Thread

1. theropost · 1786045967 · focus · HN ↗

   Anthropic is a bit nuts, I had $260 of credits on my max account for the extra usage the other night. It was expiring, so I figured I'll fire up an agentic swarm to deep dive and make some deep changes to some old cold bases.. literally 25 minutes or less, $260 burnt, it didn't get get into the implementation, just wrote a ton of useless plans for the most part. It really opened my eyes to what they expect to charge people.. wayyyy overpriced.

   1. polishdude20 · 1786046013 · focus · HN ↗

      You should just spend those towards a cursor subscription.
   2. cortesoft · 1786046184 · focus · HN ↗

      It’s crazy how different the credit cost and subscription cost are.

      With the $200 subscription, I can have Fable on ultracode working for hours and not dent the usage limits.

      1. AlexandrB · 1786047695 · focus · HN ↗

         VCs are footing the bill for that $200 subscription.

         1. ericd · 1786047779 · focus · HN ↗

            They have something like 80% gross margins, are at a $100B/yr ARR, and are growing at 10x per year... If that keeps up, they're going to be doing more revenue than Google in a year ($400B ARR, 20% per year growth)

            1. dexwiz · 1786048417 · focus · HN ↗

               How can you sanely project the last 12 months forward? We have seen a huge uptick in usage. Last summer AI was a toy to most devs, now every enterprise developer I talked to uses it every day. Coding agent providers are surely going to hit market saturation in the near future.
         2. ux266478 · 1786048001 · focus · HN ↗

            That's a valid usecase for VCs.
   3. aenis · 1786047084 · focus · HN ↗

      I managed to lose around $300 in credits I had saved for some emergency /fast sessions the following way: switch to Fable. Work on the design. Downgrade to Opus for the build. If any of other parallel Opus session has /fast enabled it seems to enable it for the newly spawned session by default. Before I knew it, the $300 was gone. I think the bug is now solved, but it was rather unpleasant. I dont ever remember bugs that would drain my wallet - with claude code its just another Tuesday. Still love it.

      1. tempest_ · 1786047536 · focus · HN ↗

         I dont love it.

         Opus 5 is just a token burner.

         I use fable plan and spawn opus 4.8 workflows which seems to work alright.

         1. robbru · 1786048733 · focus · HN ↗

            Opus 5 loves to stop working "for safety reasons" and shuts down the session! I avoid it at all costs now. Opus 4.8 has been my default as well.
      2. bellowsgulch · 1786047842 · focus · HN ↗

         [delayed]
      3. gnull · 1786048089 · focus · HN ↗

         Claude code is just pool quality. They don't make how this thing will behave clear to the user, or give control. They fail at anything that needs an abstraction or model, not just APIs and shell scripts glued together. And "just ask AI" seems to be the default fix.

         That vibe coding they brag about as if it was a good thing, it shows.

         Take their notation for describing permissions. The docs are not comprehensive, and in practice it doesn't quite work how they describe it.

         Or their management of sub-agents. I once lost a sub-agent, it finished and disappeared from UI. Apparently, you can't bring it back yourself: you have to ask the parent agent to do it for you. But the parent was Fable, and I ran out of credits, so I was locked out of using my opus sub-agent because of it.

         Or an even more grotesque example: when you paste your claude API token to authorize, it covers characters with *. But it seems like an LLM has hallucinated a limit of API key length and the tail of your key stays visible.

         1. thejosh · 1786048571 · focus · HN ↗

            so many ridiculous "how the fuck did this get through basic QA?" issues with Claude Code.

            I can't believe how many critical bugs fall through.

            My favourite one is the bug where Plan mode can execute destructive commands inadvertently.

            Then all these get closed with `Closing for now — inactive for too long. Please open a new issue if this is still relevant.`. Awesome.

            1. formerly_proven · 1786049298 · focus · HN ↗

               > I can't believe how many critical bugs fall through.

               Almost like CC is 100% vibe coded.

   4. mikae1 · 1786047217 · focus · HN ↗

      And at that cost they're still not profitable. It's going to be a bumpy road ahead...

      1. arrowleaf · 1786048024 · focus · HN ↗

         I thought they are making a profit on API pricing? A quick Google shows somewhere between 50-70% margins on API inference.

         1. bakugo · 1786048508 · focus · HN ↗

            API pricing is almost definitely profitable, but at this point I assume it's a small minority of their inference traffic compared to subscription usage, and unlikely to make up for the rest of their expenses on its own.
      2. tyre · 1786048090 · focus · HN ↗

         People keep saying this but from what we’ve seen, Anthropic models are marginally profitable and earn back their costs over their lifetime. The company is burning money building the next versions and other ventures (e.g. verticals), but the models themselves have been profitable.

         1. gamblor956 · 1786048505 · focus · HN ↗

            They're EBITDA profitable, not GAAP profitable.
      3. an0malous · 1786048304 · focus · HN ↗

         What’s the blast radius of this bubble popping? It’s all private investment still right?

         1. bhewes · 1786048425 · focus · HN ↗

            Two thirds of most of the DC builds are not compute. So it's a CRE play the last leg holding up that mess.
      4. arikrahman · 1786048374 · focus · HN ↗

         Meanwhile I can do all that and more with reasonix harness for Deepseek with a cache hit rate of 99%. And that's with unsubsidized American providers like cloudflare or Digital Ocean
   5. criddell · 1786048446 · focus · HN ↗

      [delayed]

      1. echelon · 1786048797 · focus · HN ↗

         Yeah, but now we can hire the Chinese instead for 1/100th the cost. It's an even better deal.

         Plus we get to own, keep, run, do whatever with the model.

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