Comment by peteforde
3 hours ago
Totally! Though I maintain that the only good aspect to microservices is that krazam video. You know the one.
I do get frustrated when I see people not using Plan steps, copy/pasting from web front-ends or expecting to one-shot their entire codebase from a single dense prompt. It's problematic because it's not immediately obvious whether someone is still arguing like it's late 2024, you know what I mean?
Also, speaking for myself I can't recommend that anyone use anything but Opus 4.5 right now. 4.6 has a larger context window, but it's crazy expensive when that context window gets actually used even while most agree that these models get dumber when they have a super-large context. 4.5 actually scores slightly better than 4.6 on agentic development, too! But using less powerful models is literally using tools that are much more likely to produce the sorts of results that skeptics think apply across the board.
Haven't looked into 4.5 vs 4.6 in depth (since the latter seems good for my needs), but
> but it's crazy expensive
was something I struggled with until just going for the Max subscription and cancelling my other ones.
I'm not sure what Anthropic is doing, but they're either making truckloads of money from those paying per-token (especially since you're not supposed to use subscriptions for server use cases --> devs can use Claude Code, but not code review bots etc.), or heavily subsidizing subscriptions.
100 USD is worth it for me, I've only hit the 5 hour limits a few times, and haven't hit 100% of the weekly limits once. I fear to think how much comparable usage with any of the Opus models would have been, if I were to pay per token - even Sonnet could get similarly expensive.