Comment by littlecranky67
4 days ago
"the gains showed up when tokens stopped being rationed" - I can totally see that. I am leading (as an external consultant) a larger dev team for a huge insurance company. The devs are quite junior or in general more the "I became a sw-eng here because that company is the only big employer in a 1h radius" type of people (meaning: No rockstar developers). Most of them do not play with AI in their spare time, and they have been told to spend claude tokens wisely. Everybody is too afraid now to play with it and explore during work hours for fear of being token shamed.
At the same time, most of their junior devwork can be replaced completely by AI - so they really should start to learn how to work with it. I recommended everybody to get a private 20€/month claude subscription and use it for toy projects. I have younger devs (early 20s) in the team that told me they won't spend private money, or simply have no usecase in their private life for AI. We talk about software engineers here, and IMHO most of them are in denial of the fact that their skills have mostly become worthless if they don't start to pivot to something valueable.
If you were to take away my work's $500 budget for Opus 5.5 and replace it with unlimited use of GLM-5.3, it would be a huge downgrade in my opinion.
If your employer is so cheap as to spend a $100 or less per month per engineer, while being large enough not to have access to the subscription plans, a move to self hosted or cheap providers does make sense in my view.
> If you were to take away my work's $500 budget for Opus 5.5 and replace it with unlimited use of GLM-5.3, it would be a huge downgrade in my opinion.
I am perfectly able to do the tasks with own custom harness and unlimited local Qwen 3.8 27B with 150t/s. Harness needs search capability and more fine-tuning for the job.
You need less words to describe the intent with Astra/Opus 5.5, and it automatically usually observes the best practice that you don't need to explicitly tell, but with only a slight more effort you can get the job done. I have even made security audits with Qwen 3.8 27B against projects fully written with Claude Opus and it is a bit mind-boggling, but there have been tens of vulnerabilities, identified by this model alone. This excludes the issues found when guiding more myself.
I’ve been going back and forth between opus and local Qwen 27B and a good number of times opus makes absolutely stupid things compared to Qwen.
For a large number of tasks you definitely don’t need a frontier model but a good harness around it.
If you don’t can’t/want to experiment with local model, have Claude implement the exact same feature with haiku/sonnet/opus and see what the differences are. You might be surprised.
I've used extensively everything between Opus 4.6, GPT-5.5, Fable 5, Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, 6.1 Sol and Opus 5.5.
To a lesser degree also Sonnet and Luna.
And when I say extensively I mean 500h+ on a side project in addition to my full-time job.
Even the difference between 5.6 Sol, which is miles ahead of local Qwen 3.8 27B, and Opus 5.5 is immediately obvious in the quality of the results.
Having been stuck on 5.6 Sol at my job while Opus 5.5 was available at home, I can say with full confidence that the difference is significant, even if I weren't looking at the output at all.
The way it understands my requests, forms a hypothesis, verifies the result and finishes the change is night and day different. This happens while 5.6 Sol is still flailing around somewhere in the monorepo struggling with even locating the relevant code.
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I use a mix of GPT/Codex, Claude, and DeepSeek for my workload (in that order of volume).
Each has their own characteristics and honestly you just get used to prompting each a bit differently.
Even better is to use an orchestrator (I switched to Paseo a few weeks back) with an agent "team" (in Paseo, these are just profiles that the orchestrator initiates). Then the orchestrator writes super detailed prompts to each sub-agent on your behalf and I find I get better results this way with less effort. I would describe it as "more autonomy".
In my company they are also hosted GLM 5.3 in their on-prem have us a unlimited tokens. It does a decent job, I would say.
But why do you think it's not good apart from budget?
The thing is the have been told to use the tokens wisely, but no limit is communicated. Still everybody is hesitant. To be fair, the company runs claude on AWS bedrock for data privacy requirements at a different pricelevel. But I guess that is the drawback for german job-security: each and all of them know they basically can't get laid off.
I also attribute a lot of it to be just plain outright denial. I have a feeling a lot of people don't WANT to understand that their coding skills they acquired over years have dropped a lot in worth. It is the "as long as I don't step on a scale, I can't be overweight" kind of denial. You are afraid to see what is behind the curtain, so you simply don't do it.
> But I guess that is the drawback for german job-security: each and all of them know they basically can't get laid off.
Help me understand what exactly is the drawback you’re mentioning. In your previous comment you were suggesting these people spend their own personal money and personal time on projects to benefit their work time. They (quite reasonably, it seems from the limited context) decided that no, they won’t dedicate life and resources from outside work to more work. Fortunately, it seems they have some job security (German, but probably some from the EU as well) which allows them to make whatever choice they believe is healthier to them, without fearing repercussions. What’s the drawback?
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What exactly is the skill you acquire by using more AI? If the models get smarter, isnt it a waste of time to get good at the current gen?
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That is a really silly corporate policy - if the actual amount the company wants each employee to spend is maximum €200/mo, $500/mo or whatever then the company should set that as a limit and people will use it.
Saying "you can use as much as you want but don't use too much or you'll get in trouble" is obviously confusing and is going to result in most people barely using it
Er, for me it would be a massive upgrade. Hopefully my employer follows this lead.
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> most of their junior devwork can be replaced completely by AI - so they really should start to learn how to work with it. I recommended everybody to get a private 20€/month claude subscription
I'm struggling to wrap my head around this. "This technology will completely replace you and lead to your unemployment, so you should fund it out of your own pocket"? Is that what you're saying? If so, can you please explain your reasoning?
AI will not replace everyone. There will be people steering the AI, and using it. If you are not one of those people, you WILL be laid off. It is like office workers in the 90s thinking they don't need to learn computers and hold on to their typewriters.
Why would you want a junior steering the AI? Hell, why would any developer need to steer the AI at all? Just lay off the entire dev team and let the non-technical managers/execs tell the AI what they want directly.
"AI can do all the development work on its own, and you will be replaced by it, but I won't because my position as a meat proxy relaying instructions makes me special" is just you trying to cope with the inevitability of your own prophecy. You WILL be laid off too.
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Thanks for sharing!
A year or eighteen months ago, if you were to ask me how much I would personally pay to have access to a then-frontier model for work, I would have said: not much. They were frustrating to instruct and use. The cost of play was too high.
Six months ago, I think I would have paid $100 per month.
Today, for a current frontier model and harness with all-I-can-eat, I think I would pay a big chunk of my salary. Easily more than $2,000 per month.
Everything improved: models, harnesses, and instructions from me.
This makes me realize that I have no advantage over LLMs in general software development.
Think of using an LLM like driving a car. Easy enough, yeah? Do you say the car drove you to the airport or your friend the driver did? Let's watch four time World Champion Max Verstappen absolutely tear up 100 amateur go-kart drivers, courtesy of Red Bull: https://youtu.be/7GIULwETan4
LLMs are better than they first were when ChatGPT hit the scene in 2022, and you're not the Max Verstappen of LLM prompting or software development (it's okay, neither am I). But it's still food for thought, at least while their true capabilities are being held back by their progenitors and we're forced to ration their use.
Hey Opus 9, you are an insurance carrier offering web-based policies and servuces across the EU. Available tools: german_notary_api, bafin_compliance.
Here is €1B in initial capital. Go!
Funny, but insurances are a good example. Most of what insurances do is administration. Like almost everyone's job there is to sit in front of a computer all day. Lets see how much of that will still be done by humans in 10 years. I think it is one of the field most impacted by layoffs, as they manufacture nothing.
... and just imagine how successful these businesses will be when managers demand an AI spend $999.99 effort in finding excuses, acting difficult, ... before paying out a $1000 claim. Which is probably already what they do with humans.
I can see the profits already!
Why do we even have insurance companies at this point?
>I recommended everybody to get a private 20€/month claude subscription and use it for toy projects.
That's about 20€/month more than I care to give Anthropic. They already stole my data and now they want my money too? No thanks. I'll stick to running Gemma or Qwen on my Mac.
Would enjoy chatting offline if up for it. I am an external consultant acting as more of an operations/product lead to insurance, but come the insurance side.
Curious about consulting model? Are you external (full-time) lead or fractional? Embedded in their tech and security stack or just helping organize/lead through communication channels?
> ... and IMHO most of them are in denial of the fact that their skills have mostly become worthless if they don't start to pivot to something valueable.
But your comment says it several time: the valuable skill is being already a seasoned dev.
Then AI is superpower.
It's for the junior that things sucks big times.
I see it all around me: senior devs are empowered while juniors are not even hired anymore.
It is a shock going through the industry, and we are just starting. I think future software engineers will need more training years and more unpaid time getting skilled. More like surgeons, who need almost 10 years of training until we actually let them operate on live patients.
Given that we are seeing a big retirement wave of the boomers, a lot of seasoned devs will retire in the next 10 years. So there should be enough demand, and a big enough paycheck for that decade long training to make its moneys worth.
assuming the productivity boost of AI to a senior developer is 10x, we might still have way more engineers than actually required for the next few decades. Also, seniors do not have to be boomers, and have a good thirty years ahead before retirement.
Are you not worried about this being a sort of one-way street? Do you have any strategies to avoid ending up with a codebase you cannot work on without "AI"? when I think insurance company, I would assume the value seems to be more in the trust you build up over decades of with customers, not producing lots of code faster.
Well I am still in the loop as a senior dev and I get to review everyones code before it gets merged. Official guidelines is that everybody is responsible for the code they produce (with or without AI) and must understand it when they give it to the reviewer. I've been doiing this 3+ years at this company, so before the whole AI thing landed. I am explicitly not allowed to implement features myself (because the idea is the juniors learn and get trained).
Now, within the last 6-12 months of AI advancement, I think you could lay off half or even 3/4 of the team if I was explicitly allowed to implement features myself using AI. But that is not the current policy.
As for worries "ending up on a codebase you can't manage without AI" - my personal take is: No, I am not worried. Because going forward AI will always be available in the development workflow. That is my own opinion, not the corporation standpoint, however.
> Because going forward AI will always be available in the development workflow.
So your AI subscription is basically a subscription to your own code. Are you sure the tokens will always flow for you?
Being unable to work on a codebase without AI is not necessary. Working with models you can fit on consumer hardware is already significantly more productive than rawdogging code. It's similar to "you won't always have a calculator with you" from math teachers, see how that turned out.
A way bigger problem is a codebase that you can't effectively work on with AI, which is a lot of legacy humanslop. And things that make a codebase more suited for AI, like documentation that provides relevant domain knowledge and context for requirements, automated quality control, and test coverage, also make a codebase easier to work on for a human too.
You get the same result when you calculate something by hand or with a calculator.
And that whole "legacy humanslop" paragraph is just stating the obvious with an air of spite towards humans.
People who can't bother to reason get angry when you say "hey, why put all eggs into one basket", episode N. Boring.
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Why doesn't your company just get each of them a 20€ subscription instead of paying per token?
For compliance reasons, companies pay for the enterprise account, and the enterprise account uses API pricing.
Compliance with what?
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... then they should understand the pricing commitment they're making doing that.
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Well that is a great idea, and if I were management, I would give everyone a 240€ claude-giftcard-subscription that they can use privately on their private computers. There is however the danger that they would start using their private accounts to fill with company data (which potentially is against GDPR regulations - hence the amazon bedrock deployment).
Money is money. Why is it a GDPR risk for one bank account paying for your proposed use case of toy projects and not another? I don't see how that changes the trust relationship for the team to do the right thing.
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