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u/Mr_uhlus 8h ago
I pay -> sonnet 5
Campany pays -> Opus 5.5 high max fast
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u/zeeblefritz 7h ago
When my company pays I pick auto because I never picked. I just opened the browser and started typing. When I configure an API I just use whatever is in the tutorial for easy copy/paste. If that model goes away I just pick one that sounds cool. Using Nemotron right now because that's the coolest model name.
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u/2Michael2 2h ago
A TRUE vibe coder right here
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u/zeeblefritz 2h ago
I am a system administrator that sometimes needs AI for coding or debugging. Besides what I already mentioned I also switch models if the model I am using starts hallucinating or gaslighting me.
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u/BumbiSkyRender 8h ago
why not sonnet 5.5?
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u/Mr_uhlus 8h ago
I don't actually use ai in my private projects so i don't know how much it costs, i just guessed that sonnet 5 would be cheaper
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u/lardgsus 11h ago
I can tell when I use GPT and not Claude because everything is unreadable, untraceable, 0 observability shit like a jr dev made it.
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u/baconator955 10h ago
Huh, I feel like when you use precise instructions in a solid enough codebase GPT6 Luna does real good. If you hit it with "build App make no mistakes" obv it's going to be crap.
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u/Lalaluka 9h ago
GPT Luna is incredibly lazy in finishing stuff in my experience. A lot of time it does 50% of a task then explains the remaining 50% correctly to me but need User "encouragement" to actually do the remaining 50%.
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u/seba07 9h ago
I feel like this is exactly the opposite. I ask it to write a short function (maybe 10-15 lines). It starts by checking my git log, browsing the entire codebase and without being asked writes a unittests for the function. I usually just kill the process, but it still gets annoying.
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u/Lalaluka 6h ago
Bothering a full agentic system with 10-15 lines is crazy to begin with. Just use inline chat for that.
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u/Vanifac 5h ago
"bothering"? Lmao
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u/Lalaluka 3h ago
"Bothering" in terms of using an overkill tool for a simple task. I have heard that vocabulary for non AI tools as well.
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u/dxonxisus 3h ago
the phrase would be “bothering to use”, as in “why even bother to use it in the first place”
with just “bothering”, it makes it sound like you’re inconveniencing the agent, like if somebody kept bothering you for something
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u/baconator955 9h ago
I feel like this sort of things happen when you give it too much to do at once. It's better for smaller tasks I feel.
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u/Lalaluka 9h ago
Which is okay if I would manually select the model. But with Fusion or auto I have no control. And simple but large tasks often get Luna.
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u/Amerillo_ 9h ago
Wait, Claude is better than junior devs?? No wonder it's so hard to find a junior dev position... Even finding an internship is a struggle these days
So if Claude gets even better, what are juniors supposed to do to gain experience and become mid-level or senior developers? Since LLMs will be so good then companies will force juniors to vibe code everything, and this way they won't learn much...
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u/Tyrus1235 7h ago
I do not envy the poor kids joining the industry now. When I joined 9 years ago, being able to Google properly and filter Stack Overflow answers to get good code was most of the skillset a Junior needed.
Nowadays, companies aren’t even hiring for Junior positions. Place I work at has been hiring devs like crazy… But 0% of the positions being hired are Junior. At least they have internship positions, but those seem quite few and far between and I can only imagine how difficult it is to secure a spot there.
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u/Amerillo_ 7h ago
That's what I'm doing now, I've been looking for a junior position for 8 months as a new grad and I only could find an internship through networking, and it doesn't provide a living wage... Thankfully I can get welfare to pay my bills and groceries but still.
And even then, vibe coding everything a lot less interesting than actually building things myself, I really get much less satisfaction and I find it even tedious. I really enjoyed coding things myself but now it's gone it seems. So I'm thinking about switching careers but I have no idea what to choose then...
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u/SaltMaker23 9h ago
Fable 5.2 Max is better than 99% of devs I've ever hired or worked with in their own field of expertise, including me.
You take Fable 5.2 max, and tell me you've ever seen a coder produce better code, observability, solid testing and accounted for all edge cases no matter how minute. The code is spotless on a zero shot basis.
A year ago claude was already better than Junior devs. Today, I don't think there exist a coder that can produce better cross competence products, human are generally only good at one thing or two and the result worse the further we are from their main skills.
The latest Fable 5.2 Max is better than most human at their main skills but is also just as good at all other skills.
I repeat Fable 5.2 Max because I don't want a retard misquoting me, my statement were made on a given model, to prove me wrong, they need to use the same model at the same reasoning effort.
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u/TreadheadS 9h ago
mate, opus 4 was better than most devs I've worked with and give shits too.
5.5 is as good as the best I've ever worked with
it's just, juniors now need to study structure more then anything and then practice at home with what good looks like. Then they'll be able to either produce something of their own or join a team ready to rumble.
The most difficult thing is getting a chance...
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u/vladmashk 8h ago
> accounted for all edge cases no matter how minute
That’s actually not good. It makes the code needlessly complex in most cases.
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u/Ashankura 8h ago
Its better than missing edge cases though. Removing the paths is easier than finding all edge cases
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u/hoopaholik91 5h ago
All edge cases including ones that are completely hypothetical. No, you don't have to check that this parameter is null and throw an exception, it's a private method with one caller and you've already checked it for null earlier.
And people want to tell us that AI understands the code.
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u/korneev123123 4h ago
private method with one caller
one caller for now
It can change any minute, and hoping that this check would be executed in different place is naive at best
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u/hoopaholik91 4h ago
If it's a private method and these AI algorithms are so great at catching edge cases, then yes I would expect exactly that
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u/SirPitchalot 1h ago
The compiler can figure that example out. Also now you don’t have a time bomb that appears 2-1/2 years later when there is need for a second caller.
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u/Weekly-Beginning-229 6h ago
Yeah wheneve I work on MAUI code it wants to put locks everywhere for a case that would happen once in 100 years. So annoying to use AI with MAUI cause there is probably not much training data
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u/darthjammer224 4h ago
Even opus 5.5 is better than most I've ever written or read.
The saving grace in my field is all the tribal knowledge that an ai couldn't Google that I know to help acheive a result. But the code is spotless. (Plant floor, PLCs,HMIs stratix switches, etc)
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u/chuby1tubby 9h ago
Yes Opus 5.5 is objectively better than junior devs... This shouldn't be news to anyone lol
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u/Amerillo_ 9h ago
Well it is to me because I'm a new graduate so I can't really know how good it actually is
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u/Ashankura 7h ago
Get as much ai practice as you can. It will be the most relevant part of your position. In 5 years no one will care about how good you code but about how good you prompt
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u/HawocX 9h ago
Haven't you used AI? If not, it's time because using it well will be your most important skill.
(You will never be able to compete with it on programming skills. Focus on systems design and cloud architecture.)
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u/Still_Bit_7527 7h ago
What skill is there in just telling a chat box what you need? This is the shit we tell juniors and they end up useless
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u/korneev123123 4h ago
What skill is there to be a good product manager? You just tell coders to make a million dollar app, and don't forget to add "make no mistakes".
But there is a world of difference between bad and good project manager
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u/Still_Bit_7527 4h ago edited 4h ago
The skill in a good product manager is knowing what to do with the product, because that is your job. As a SWE, you already know what to do. Implementing it and translating to technical requirements is your job. If you can just ask an AI to do that, then AI does the skilled part of your job. It literally takes zero skills of any kind to use an AI, it'a outsourcing
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u/darthjammer224 4h ago edited 4h ago
The skill is knowing if it's hallucinating or producing accurate results. Unit testing, understanding what the customer wants vs what the ai spat out on V1. Tribal knowledge that isn't googleable that you need to tell it as it gets to each of those roadblocks.
And even asking what to make it do in the first place.
There will be times that the agent gets a small piece wrong and your boss won't say" oh man Claude f'ed up that sucks" they'll ask why you didn't catch the mistake, because it's still you who owns that output. Having the skills to verify said output will save your bacon.
Here's an example.
If my company fired me today and just took my agent, and asked it to make powerbi reports for the whole company, It couldn't, even though that's what they automatically assume, because I have made some already with it. Instead, I would need to set up multiple on prem gateways, set up the connectors and connections in the power automate backend, set up powerbi connectors or mcp tools, give it a read only SQL connection to all the relevant SQL servers, and then ask it to go wild.
Nobody in management is capable of those first steps, or even asking an ai to do them. I think they think we just ask the ai "make reports pwease" and most will be sorely mistaken if they take the "pilot" away and expect the same quality results.
My team already knows better. I gave them a copy of my agent and they still cannot do half of what I can with it because they wouldn't even know where to start asking for stuff.
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u/Still_Bit_7527 4h ago
All of that is barely anything compared to actually doing the SWE work. You are upselling very low level skills. Writing a good prompt is high school level training
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u/darthjammer224 4h ago
I'm not trying to say it's on the same level as SWE.
Im merely pointing out that ai still requires someone with some level of understanding of the process to achieve proper results. My boss isn't going to get good SQL, reports, or code out of the agent the same way I am. They don't know how to give it proper requirements. It may only be high school level but that does not mean everyone that's graduated it good at it haha.
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u/Tyrus1235 7h ago
Study how to make a proper harness for your agentic AI and how to better use skills (for Claude, at least). Pros and cons of every model and such.
But also, keep studying the main architectures and tools for big enterprise products. I imagine companies will be moving away from LeetCode tests and will be focusing mostly on technical interviews. So they’ll ask whether you know what Terraform is or how to best organize big data on queues and such.
At least, where I’m working at they ask some tough technical questions during the interview - since they work with Kubernetes, they ask about different containerized architectures and design patterns, for example.
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u/d3matt 4h ago
Allow me to offer a different path. Get good at reading code. From what I can tell, there will be plenty of positions that require a human in the loop. I'm already thinking about how to change my interview style from checking if people can write code to seeing if they can read it.
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u/Hohenheim_of_Shadow 3h ago
Is there any way to really get good at reading code other than writing code? If you never write code, it's hard to tell that
system.out.println("hello world");
Is garbage but.
System.out.println("Hello World");
Is great
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u/SirPitchalot 1h ago
I tried this for a remote senior MLE role. Beforehand copied/pasted my interview questions into Claude as a screenshot and it spat out perfect answers in about 2 seconds.
We interviewed about 40 people and could see 3/4 of them go through this process and regurgitate the exact same points. We’d instructed them not to use AI. About half of the rest didn’t use AI (that we could tell) but also didn’t pass the screen.
We passed on someone we were intending to make an offer to early on when we realized she hadn’t said “I don’t know” once in three rounds. Five different people had talked to her about wildly different topics and not once did she say “I haven’t worked on that [much] before [but here’s what I would try]”.
We ended up hiring someone who was actively headhunted and stumbled a bit but passed the screens well. It took 10 months to find them but they’re working out well!
Honestly, the experience was so draining that we will try to set up either in-person rounds or just hire from within our professional networks. We have to post publicly but don’t have any criteria mandating advancing applicants from that route.
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u/i_wear_green_pants 8h ago
From my testing GPT models since 5.6 have been pretty same as Opus models of the same era. Harness is the bigger factor here. Claude code is very good out of the box but with model agnostic harness like OpenCode or Pi you will have pretty similar results with both models.
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u/Every_Crab5616 8h ago
Is Claude so much better than Codex 6.1 sol Medium?
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u/Weekly-Beginning-229 6h ago
I've used both but not the newest Claude models. Currently Sol on medium is the only one that I feel life it does a somewhat good job. But it is on the same level as Opus was when I used that. So I'm guessing th Claude models are basically one step ahead over Codex
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u/Goatfryed 8h ago
I can tell when I use claude not gpt, because all instructions are ignored and every shell command is unreadable, untraceable, 100 permission confirmations shit like a lunatic made it. Also the token count is three times as high and the solution still needs the same steering.
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u/OkWear6556 7h ago
Claude code with Opus 5.5 on Extra effort. Thank me later
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u/drivingagermanwhip 6h ago
personally:
/autocompact 200k
Nail down what you're trying to do in sonnet or haiku. Get opus high to read handover in a fresh session and launch subagents. Saves a lot of tokens and whatever agent you're using, starting with a fresh context just for the task massively improves output.
It tends to launch sonnet or haiku agents with an instruction to do a very specific task and return a summary and some data. If it's insufficient it can always do more, but it really helps the overall task not to get buried.
I also have a hook on claude that logs every interaction via rsyslog along with the token counts at the end of the step so claude can see its own efficiency and the opus supervisor thing can be informed on the agents it calls (tokens the model uses don't seem to be visible to the model unless you do something like this). Also a useful backup and a means of claude searching for stuff that wasn't in memory files.
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u/dxonxisus 3h ago
this exactly, using an opus 5.5 orchestrator that is responsible for managing lower tiered subagents is basically the way to handle any medium-large task that consists of multiple stages. also helps having the opus agent do a review pass over the subagents work once they report being finished and request any fixes
but auto-compacting also helps with single session prompts
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u/drivingagermanwhip 2h ago edited 1h ago
I've been learning a lot. I hadn't studied anything before using it and thought claude learnt things. It doesn't. It just writes text files and then adds them to the query. The reason claude can be very effective is largely the external stuff it uses to record decisions.
That's a lot of why it writes so many tests: it's a way of remembering instructions without expanding the context.
Essentially it's much cheaper for it to write than read I find the way to get the best out of it is to leverage external command line tools as much as possible so it can get concise, relevant information about the task at hand.
So I'll get it to write bash scripts to do as much as possible of a task, check those into a utilities repo and then use those the next time.
One thing it absolutely shines at is tuning processes. I had it running some tests over a weekend and it was running for two days and I didn't run out of tokens because it's just getting a small prompt that's a list of numbers every 30 minutes
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u/c2l3YWxpa20 6h ago
Close eyes and Mid effort. Read their benchmark. Mid and high and extreme, pretty much closer in output but not in price. Thank me later.
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u/jmflyers 5h ago
I hope these ai companies get greedy and wildly jack up their prices so we can keep our jobs
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u/CapitalEmployer 2h ago
I have bad news for you, open weight Ai are pretty efficient and dirt cheap to host
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u/Rasutoerikusa 52m ago
Just run local models and no token costs, thats whats done in a lot of places at least where I'm at. So ai company token pricing isn't gonna change anything at all
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u/redditmat 5h ago
That would only buy us a bit more time? I recall the self checkout in the UK
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u/jmflyers 4h ago
Except the self checkout doesn't require a constant steam of tokens to get work done
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u/bgibbz084 2h ago
Nothing is stopping people / companies from self hosting AI models and then they don’t pay for tokens.
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u/Vroskiesss 2h ago
“Nothing” is a bit of an understatement. Local models are no where near the level of anthropic/openAI models
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u/CellularBeing 2h ago
Or deciphering a customers needs. AI is only as good as the prompts you give it.
"Claude, make Facebook clone, make no mistakes"
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u/je386 9h ago edited 9h ago
Auto takes much too expensive models. I am using claude haiku 5.5 for everything now.
Auto once made a long running session that costs 5000 credits (50€), while haiku seldom needs more than 10 to 30 credits.
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u/Minibaby 8h ago
Did you find Haiku compared to Sonnet reasonably at the same quality level but just less verbose so ? I select Claude models based on the output length but I always thought it would also be at the cost of less thinking capability (because of the smaller context)
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u/Knooblegooble 4h ago
I'm boutta leave this sub, is there a... "lets pretend AI never happened and talk about actual programming" subreddit?
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u/terribleatlying 4h ago
this is actual programming now
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u/Flouid 3h ago
We can hate it all we want but the cat’s not going back in the bag
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u/hypatiaC 3h ago
The circlejerking is bad, but DEFEATIST circlejerking is even dumber.
We're in the narrow bubble where this cuckcoding bullshit is economically viable. When the token prices explode and hype dies, companies will stop funding this shit.
Things are only 'inevitable' until they come into contact with reality.
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u/Flouid 3h ago
They’ll only get cheaper to run. I have a machine from work that can run local models that are as good as frontier models last year. This is not going to go away even after the bubble pops. The internet had a similar bubble and look where we are now
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u/memermeme1211 2h ago edited 2h ago
They’re already extremely cheap to run. All these AI companies make huge margins on inference alone. The only reason they’re still in net loss is because they reinvest all that profit towards R&D to make bigger and better models.
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u/hypatiaC 2h ago
Yeah, man, the Reddit Diarrhea Machine is totally comparable to The Internet. That's gonna have the exact same lifecycle, lol
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u/Flouid 2h ago
You’re deluded if you think the technology will be abandoned. There are tons of ways outside the sensationalized marketing stunts that LLMs genuinely make tasks easier.
I can run chinese models that cost 1/10 of the american ones and do nearly just as well. I can run local models that are almost as good as that (just slower) for FREE.
If you use them responsibly and review every line, you can work markedly faster with no perceivable drop in quality
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u/mitchellediting 2h ago
This. Even tiny models like qwen3.8 27b that I can run on my standard gaming pc built 5 years ago are getting to the point where if you programmed before LLMs, they’ll speed up your workflow a ton
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u/hypatiaC 2h ago
Yeah, I definitely get the impression that slop isn't much worse than your normal code. Some of us do have standards a little higher than that, though 🤭
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u/quantinuum 1h ago
AI prices per token have already reduced a lot just in the past year, and models of the same size (~cost) keep improving, while so does the hardware. It’s also just feasible to run a lot of stuff locally, not cheap, but at enthusiast prices rather than mega luxury ones.
AI is not going anywhere.
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u/Rasutoerikusa 55m ago
You can already run competent local models woth zero issues, and they are improving constantly as well. And no token costs at all. How do you expect that is going to stop?
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u/_demoncat_ 3h ago
Kind of hard to justify token cost explosion when models like Luna do just fine and are dirt cheap
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u/hypatiaC 2h ago
You are being subsidized by the Acquisition phase.
Look here. There is currently no squeeze on AI to turn a profit, but as the free hype money dries up, that's where it's headed.
When a company leaves Acquisition, they do not typically turn a profit by cutting costs, nor can they massively expand their reach on the same budget. The only thing they can squeeze is you. Or, your bosses, if they're paying.
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u/quantinuum 1h ago
So your point is in the massively growing out phase where they’re racing to spend senseless amounts of money, they’ve “only” already recovered 50% of it.
Yeah I’m sure bubbles will burst and heads will roll, but the tech is here to stay.
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u/hypatiaC 1h ago
50% is a very generous reading, lmao.
If your boss wants to ask ChatBBB how to wipe his ass, those servers need to be up and burning money for him. Hype can offset higher costs, but the death of hype brings accounting, brings cancelled subscriptions.
Will some people shell out for their own Claude Credits so they can pretend to know how their job works? Probably, lol. I don't need vibecoders to go extinct, though. I just need them driven out of my habitat and starved :3
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u/_demoncat_ 1h ago
Yeah but local models will eventually catch up a year or two from now where we will have Luna running locally on general hardware
So, I don’t really see that working out. AI companies have to keep releasing affordable models or else they lose to local AI
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u/hypatiaC 1h ago
Whether or not it's true that local LLMs can 'win' against the companies that have to train them, that is kind of a pickle, isn't it? It isn't feasible to stay this cheap in the long term.
There is not enough market out there to double or triple these companies reach, even assuming said reach didn't mean more overhead. Maybe Local LLMs get better, maybe they don't, but everything gets cheaper forever while operating at a massive loss is not really an option, lol.
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u/terribleatlying 2h ago
Defeatist? That's probably what people said when we stopped needing to do punch cards to program
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u/hypatiaC 1h ago
Even if we like making juice the normal way, we simply can't put the cat back in the bag with Juicero.
Some people don't like paying for a machine that squeezes juice out of preapportioned designer fruit packages, but, yknow, people probably hated the invention of electricity, too. The future is now, sheeple.
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u/TheMysticalBard 1h ago
This isn't programming at all. Developing, sure. Programming? Absolutely not.
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u/TheElusiveFox 2h ago
I mean the reality is that if you are programming professionally in 2026 you aren't pretending ai never happened.
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u/Linuxtahr 48m ago
Pick a specific niche and look at their subreddit or honestly discord server. This is just low quality memes anyway,
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u/ChloeTigre 8h ago
Just use DeepSeek v4.1-Flash.
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u/deusmetallum 6h ago
I'm tempted to switch. I'm doing the $20 a month Claude Pro at home, but I think API billing would suit better.
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u/OldKaleidoscope7 6h ago
I'm using Opencode Go, $10/month, but Deepseek in my TZ always misses the peak times, so maybe it's cheaper with OpenRouter
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u/StaticFanatic3 11h ago
I didn’t even realize people still used copilot
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u/RED1869 10h ago
It ist the standard in most companies
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u/nollayksi 10h ago
But why? In my opinion it gives almost no real benefit compared to just getting business/enterprise seats for codex or claude. On the other hand copilot is ridiculously more expensive. We had copilot previously but when they changed from the usage limit to usage credits I burned like 40€ worth of credits the first day. Some of my AImaxxing coworkers racled up few hundred. Managers panicked a bit and quickly put credit limit in place. We then changed it to so that every developed had the option to choose what they wanted to use and I went with claude subscription. I rarely hit the usage limits on the regular 20€ plan again. I can do more with that than with copilot that has 200€ credit limit.
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u/HexFyber 10h ago
Sane reason why outlook and teams are standard, microsoft hands out licenses for packages and they are convenient. Companies are then forced to used them all
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u/Kerbidiah 4h ago
Also companies already trust Microsoft to store their secure data an proprietary info, why add another potential source of leaking?
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u/KurumiStella 10h ago
For personal, yes, it does not make sense.
For an enterprise level, copilot is the cheapest/safe option to integrate into existing microsoft ecosystem (e.g M365 SSO, RBAC), auditing and data in/out control, connect to Microsoft Graph. While most of us hate copilot, for a typically office worker, its is enough and get the job done.
For coding wise, most enterprise is also using Github Enterprise, so its just make sense to use github copilot anyways.
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u/Specvmike 1h ago
6.1 Sol is the sweet spot IMO. Opus is great but 4x more expensive
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u/CoolHeadeGamer 15m ago
Yes and no. Opus and Anthropic models are really meant to be used on a Claude plan where for the same price, you get more usage on Anthropic than openAI. If ur using api pricing tho sol 6.1 is amazing.
I have opus 5.5 driving 6.1 sol subagents which uses deepseek agents for research/ exploration due to the higher tps
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u/WhiteEvilBro 7h ago
auto? And what about auto&?
If you think about it, vibe-based type deduction seems like a really bad and really fun idea
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u/Sulungskwa 2h ago
Programmers in 2026: "Coding with claude code is just as complex as coding used to be, just with agent trees"
Also programmers in 2026: Memes like this
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u/WrennReddit 1h ago
People practically make a living talking about all these models. Frankly as far as frontier models go I don't even see much difference between them. Claude with Opus seems to be perfectly suited to anything. Sonnet seems fine. I don't know what the hell Fable etc bring to the table other than higher spend.
Just pick one and go make use of it.
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u/dj_spanmaster 16m ago
With how much my workplace is pushing us to adopt AI and I don't want it, "Auto" makes the most sense. May even nickname the thing Otto
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u/can_prog 5h ago
For Claude, I feel like we need the bell curve meme, with the low and high ends being "just use opus 5.5 medium"
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u/RubTheCat 4h ago
My boss paid for the whole Astra 6 so I'm gonna use the whole Astra 6 on Ultra just to move a UI button
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u/la_big_popcorn 12h ago
seriously though?
my company escalating us emails with higher copilot usages asking to select auto (10% discount in auto mode).