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. 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. aenis · 1786050100 · focus · HN ↗

            I suspect it must depend on how one manages their codebase - wrt to docs, ADRs, and general guardrails.

            For me it is not great for design work - Fable is way better, and 4.8 was conservative and thus better (Opus 5 seems to jump to conclusions far more eagerly). But for overnight builds, where I give it 8hrs worth of work on LLDs created by Fable - its great. Where Opus 4.8 would often lose the plot and stop for questions clearly answered in the LLD - Opus 5 does manage to complete. Since it launched, I don't remember it ever disappointing me with builds. But designs? Boy, is this thing explosively stupid sometimes.

         3. ethin · 1786061248 · focus · HN ↗

            For me it's the opposite: I don't have $200 plus to throw at Anthropic every Month, and when I do get to use Fable it rips through my usage credits like there's absolutely no tomorrow.

            Of course, the hilarious thing to me is that Anthropic likes to claim that the usage limits are because of resource allocation problems or something like that. Obviously no such issue exists, otherwise they wouldn't allow you to bypass it by just paying a bit more and it would be a hard limit. So usage credits are entirely their way of just screwing you out of more money.

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