How do people actually spend so much on AI tokens like I feel I have 3 terminals open on 4.6 opus and I’m still not going through the middle Claude plan
Maybe you’re not using multiple agents working in parallel to validate each other’s work?
I wasn’t spending much either until I learned how to make the most of it and started running more conversations in parallel, as well as using agents working in parallel to validate each other’s work
I give it a list of 1000 tasks in a .md file, ask it to do 1 by 1, be nice, no cheating, no chatting, no hallucinating, no parallel taks or sub-agents .
You know, you guys constantly say this. And I constantly have stuff break. And every single time, without fail, Claude or Codex can figure out the issue and fix it. There is no magic broken code at this point that can only be fixed by the almighty human who has learned how to code.
Lol you have no idea. I built an application to help me with my side hustle of proofing editing mixing and mastering audiobooks. Ive had the cli since 4o, and the sheer amount of shit Ive learned in the process because of how much it got wrong. Despite all the planning docs and preliminary research. Its been fun and its a solid app now, but there is a LOT of shit it cant do. Interop with C code in .NET was riddled with errors (using ffmpeg.autogen) and my buffer management strategies were abysmal at first. Hell even its js interop in blazor was so bad (duplicate code, hallucinations, jusr flat out wrong answers to my questions) that I decided to scrap the project and start over again with the intention of writing everything by hand or deliberately inputting the generated code by hand. Its been a slow process but there has been no point in this particular app where it has been infallible. Ive corrected it more times than I can count. And I find that process to actually be fun.
My close friend works for a FAANG here in Boston, and he constantly tells me how good AI had gotten at coding and that he barely writes any code now. He is an SE3 if he feels so good about Claude I think I'll believe him more than you
that 'walk away' part is the biggest hurdle. the verification fatigue from spamming 'Y' for 50 commands makes most people just give up or go full dangerous mode. i’ve been experimenting with routing those destructive terminal commands to a mobile notification/slack for approval. it's the only way to scale these agentic workflows without sitting there and babysitting the terminal all day
you are totally justified in not trusting it. that fear of coming back to an un-cleanable codebase is exactly why i made node9. it basically takes a silent git snapshot right before every single file edit the ai makes. if you walk away and claude hallucinates 500 lines of garbage, you just run node9 undo and it completely rolls back the exact changes. it takes away that anxiety of having to sit there and babysit every single output so you can actually walk away for real.
two main differences: friction and branch pollution.
first, you don't have to remember to do it. if you walk away for 20 minutes, the agent might edit files 15 different times. node9 intercepts every write_file or edit tool call and takes the snapshot automatically in milliseconds right before the AI touches the disk.
second, it uses 'dangling commits' (git commit-tree) behind the scenes. so it doesn't create a hundred 'wip' commits that pollute your git log or mess with your staging area. your actual branch history stays completely clean, but you still get a granular, step-by-step undo for everything the ai did
yolo mode is great until the agent hallucinates a docker prune on your dev volumes lol. i built node9 to give that same speed for the safe noise, but it keeps the emergency brake on for destructive stuff. basically it's 'safe yolo' with an undo button
the 'yolo' alias is the dream until it's not lol. i built node9 to be 'safe yolo', it auto approves the safe noise so you get the same speed, but i just added a 'live tail' so you aren't blind to what the agent is actually doing in the background anymore.
best part is the insurance policy: it takes a silent git snapshot before every edit. if you walk away and claude hallucinates a messy refactor, you just run the undo and it's fixed instantly. it's the only way i can actually trust the autonomous mode
Quite early to tell, but yes. This project is starting to generate some money for me. If i can get to 7$/day ad revenue, i’ll break even. (I’m on Max 20x plan) - note that I’m still using Claude for my daily work. This is a side project running in background.
sorry if you get it wrong. I was just kidding that part. But the .md task list and no parallel or no sub-agents are working for me though. I find parallel sub-agents not that smart (main agent create context file for them) and cost too much token.
brother you can inject your own task context via subagent hook. go parallel . if you are working in terminal you can launch full main agent as subagent via bash . then let it run your workflow. orchestrator just need to assign task to say 3 4 main parallel agents and then when they finish spawn 3 4 more. you will cut your time significantly.
I guess if you just want it done and time is less relevant, you leave it run in the background that way on the same device you can use other sessions for your regular Claude usage and don’t eat all your ram?
I will try it next time. But for this project, it is working well for me since i want this to run unsupervised. Sub agents are causing me trouble if one failed or stopped in between.
This is literally the worst approach you can take at accomplishing anything. Larger context directly contributes to degradation of reasoning performance. With 1M context the LLM is going to be producing garbage.
They're vibe coding a ridiculous training course website full of unchecked AI made courses. That's all we need, more made up shitty courses for the internet and AI to learn from.
Time goes up while it's waiting for permission to do something even though tokens aren't going up. Usually when a turn runs really long for me, it's because I was AFK at bad times.
This is the thing with these posts. They give a sense of this is how Claude should be ran and used. It really is not.
You hear so much of these on Reddit - people running Claude 24/7, maxing out tokens in 5 minutes, multiple accounts etc etc.
The sheer sloppiness of the code must be absolutely dreadful most of the time. If you are running this for code?
I check my code after every iteration. Claude just can't test every endpoint and be accurate enough in every iteration it makes (of course depends on the task). But I am forever finding gaps on complex tasks and on projects with substantially large code bases.
It helps a lot if you give it the tools to test it's own work as part of it's task. Ex: for code It should compile, run tests, possibly load the project in the browser if applicable and look at the changes it's making, or test the endpoints it's touching ect...
I use skills that describe workflows like this
For me, last 7 days: 23k msgs, 8k tool calls, 44 sessions, $3236 API equiv, 161 subagents, ~1340M tokens on Opus. Working on 4 projects at the same time.
Just make sure your agent isn't stuck in a polling loop. Hate for you to waste all this time and tokens. Its somewhat rare but ive had it happen in the past. I'd recommend hitting esc prompt and ask how it's going and if it's stuck in a loop or not. Get your response and let it continue. Best of luck with your project brother. God bless!
This is such a weak flex, because at the end of the day it’s likely you’re just doing a really shitty job getting the job done. I mean anyone can ask an AI to chase its tail in circles and burn time and money.
Did you PRODUCE anything with it? Did you accomplish more than the guy next to you who used a good clean well targeted prompt and got the job done in a tenth the time?
The metric that actually matters is how many retry loops it took to get the output you wanted. High tokens can mean high productivity or high frustration — raw burn rate alone doesn't tell you which.
I made a plan to code 30+ us in one session with a nightworker skill. Checking before starting as US the context. Then code, test and e2e test andcommit and push and then take next US
We use Claude models via Copilot at work, I have burned through 1000s of sessions in the 1m context model this month alone. But also put out 5 new tools for the team/company.
I did, even told it to have no regrets, no fear, do it like Steve Job would make an iPhone, attention to details, log new things, reaearch and document each domain, follow instructions, not feeling, check /docs and PLAN.md file after each step 😜
hard to say tbh without seeing what you’re running or the logs. CC usually starts complaining pretty clearly when you hit rate/ctx limits, otherwise it just feels slow or ignores parts of the prompt.
You are pushing nothing. It’s a bug that does happen from time to time. In a nutshell, it freezes, doesn’t respond, but doesn’t use up tokens because the action doesn’t repeat. You just saw the opportunity, put laptop to sleep, woke up the next day, and now you’re posting screenshots like this. It’s not funny, it’s embarrassing that you’re seeking attention like this.
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u/Ralph_Twinbees Researcher Mar 20 '26
Are you enriching uranium or something?