I use Gemini 3 Flash, I've seen the Claude Code setups, bullish on Anthropic people are driving up tokens but I am able to produce outcomes with a fraction of the money.

▲ hmokiguess 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Do you mind sharing your workflow? What do you mean by fraction of the money, in my case personally, I'm yet to reach a session limit on the subscription plan. I'm not "tokenmaxxing" as they say, so hard to see a scenario in which the plan is expensive for the value I get.

▲ ojr 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I spend around $20 a month through API fees using my own harness, https://slidebits.com/isogen. Nothing too special, I prompt it produces file changes using grep and vector search and I can individually accept which files.

I also work on a consumer AI application https://apps.apple.com/us/app/slidebits-studio/id1138731130

For comparison someone showed me an internal company tool he was working on. He had Claude agents dangerously skipping permissions and firing up github branches through a vm sandbox just to make a single feature change. One agent to code and the other to review.

▲ dist-epoch 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you don't hit a limit running Opus, it means you are very much in the loop.

For example you probably don't have days where you ask Opus to review your whole code base and look for code duplication/technical debt/robustness issues, and then to fix some of the found issues, and do this 3-5 times until no big issues are found anymore.

▲ hmokiguess 6 hours ago | parent [-]

What’s your prompt for this, the way you described it made it seem like there’s a generalizable way I can go about this. I just rely on a testing pipeline instead so can’t think of why I would need to proactively find holes where tests haven’t already done that for me.

▲ Marha01 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I use similar workflow. Here is my refactoring and code quality prompt that I regularly run:

    Perform a thorough analysis of the <project_name> project (the code and the documentation).
    - Explore the project, go over all important files one by one and look for any mistakes or possible bugs.
    - Look for refactoring opportunities and ways to improve code quality and organization.
    - Identify any potential cruft/bloat, to ensure our code is clean and logically laid out. Keep in mind that efficient and good quality code needs to avoid over-engineered constructs and needless complexity. Avoid complicated logic where simple solutions would be more elegant.
    - Pay attention to comments: There should be enough of them to document the intent and provide high-level overview of the code logic, but not too much; avoid/remove excessive comments that simply restate the code logic or do not provide any useful information.
      - Every important function should have a top-level docstring comment that clearly explains its purpose, high-level logic overview, arguments, and return values.
    - Analyze the names of constants/variables/functions/classes and other code elements: could some of them be renamed to make their purpose more clear?
    - Analyze the documentation, uncover any potential inaccuracies/omissions and ensure the docs reflect the code.
    - Brainstorm ideas for improvements of the code and docs.
    
    After you finish the analysis, save an analysis report into "<project_name>_analysis_report.md" in the project root folder.

	▲	hmokiguess 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you!

▲ dist-epoch 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

tests will not find inconsistent naming, duplicate functions, scenarios you have not thought about testing

I use quite plain prompts, nothing fancy:

> go over the tests and do a code review, focusing on how well they test inventory management, planner and controller. maybe some tests need to be deleted, maybe other tests need to be added. the end goal should be good coverage of the core features.

> do a code review, focusing on robustness/correctness issues. validate that the code correctly implements specification.md. focus on the async client.

> there was a big refactor. please do a code review, focusing on eliminating tech debt. look for unused, obsolete or duplicate code that can be removed, look for mismatched interfaces, inconsistent function/argument/variable names. do not output what is correct, just the issues you found. for each issue output instructions for a coding agent on how to fix it. do not nitpick.

	▲	hmokiguess 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Noted, thank you! Appreciate it