Comment by Syntaf
3 days ago
I put in probably thousands of Claude session hours a month, aggregated across work + personal.
I must be missing something or supremely lucky because I feel like I’ve never hit these “stupid” moments.
If I do, it’s probably because I forgot to switch off of haiku for some tiny side thing I was doing before going back to planning.
There are 720 hours in a month. You'd have to be running 3 sessions in parallel continuously to be doing thousands of session-hours in a month. Are individual people really doing this?!
We do.
I work with 3-5 parallel sessions most of the time. Some of the projects are related, some are not, some sessions are just managing and tuning my system configuration, whatever it means at a given time.
It doesn't feel weird to me.
3-5 parallel sessions for 8 hours a workday, fine. 5x8x20 = 800. How do we get to thousands?!
3 replies →
Our developers work office hours, but would frequently have 10 plus sessions open. Massive parallelism is one of the benefits of agentic coding.
Similar usage here. But I encountered this moments, and I chalk it up to the random nature of LLMs. Back in Sonnet 3.5 days, it would happen every other day. I even build an 'you are absolutely right' tracker back then to measure it. Opus 4.6, maybe once or twice a month.
Yes, subjectively there do seem to be moments where the quality of the output drops significantly - usually during US peak hours.
It's possible that it's simply paranoia, but moments where Opus starts acting like Haiku seem to correlate with periods of higher latency and HTTP errors. Don't like reporting this because it's so hand-wavy and conspiratorial, but it's difficult not to think they're internally using extraordinary measures of some sort to manage capacity.
But even when Opus is running healthy, it still doesn't address the underlying issue that these models can only do so much. I have had Opus build out a bunch of apps but I'm still finding my time absorbed as soon as it comes to anything genuinely exceeding "CRUD level difficulty". Ask it to fix a subtle visual alignment issue, make a small change to a completely novel algorithm, or just fix a tiny bug without having to watch for "Oh, this means I should rewrite module <X>" is something that simply isn't possible while still being able to stand over the work.
It's not to say I don't get a massive benefit from these tools, I just think it's possible to be asking too much of them, and that's maybe the real problem to solve.
Most people hate reading. Therefore they don't know how to write. Therefore they can't prompt properly. Not to mention so many "enemies of logic" cults being so strong nowadays.