What are people doing at home? I have like 5 different apps I code on the $20/month Claude plan and like sure I can hit rate limits but - What are people doing to burn through $3k in tokens?

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binarymax an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Same for me. $20/mo is just fine and I use it to code daily.

I suspect the people that burn through tokens have several subagents and 50 skills loaded and 40 MCP tools. All those load up the context on every single turn.

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gabriel-uribe an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

YMMV but automations eat through the $100-$200 plans, which burn thousands in tokens alone.

I have hourly automations for root cause analysis on customer support issues, daily automations for eg log analysis, weekly & monthly automations for KPI tracking & actioning.

I will say, when I was building side projects that were 1) fairly well defined in scope and 2) without users/need for automations it was much easier to stay under $20/mo plan limits. Now I regularly hit weekly limits and need multiple Max plans

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Random09 an hour ago | parent [-]

Most of it doesn't require AI. You could generate automation scripts that do that, except of customer support. People became dependent on AI in places where it never was required and now tech bros are doing the squeeze.

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cortesoft 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The sweet spot is using AI to create those automation scripts, and only hooking AI up to do the high level analysis, and then have it delegate to those scripts.

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gabriel-uribe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't miss the days of scraping through logs or dashboards myself to troubleshoot some latency or malformed data issue that I missed conditionals for.

AI is incredible at finding patterns in otherwise benign stdouts, let alone as it cross-references data streams.

In theory, I don't need most of these automations. But for $200/mo? I will happily reduce my cognitive burden on stuff that doesn't impact the core business and make it easier to keep things gliding smoothly.

When the subsidized plans disappear, I will keep these automations going with the best small models that fit on my laptop.

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Random09 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

What I mean is a script that can look through the logs. They are known and deterministic (if you properly handle errors) and you can analyze them statistically. If you don't know what logs your app is outputting, then you have a bigger problem in your hands tbh.

	▲	gabriel-uribe 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Deterministic scripts are awesome, and they certainly power my internal dashboards. But I'm a human - I will miss things. I maintain too many apps to have entire codebases in memory at this point. Or to continue monitoring all these streams. Logging is cheap - I log as much as possible because an AI will scan it for me. I just want scoped pull requests to review proactively against the slew of things that can happen in prod that I didn't account for in my specs (again, from logs, customer issues, etc). I discard most of them. That is fine.

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Random09 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> What are people doing to burn through $3k in tokens?

The short answer is: they are doing slop. Most of the coding can be done quickly with a keyboard, intelisense and maybe some code generation templates.

But people became dependent on AI doing everything for them and tech bros now started to squeeze. Like a drug dealers.