I mean, it feels hard not to laugh at this type of blog post. My cynical interpretation is that this is a type of passing the buck to engineers in enterprise settings ("Stop spending tokens. Did you read the value maximization blog post? It is your fault.")

Oh yes, Claude will do all sorts of different things -- it depends on how you use it! You should totally learn all of these little finicky things ... because now completing your tasks cost money. It's not "free" anymore haha like when you used your old text editor, what are you a grandpa?

Oh, and those things will definitely change, as we (the priests of Claude) are vibe coding the system you use to do your little "tasks" ... right, you can't see how it works ... the code is not available. It's all good, just trust us -- we're totally looking out for you.

I mean it is utterly ridiculous to talk around this model of development. There are so many walls between you and doing the thing you want to do.

Agents are great, but the notion of "best tricks" for how to best use an opaque costful tool which will, by all odds, be completely different in a few months time is quite funny.

You know what won't change? A fucking text editor. Or your pi config, or a local model you run and trust.

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DangitBobby 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not sure how this level of cynicism is even remotely warranted. The post helps people who don't understand LLMs very well get the most out of Claude. Your incentives here are actually aligned with Anthropics since both of you want fewer tokens inputted and outputted per task completed.

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mccoyb 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Perhaps my enterprise cynicism is not warranted, but my other comments refer to accurate descriptions of reality: Anthropic wants to place their opaque system between you and any computational task that you wish to perform. Do you contest this or think it is not accurate?

Why do you think that Anthropic wants fewer tokens inputted and outputted?

	▲	DangitBobby 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Because they sell subscriptions and tokens cost them compute, and their margin lives in the difference between what your subscription pays in and what you cost them in compute. They have also been supply constrained on compute and if users cost them less in compute they can more subscriptions and less customer frustration. I agree they want you to have a subscription. That doesn't mean they aren't aligned with their subscribers.

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mnahkies 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Through my weekend experiments, I've found I can get way better outcomes, and an order of magnitude less cost with my slapped together sandboxed omp setup plus ZDR openrouter models (DeepSeek, Kimi, etc) than I've ever seen from Claude Code at work.

Everything is version pinned and a deliberate choice to change, and a git revert away from changing back.

TBF the models may change underneath me to some extent still, but the cost benefit of running them myself doesn't pan out yet (for agentic coding at least, don't have enough local vram to get a usable context window and generation speed, self hosting on runpod or similar isn't economically sensible for my current consumption though I have tinkered with it)

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csallen 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm trying to understand your point of view, but it kind of just sounds like you're against learning how to use tools efficiently?

I mean, agentic coding software is hardly the first tool to exist where learning some idiosyncrasies of how to use it well can result in more efficiency and cost savings.

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mccoyb 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It's very easy to understand:

- I'm happy to learn how to use tools efficiently

- I like to be able to inspect my tools

- I'm against tools changing underneath me

Are you against any of these points?

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csallen 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I think I'm happy about the first two. The third I suppose I care less about, just because I've kind of become used to it from decades working on the internet where many businesses/tools/apps are more like services and less like physical tools that never change.

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RossBencina 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The third I suppose I care less about, just because I've kind of become used to it

I've never become used to it. My impression is that the constant churn has accelerated. Plausible drivers are (1) normalize novelty as desirable (like fast fashion), (2) product developer/designer incentive structures that reward revolutionary change over progressive refinement. The global switch to subscription models and continuous deployment didn't help.

> more like services and less like physical tools that never change.

I'm not sure that constant change is a characteristic feature of services, especially not professional services.

It used to be that you bought a piece of software and used that version until you decided it was worth upgrading, like a particular physical tool. The software still evolved, just like the design of physical tools can, in principle, evolve.

All that said, agentic AI tooling is evolving so rapidly I'm not sure an expectation of stability is realistic.

	▲	Wowfunhappy 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> It used to be that you bought a piece of software and used that version until you decided it was worth upgrading, like a particular physical tool. But Claude is running on someone else's computer, not yours, so it's not Photoshop so much as AWS. Or a rented server farm, if AWS is too new school for you. Of course there's an ongoing cost! And if you configure the server to use more electricity, you get billed more. If you want to do agentic tooling locally, you can do that—the models aren't quite as good, but they're not bad either. But be warned, for the large models you're going to have to acquire some serious hardware, to the point where you may wish you'd chosen to just rent it instead!

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mccoyb 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree that the third seems to be implied by industry, but I'd argue that it's not clear that it is necessary -- and it is subtle whether or not it is beneficial?

My contention is that we should be building towards less churn, not more. I'm aware that some churn is the cost of engaging in any sort of enterprise, but I'm deeply suspicious of an AI company inserting themselves between me, and the tasks I wish to do with my device -- with a completely opaque system that I can't really "learn".

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dist-epoch 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm curious if you also laugh at articles about how to reduce your AWS bill, or how to add indices to Postgres such that you can run it on cheaper hardware.

	▲	Banditoz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think you're conflating two different things here. I am not aware of any DB optimization articles that say "trust me bro, throw your data, don't build indices, it'll Just Work™!"

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runeblaze 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

dude, if you try to do harness development yourself you will realize that most things said in this blogpost is shared with any ${sufficiently_advanced_harness}. this is not really claude-specific, this is just how this class of tools, OSS or not, works

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mccoyb 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That's not my complaint. I know well the concerns of agent harnesses. My complaint is that this is a low-dimensional projection of a system which I have no insight into, and therefore, I cannot evaluate the tips myself against their source.

Am I to believe the creators, knowing full well that the source will, as Boris Cherny put it in a recent interview, be deleted and rewritten from scratch at the release of the next big model?

Further: I'm responding to content in the blog post itself:

> Until pretty recently, the tools you wrote code with were a flat fee (or free). Your editor cost the same whether you fixed one test or fifty that afternoon, so an individual task didn't really have a price of its own.

I find this type of prose ridiculous. It conveys "this is the way things are now, get used to it".

Does that make sense?

	▲	runeblaze 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> which I have no insight into i guess you do? claude code is the commercial closed sourced version provides by ant. reading a mini version of vllm or sglang and then read codex source code or grok build source code will teach you all things taught by this article, fully in the open it is like saying that you have no insights into some $commercial_db_system which is kinda true but imagine if the article is to teach you indices, query normalization, etc..
	▲	bluefirebrand 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> I find this type of prose ridiculous. It conveys "this is the way things are now, get used to it". This is absolutely what AI companies and AI lovers want you to believe