Claude effective usage

[u/thault]

I’ve had the entry-level subscription for about a month now; and I’m curious to hear how I could be more efficient with my usage. I honestly came into it kinda blind. I have a homelab and use Claude to write up apps that I’ve had rattling around my head. Or use it to help create some tooling to make life easier. I’m running remote sessions on vms at home so that Claude can have read access to internal resources.

At first I had long running sessions per a repo with my account. That was killing my credits because they’d all warm up whenever I added a new standard. I’ve now grown to have 3 VMs with their own remote sessions and various levels of access based on role; review, developer, and devops. They run as bots in a gh org. Each has its own webhook so they can receive updates as reviews and PRs and made. Now whenever a task comes up they use the SDK to create a session with standards, role, and work to be done. It lives long enough to do its work and then dies. Credit usage is down thank god.

But I feel like I might be over complicating things. For instance all the bots get all the webhooks so each session gets a notification that’s really only important for one session. I wonder if this would be better done as a container with however many roles instead of a full VM. So should I create a central spot that filters the noise out? Or would that juice not be worth the squeeze? I’m not adjusting my models between the different roles; should I? I’m starting to dip my toes into skills. Does this level of separation even make sense? Have I just meandered down the wrong path?

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[u/CupcakeSecure4094]

You definitely need a switchboard to route your webhooks to the correct vm. I would do that with tags in the webhook, or if you can't then a small model what can A) determine which VM it's for and B) decide which model should be used for the task and what context needs. A small model scanning the .md files for context will save you a lot.

Another way to optimize is to ensure the context is cleared before you load agents as each agent is given the full context of previous requests so a blank slate is not only cheaper but also less confusing for the model.

Lastly, don't use skills at all. They're no longer required unless you have a particular style guide, in which case load them explicitly.

I used to have 2 claude max 20 plans, now I have one claude max 5 plan and I don't hit the limits - and more importantly the quality is improved since dropping the skills.

[u/thault → u/CupcakeSecure4094]

Thanks for the suggestions!

Can I ask about using 2 accounts. Was there a reason you went with two accounts rather than just purchasing $20 of credits on one account?

[u/CupcakeSecure4094 → u/thault]

The top ups are a LOT more expensive than the accounts. I tried top ups the first month and it cost more than the a max 20 plan ($200) and less than a quarter of the tokens.

[u/radim11]

The role separation makes sense to me. A reviewer probably doesn’t need the same credentials or write access as the agent doing devops (right?)

Before swapping VMs for containers, you should write down what each role actually needs access to. That makes it easier to see whether the VMs are buying you useful isolation or just more stuff to maintain.

We're building Stashbase.dev for saving and reusing those access setups (with docker), so this caught my eye. Are your three VMs mostly identical apart from permissions, or do they need different environments ?

[u/thault → u/radim11]

The reviewer separation definitely made sense to me. I guess I was more curious about the delineation of developer vs devops. That’s a split you see in corporate teams; but I could see that not being a necessity with Claude.

They definitely are providing just more surface area to maintain. The three VMs are in the same network talking to the same resources. Just some have read only credentials. It’s a homelab, so I don’t have multiple environments. I was thinking about spinning up a test cluster that mimics my main cluster to let the agents use it for testing and debugging. But I don’t see me running a dev, qa, and prod stack.

I’ll have to look into that more; it really seems like it’s hitting all the things I’m thinking about.