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Comment by nickstinemates

16 hours ago

It feels so weird to me - people are exhausting their quotas while I am trying very hard to even reach mine with the $200 plan.

We're generating all of the code for swamp[1] with AI. We review all of that generated code with AI (this is done with the anthropic API.) Every part of our SDLC is pure AI + compute. Many feature requests every day. Bug fixes, etc.

Never hit the quota once. Something weird is definitely going on.

1: https://github.com/systeminit/swamp

My hypothesis is that people who have continuous sessions that keep the cache valid see the behavior you’re describing: at 95% cache hits (or thereabouts), the max plan goes a long way.

But people who go > 5 minutes between prompts and see no cache, usage is eaten up quickly. Especially passing in hundreds of thousands of tokens of conversation history.

I know my quote goes a lot further when I sit down and keep sessions active, and much less far when I’m distracted and let it sit for 10+ minutes between queries.

It’s a guess. But n=1 and possible confirmation bias noted, it’s what I’m seeing.

  • Why is it our job to micromanage all this when it used to work fine without? Something's clearly changed for the worse. Why are people insisting on pushing the responsibility on paying users?

Man what the hell happened to System Initiative. It was a super weird pivot from sociotechnical proclamations to a tool I honestly have no idea what it does for me? Is it n8n for agents? Is it needed when I have a bunch of skills that approximate whatever swamp is trying to do? Who knows!

  • I can't really speak to the sociotechnical proclamations, because I didn't make them.

    What it does for you is simple: if you want to automate something, it does. Load the AI harness of your choice, tell it what to automate, swamp builds extensions for whatever it needs to to accomplish your task.

    It keeps a perfect memory of everything that was done, manages secrets through vaults (which are themselves extensions it can write) and leaves behind repeatable workflows. People have built all sorts of shit - full vm lifecycle management, homelab setups, manage infrastructure in aws and azure.

    What's also interesting is the way we're building it. I gave a brief description in my initial comment.

    • Ah, interesting, thanks! I think you might consider elevating some of that kind of copy.

      The sociotechnical stuff with System Initiative was made by your CEO? The guy who is really into music? And I don't even know how long that product was a thing before the pivot. Not long!

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