Comment by ModernMech
4 days ago
Yeah, but it also makes budgeting hard. Normally you'd want to budget about 20% per day to use your whole week up in time. But since they reset usage sporadically, it becomes optimal to burn tokens as fast as possible to be as low as possible when they reset.
But since you don't know when resets are coming, it becomes kind of frustrating trying to game it out. One week they're resetting like crazy so you're trying to burn tokens as fast as possible. The next week they're not resetting at all so you have to adjust your workflow to be more conservative.
> use your whole week up in time [...] optimal to burn [...] trying to game it out [...] you're trying to burn tokens as fast
This whole thing sounds crazy to me, why are you so focused on making sure you hit 0% usage left when it's supposed to reset? Why can't you just use what you have and if it resets, it resets, and if it doesn't, it doesn't?
I've calculated I can spend about ~12% of usage every day, more or less, this is my "budget". If it resets, then the "12% per day" gets reset for that day, but that's it. Sounds crazy to me that I'd "invent work out of nowhere" just to spend more usage, why on earth would I adopt such a workflow? Sounds like you're burning tokens just to burn tokens???
If you spend $200 per month that's for X amount of work (represented as tokens) you can complete total. But if there are random resets then there's a different work maximization strategy. It's fine if you don't agree with it but it's not "crazy" behavior; it's completely rational to want to maximize a resource. It's not inventing work out of nowhere because there's more work to do than there are tokens in a week to do it. This is your assumption and why you've framed it as "crazy".
> it's completely rational to want to maximize a resource
Sure, in a video game where you have one attribute and you can minmax a strategy just focusing on that, but that's not how real-life works.
You can't just stack pending work on top of each other, expect yourself to be able to stay equally on top of everything and have the same results as if you didn't. With this comes the consideration about the tradeoffs of "produce mediocre but large body of works" vs "produce high quality but small body of works".
Who's to say what's more "rational" or not, it's not a straight-forward calculation which culminates in "Must consume all available usage to maximize resource usage" like some robot, as we are not.
It's quite literally inventing work out of nowhere as you wouldn't put the agent to do that and forcing yourself to be conscious about that work until it completes, unless you actually had the usage available. Asked another way, wouldn't your workflow clearly change if you had unlimited usage available? You'd probably attack tasks/problems that you didn't consider actually spending time/energy solving.
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