 times a day, constant HTTP errors, etc. just isn't really worth it for all it does. I can't see myself justifying $200/mo. on any replacement tool either, the output just doesn't warrant it.

I think we all jumped on the AI mothership with our eyes closed and it's time to dial some nuance back into things. Most of the time I'm just using Opus as a bulk code autocomplete that really doesn't take much smarts comparatively speaking. But when I do lean on it for actual fiddly bug fixing or ideation, I'm regularly left disappointed and working by hand anyway. I'd prefer to set my expectations (and willingness to pay) a little lower just to get a consistent slightly dumb agent rather than an overpriced one that continually lets me down. I don't think that's a problem fixed by trying to swap in another heavily marketed cure-all like Gemini or Codex, it's solved by adjusting expectations.

In terms of pricing, $200 buys an absolute ton of GLM or Minimax, so much that I'd doubt my own usage is going to get anywhere close to $200 going by ccusage output. Minimax generating a single output stream at its max throughput 24/7 only comes to about $90/mo.

I put in probably thousands of Claude session hours a month, aggregated across work + personal.

I must be missing something or supremely lucky because I feel like I’ve never hit these “stupid” moments.

If I do, it’s probably because I forgot to switch off of haiku for some tiny side thing I was doing before going back to planning.

I literally hit my 5 hour window limit in 1.5 hours every single day now.

2 weeks ago, I had only hit my limit a single time and that was when I had multiple agents doing codebase audits.

I think my next steps are: 1) try out openai $20/month. I've heard they're much more generous. 2) try out open router free models. I don't need geniuses, so long as I can see the thinking (something that Claude code obfuscates by default) I should be good. I've heard good things about the CLIO harness and want to try openrouter+clio

Please don't use grossly offensive terms in this forum. That sort of language is not welcome here.

Every service is being sold at a deep discount chasing market share, but it's not lasting forever.

This is what I did, downgraded to pro and pay for opencode zen for the open models. I like the combo of the two

Are you using the Chinese models through their individual services or via an intermediary layer?

> I think we all jumped on the AI mothership with our eyes closed and it's time to dial some nuance back into things.

I’m kind of confused by these takes from HN readers. I could see LinkedIn bros getting reality checked when they finally discover that LLMs aren’t magic, but I’m confused about how a developer could go all-in on AI and not immediately realize the limitations of the output.

> I think we all jumped on the AI mothership with our eyes closed

Oh no, there's plenty of us willing to say we told you so.

What's more interesting to me is what it's going to look like if big companies start removing "AI usage" from their performance metrics and cease compelling us to use it. More than anything else, that's been the dumbest thing to happen with this whole craze.