Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent

Probably similar to the guy who was gloating on Twitter about building a service with vibe coding and without any programming knowledge around the peak of the vibe coding madness.

Only for people to start screwing around with his database and API keys because the generated code just stuck the keys into the Javascript and he didn't even have enough of a technical background to know that was something to watch out for.

IIRC he resorted to complaining about bullying and just shut it all down.

Any cost/benefit analysis of whether to use AI has to factor in the fact that AI companies aren't even close to making a profit, and are primarily funded by investment money. At some point, either the cost to operate these AI models needs to go down, or the prices will go up. And from my perspective, the latter seems a lot more likely.

Rug pulls from foundation labs are one thing, and I agree with the dangers of relying on future breakthroughs, but the open-source state of the art is already pretty amazing. Given the broad availability of open-weight models within under 6 months of SotA (DeepSeek, Qwen, previously Llama) and strong open-source tooling such as Roo and Codex, why would you expect AI-driven engineering to regress to a worse state than what we have today? If every AI company vanished tomorrow, we'd still have powerful automation and years of efficiency gains left from consolidation of tools and standards, all runnable on a single MacBook.

Excellent discussion in this thread, captures a lot of the challenges. I don't think we're a peak vibe coding yet, nor have companies experienced the level of pain that is possible here.

The biggest 'rug pull' here is that the coding agent company raises there price and kills you're budget for "development."

I think a lot of MBA types would benefit from taking a long look at how they "blew up" IT and switched to IaaS / Cloud and then suddenly found their business model turned upside down when the providers decided to up their 'cut'. It's a double whammy, the subsidized IT costs to gain traction, the loss of IT jobs because of the transition, leading to to fewer and fewer IT employees, then when the switch comes there is a huge cost wall if you try to revert to the 'previous way' of doing it, even if your costs of doing it that way would today would be cheaper than the what the service provider is now charging you.

That's why I stick to what I can run locally. Though for most of my tasks there is no big difference between cloud models and local ones, in half the cases both produce junk but both are good enough for some mechanical transformations and as a reference book.

It get even darker - I was around in the 1990s and a lot of people who ran head on into that generation’s problems used those lessons to build huge startups in the 2000s. If we have outsourced a lot of learning, what do we do when we fail? Or how we compound on success?

This is why unlimited plans are always revoked eventually - a small fraction of users can be responsible for huge costs (Amazon's unlimited file backup service is another good example). Also whilst in general I don't think there's much to worry about with AI energy use, burning $24k of tokens must surely be responsible for a pretty large amount of energy

Looked at your tool several times, but haven't answered this question for myself: does this tool fundamentally use the Anthropic API (not the normal MAX billing)? Presuming you built around the SDK -- haven't figured out if it is possible to use the SDK, but use the normal account billing (instead of hitting the API).

Love the idea by the way! We do need new IDE features which are centered around switching between Git worktrees and managing multiple active agents per worktree.

Edit: oh, do you invoke normal CC within your tool to avoid this issue and then post-process?

Max $100 or $200?

I'm on $100 and i'm shocked how much usage i get out of Sonnet, while Opus feels like no usage at all. I barely even bother with Opus since most things i want to do just runout super quick.

>My Claude Code usage would have been $24k last month if I didn't have a max plan, at least according to Claude-Monitor.

In their dreams.

There is no way those companies don't loose ton of money on max plans.

I use and abuse mine, running multiple agents, and I know that I'd spend the entire month of fees in a few days otherwise.

So it seems like a ploy to improve their product and capture the market, like usual with startups that hope for a winner-takes-all.

And then, like uber or airbnb, the bait and switch will raise the prices eventually.

I'm wondering when the hammer will fall.

But meanwhile, let's enjoy the free buffet.

Does Claude Max allow you to use 3rd-party tools with an API key?

At this point, question is when does Amazon tell Anthropic to stop because it’s gotta be running up a huge bill. I don’t think they can continue offering the $200 plan for too long even with Amazon’s deep pocket.

> Is $200/month a lot of money when you can multiply your productivity?

My read was the article takes it as a given that $200/m is worth it.

The question in the article seems more: is an extra $800/m to move from Claude Code to an agent using o3 worth it?

As I said elsewhere... $200/month etc is potentially not a lot for an employer to pay (though I've worked for some recently who balk at just stocking a snacks tray or drink fridge...).

But $200/month is unbearable for open source / free software developers.

My butt needs to be in this chair 8 hours a day. Whether it takes me 20 hours to do a task or 2 doesn't really matter.

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LLMs can read documentations for a language and use it as well as human engineers.

"given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content"

Source: Gemini 1.5's paper from March 2024 https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_...

I think there certainly will, it will just mean that only people who can function independently of the AI will have access to them a few years before everyone else.

An LLM salesman assuring us that $1000/mo is a reasonable cost for LLMs feels a bit like a conflict of interests, especially when the article doesn't go into much detail about the code quality. If anything, their assertion that one should stick to boring tech and "have empathy for the model" just reaffirms that anybody doing anything remotely innovative or cutting-edge shouldn't bother too much with coding agents.

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Barrier to entry is actually very very high. Just because we have “open source” models doesn’t mean anyone can enter. And the gap is widening now. I see Anthropic/OpenAI as clear leaders. Opus 4 and its derivative products are irreplaceable for coders since Spring 2025. Once you figure it out and have your revelation, it will be impossible to go back. This is an iPhone moment right now and the network effect will be incredible.

I think you forgot to consider the cost of providing the inference.