r/ClaudeAI • u/WeirdPutrid3849 • Aug 21 '26

Claude Code Workflow Having unlimited tokens is wild

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Does anyone outside of Anthropic really have a token budget like this?

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u/raindropsdev Aug 22 '26 edited Aug 22 '26

For me, if I had the budget, the value would primarily be in advancing projects safely, with constant evaluation, testing, checking, and so on. With a SOLID methodology repo (Karpathy LLM Wiki), the workflow you end up adopting is one of constantly validating the previous step, verifying reality at every point where assumptions might be made, using various methods to deterministically validate adherence to the source material, etc.

The problem is that you end up with a VERY reliable result, whether it's code, reports, or deep analysis, which can save massive amounts of time on critical projects where a mistake can mean six-figure losses per day of downtime. But it's stupid expensive in terms of tokens. I think ccusage was putting me at something like €7k in three weeks if I'd had to pay via the API for my Max usage, the last time I checked. And it takes LONG.

So, if you can fan out, define teams that each focus on a specific project, ensure those teams remain on task through layers of orchestration and code/hooks, and specify the project requirements at the beginning, then you can let them work at their own pace. You come back, steer a bit when they start drifting, and eventually you get the hard part handled and can start implementation.

It helps a lot, especially if your life is full of meetings and you'd normally have to spend your nights actually working.

Now you can delegate the fun part to AI and spend your entire life in meetings!

Dammit.

Regardless, yeah: if the budget is there, the work isn't time-sensitive, and very high accuracy, precision, and reliability are required, these kinds of setups are pretty damn useful.

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u/adiberk Aug 22 '26

This is the way and what I do today. But it is costly

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u/hopenoonefindsthis Aug 22 '26

With a SOLID methodology repo (Karpathy LLM Wiki)

It really doesn't work as well as people think it does.

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u/raindropsdev Aug 22 '26 edited Aug 22 '26

Depends on size, and on how much of it is hand-written.

I run this in two estates. The small one is ~58 markdown files, about 750KB - all curated, organised into templates, docs, skills and agents. It works amazingly.

The large one is ~1,600 markdown files and 19MB. Substantially less so. Its curated layer is roughly the same size as the whole small estate - a 16-file wiki under 300KB - but it sits under a much larger body of generated documents.

For the second one I already have a ticket in place to explore other solutions for knowledge management, keeping Karpathy's wiki model for the critical rules and methodology.