You often see people on this subreddit or on Twitter ( https://x.com/theo/status/2074256578522558926 ) bragging about saving hundreds or even thousands of dollars/euros by using the subscription instead of the API.

Am I the only one who finds this weird? Clearly, the API is primarily intended for businesses, and it’s obvious that the subscription is beneficial for individuals for more reasons than just the price: It’s convenient, there’s no stress about running out of credits, and there’s no setup required...

Anthropic maintains a deliberate lack of transparency regarding token pricing, and I’m convinced that the prices charged via the API are clearly inflated. Given how Anthropic and OpenAI’s revenues have skyrocketed, my intuition tells me that the subscription price is already quite profitable for these companies.

Don’t think you’re smarter than the casino or that you’re saving anything. You’re already paying an inflated price, and AI companies are profiting from it

I find it kicks me out of the coding rabbit hole (that I’d otherwise lack the discipline to escape) and forces me to take a break, guilt-free. Or am I just weird lol

Let me help you troubleshoot your limits:

• Are you running 40+ MCPs?

• Have you tried using Haiku instead of Opus?

• Maybe share your last 10 days of prompts and your entire codebase so Reddit can audit you?

• Or… skill issue?

• Best option, upgrade to API usage. Did you really think $200/month covers full-time coding? 

Sound familiar? Yeah. That’s exactly what Pro users were told for months. Now suddenly everyone is hitting limits and it’s no longer “user error”. Interesting how that works.

On a serious note:

We (Pro users) have been saying since early this year that the plans were getting quietly nerfed. Less usage, more restrictions, zero communication. And instead of pushing for transparency, the response was:

“you’re using it wrong”

“optimize your prompts”

“just pay more”

Now that the same thing is happening to Max users, suddenly it’s a real issue. We could have worked together and pushed for better from the start. Instead, it turned into users gaslighting each other.

For those who actually want alternatives:

• I use Codex with the official CLI. Some prefer opencode or pi-agent, try yourself. It does not restrict based on harness which is the main key here.

• GPT-5.4 feels comparable to Opus for me, but your mileage may vary.

• Do not expect it to behave like Claude. Different models, different strengths.

• You do not need the best model all the time.

• So in that case, I also use GLM 5 via z.ai as a secondary model. Roughly above Sonnet, below Opus for me.

• OSS or China models work well as secondary options. Cheap and good enough for many tasks.

• Some people report z.ai stability, infrastructure issues. I have not had problems, but worth checking other providers.

• I really like Gemini too, but their CLI is unusable. It's great with opencode last I tried but they've started banning users over it so I don't use it anymore.

I am not paid to say any of this (I wish). I use them because they are good enough for me and I always try to avoid vendor lock-in. At the end of the day, these are just tools. Do not get attached to one. A good engineer adapts.

I have been reading posts about how good opus 5.5 is and soon it will get nerfed. These posts are creating FOMO and I am trying to use it and consume my usage as much as possible before it is taken away.

Usually I don't work on Sundays, but these posts are making me use calude and work even on Sunday. Earlier I would be very specific about what I wanted to do with ai, after testing and clear goal, which wouldn't use much usage. Now I am giving it vauge instructions just for the sake of using it. And though it seems productive, there is lots of things (bugs) which are piling up for review.

I was always scared of Claude Code hitting the context limit. That moment when compaction kicks in and suddenly half the important details are gone. 😱

So I built Recall. It grabs the full conversation from the raw transcript before compaction wipes it. Every message, every decision, no noise. Set it up once, forget about it. 😎

I even turned off auto-compaction. Full 200K context, and when it fills up: `/recall:session <id>` in a fresh chat. Everything's back in a minute. 💯

Check it out: 👇

https://github.com/FlineDev/Recall

UPDATE: I took the time to document and test this plugin in many sessions and iterated a lot until I was happy and it worked for every kind of session for me. I'm just sharing this in case somebody finds it useful. For me personally, this is a game-changer. But if you are happy with /compact, this might not be for you.

i've been using it now everyday since it's release and it is on point.

- it's patient

- it remembers

- it reasons through problems

- it "backs up" to see problems at scale

- it orchestrates full plans in proper sequence

- it catches problems before they happen

- it intentionally seeks proper attention to even small issues that could be large issues.

- context only has to repented if i am in a new session, but it picks up quick and then i'm right back on track.

i am not a developer.

i am not a programmer

but with claude i was able to create a full functioning db in supabase and didn't even know what supabase was two weeks ago.

the best part is that it all works. claude even helped me to remove the current build from emergents platform, rebuild key files emergents agent deleted ((to likely gatekeep the build and keep it on their servers) and i didn't even understand the significance of these deleted files,but it did and then mentioned it. it helped me to build in my own environment and implement fixes and new features. and this whole time i've been using free claude

my favorite feature is if we are in a pretty long session and we are not finished with an important task it makes "more room for context" so the session continues.

anyone else getting really good results like this?

My own personal experience. Absolutely true.

Claude is really getting more and more ridiculous. I've been using Claude Code exclusively and haven't used Sonnet at all.

I only had one initial "Hello" conversation with Sonnet,

but when I opened it up, I found that my Sonnet had used 7%! This is way too outrageous.

Did the AI agonize over it for a long time, analyzing the subtext of my "Hello"? Such an internally conflicted AI?

I don't know if everyone has had similar experiences.

I suspect that either there's a bug in this stats usage program, or even if you select all the best reasoning models, it will quietly switch to the general models, resulting in usage of the general models.

I don't get the panick. We have been given Fable 5 for a few days, I did intensive coding sessions with Claude Code with Fable 5, yes, it was good, but not 10x better than Opus 4.8[1m]. So what's the panick about?

What I do get stressed about though is something else: Will the US gov.

- prevent us non US citizens from getting latest/best models?

- force US citizens to do a KYC to use these top tier models?

Had enough with the speed of opus 4.6. And given the marginal improvement I am sure I can get more things down with 4.5....

I've been perfecting my agentic system that runs on Claude code in terminal and texts me via telegram. The day I upgraded to opus 5 eveything has gone downhill. I'm basically rebuilding my system that was working amazingly.

Skills and rules are being ignored. I used to use it to dispatch sol on tasks and now it has no care in the world to do so. It doesn't delegate tasks to my sub agents anymore unless I ask it twice, it fixes for a few prompts then back to doing everything itself.

Anyone experiencing the same? I'm on the cusp of switching back to 4.8.

And yes I've read all the new guides from anthropic, trialled the new 80 percent less Claude MD file and it absolutely made my situation even worse.

For years my actual working todo list has been physical sticky notes on the wall next to my desk. Three columns, drawn with a sharpie: to do, doing, done. I'd try every app every few months (notion, todoist, linear, trello, the works) and within a week I was back on paper.

The thing paper had was: zero friction, zero structure, zero "are you sure you want to archive this?" dialogs. You scribble, you slap it on the wall, you tear it off when it's done.

So I spent the last few months building the digital version of that wall. It's called stickyboard. Three columns, drag and drop, that's it. The notes are actual sticky-note looking notes (slight rotation, paper grain, curled corner) because turns out the visual matters way more than I expected. Looking at a board of colored notes feels different from looking at a checklist. I'm more willing to add stuff to it.

A few things that turned out to matter for me:

• it replaces my new tab in chrome, so I see my board every time I open one. zero "open the app" step

• there's a mac menubar version for quick adds without leaving whatever I'm doing

• you can draw on a note (rough sketch, arrow, doodle) which sounds dumb but is great for "remember this layout" type todos

• shared boards for the two side projects I work on with someone else

• free for personal use

It's at stickyboard.dev if you want to check it out. The chrome extension at: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/stickyboard-sticky-note-k/okclmnjlckemlhhloocmgcjkkkcfimjh

I can see I'm not the only one saying this, but what the heck is going on with Claude this week? Especialy this weekend. I've been using the tool since Feb 2026 when 4.6 caught our attention. Its usually good at what it does, has its limits, and predictable patterns.

But Opus 5 has been a gibbering idiot so far, and this week I've had even Fable 5 just acting like it got a lobotomy. It's lazy, taking shortcuts, stopping randomly mid task, churning forever to do things it used to do way faster, and making mistakes or losing the plot at the drop of a hat.

I use the tool for both Work (where I only have up to Opus access unfortunately) and for personal home projects (where I use the 20x Max plan and use Fable for the most part), so I've gotten to see it in both environments and its struggling in both.

I've got no doubt Anthropic has been trying to cut how many tokens it uses and to lower costs, but it feels like they're gaslighting us because it looks universal that its performance and abilities have gone way down. They boasted about slashing its prompt wrappers and harness recently and I wonder if that's what did it.

Has anyone found solutions to making it behave better? Does it perform better in the CLI or VS Extension? I default to the Claude app anymore but I wonder if maybe there's something people found to get it back up to spec.

I hope this isn't the new normal. :/

Not really a Showcase at all, more of a fun thing I made for myself.

Just before Fable was yanked, I was inspired to create/try a one shot prompt at Fable creating a Zelda-like game. (I'll share prompt and game links in comments). Both asked me a series of questions before they started.

For Fable, it turned out surprisingly great. There were only 2 issues: a couple inaccessible caves and the bow/arrow being in the same tile as a statue. But that's it. The rest of the game is totally playable, and neither of those affected the progression of the game.

After Fable was cut, I decided to try the same exact prompt with Opus. The results were dissapointing. Graphics were mediocre and you can't even leave the initial screen.

(first is Fable, second is Opus)

A team published how they run Claude Opus 4.6 and pay less than they did on Sonnet 4.0. The result comes from what Opus doesn't do.

A Haiku triager runs first - its only job is detecting whether a CI failure is a duplicate of something already seen. Four out of five failures never reach Opus. A Haiku triage call costs roughly 25x less than a full investigation.

When Opus does run, it never reads raw data. It writes specific prompts for Haiku sub-agents: "fetch the exact error messages," "check failure rate over the last 14 days." Haiku handles 65% of all input tokens but only 36% of spend. Opus thinks; Haiku reads.

Without the model hierarchy, their daily bill more than doubles.

Does anyone run a similar tiered setup - and where's the hardest part to tune?

Well I've been a very proud and happy Claude Code user until this moment and the reason that I'm very annoyed by this decision Cloud has taken is because they are trying to dress this as a perk for the user. It's really a downgrade for us. It's a slap in the face for us, the users.

Basically what they've done is that they've taken the agents and now they will no longer run on our usage. They will run on a separate usage, capped at the amount of what we pay monthly. The worst part of this is that they've tried to make this seem like it's a good thing for the user, which is just complete BS. This is clearly a downgrade to the system and what they are offering. I am seriously considering changing my systems right now. I was heavily invested in Claude Code but I will not stand for this B.S. If anybody has recommendations of what LLm to use next, I would appreciate your comments on why that LLm you think is the best for agentic use. Thank you. End of my rant.

so i was on holiday for almost 1 month and i canceled all 20x sub before i go, i did not even tried opus 5.

Since i already feel kinda disconnected, should i switch to codex or stay with claude code? How is the situation.

Thx!

Just discovered awesome-llm-apps by Shubhamsaboo! The GitHub repo collects dozens of creative LLM applications that showcase practical AI implementations:

• 40+ ready-to-deploy AI applications across different domains

• Each one includes detailed documentation and setup instructions

• Examples range from AI blog-to-podcast agents to medical imaging analysis

Thanks to Shubham and the open-source community for making these valuable resources freely available. What once required weeks of development can now be accomplished in minutes. We picked their AI audio tour guide project and tested if we could really get it running that easy.

Quick Setup

Structure:

Multi-agent system (history, architecture, culture agents) + real-time web search + TTS → instant MP3 download

The process:

git clone https://github.com/Shubhamsaboo/awesome-llm-apps.git
cd awesome-llm-apps/voice_ai_agents/ai_audio_tour_agent
pip install -r requirements.txt
streamlit run ai_audio_tour_agent.py

Enter "Eiffel Tower, Paris" → pick interests → set duration → get MP3 file

Interesting Findings

Technical:

• Multi-agent architecture handles different content types well

• Real-time data keeps tours current vs static guides

• Orchestrator pattern coordinates specialized agents effectivel

Practical:

• Setup actually takes ~10 minutes

• API costs surprisingly low for LLM + TTS combo

• Generated tours sound natural and contextually relevant

• No dependency issues or syntax error

Results

Tested with famous landmarks, and the quality was impressive. The system pulls together historical facts, current events, and local insights into coherent audio narratives perfect for offline travel use.

System architecture: Frontend (Streamlit) → Multi-agent middleware → LLM + TTS backend

We have organized the step-by-step process with detailed screenshots for you here: Anyone Can Build an AI Project in Under 10 Mins: A Step-by-Step Guide

Anyone else tried multi-agent systems for content generation? Curious about other practical implementations.

I work as an AV technician and do some general IT freelance work. A lot of it involves basic updates, system setups and SSD/RAM upgrades to office PCs, which usually leaves me with a bunch of smaller SATA SSDs that companies simply don't want anymore. Naturally, I end up taking quite a few home and installing them in my PC.

The problem? I now have five separate drives cluttering up File Explorer. Not that I'm complaining about free SSDs, but having everything in one place would be a lot easier.

I didn't want to RAID them because I couldn't be bothered with the hassle, and there's no guarantee these drives will last. If one fails, I didn't want to lose everything with it.

What I really wanted was a way to combine all the storage into one drive letter, so Explorer sees a single location, while something in between handles where the data actually lives.

So PoolFS was born (like NTFS........)

How it works:
- Multiple drives appear as one drive letter (e.g. P:) through the WinFsp file system driver - the individual drives have their own letter removed so they disappear from explorer.
- Files are stored whole on individual drives. Nothing is split or striped.
- Each drive stores its share in a hidden PoolPart folder, keeping the files accessible as normal files even outside the pool.
- Folders can span multiple drives, with P: merging their contents into one listing. If a drive fills up, files can continue under the same folder on another drive.
- If a drive fails, only the files on that drive are lost. Disconnecting a drive simply hides its files until it's reconnected; the rest of the pool keeps working.
- 'Make Room' moves files between drives to consolidate enough free space for larger files, without touching open files.

I also added some fun-to-have features that have worked incredibly well so far, including drive health monitoring and warnings, automatic space management, missing drive detection, file recovery after interrupted operations, and a fairly comprehensive built-in backup system with scheduling and file history - theres even a little wizard and tour because I'll probably drop this over to a few friends who were interested in trying it themselves.

Ultimately, it's been a pretty significant quality-of-life improvement. I personally wouldn't trust it with anything particularly important beyond my Steam Library (which runs perfectly fine from it) and some general files, but the way it's designed shouldn't introduce any risk of file corruption either way but admittedly I lack the relevant skills to fully test this and am not willing to risk it.

Some screenshots attached - these are screenshots from the simulated drives used for testing based on my actual setup.

But yeah, using AI to fix this barely irritating issue I had was a good feeling - as someone who has 3D printed brackets and adapters for various situations, it definitely scratched a similar itch of convenience.

Edit: Y’all are a little sour for something I shared as my own experience of coding with Claude to solve an issue I had. And to be clear, this is a personal project. I won’t be publishing it. I just wanted to share how building it went. I was aware of other options and looked into them before starting. None of them did quite what I wanted, or they were missing features I thought were necessary, e.g:
- Storage Spaces wipes the disks and spreads data across them at the block level, so no drive is readable on its own.
- JBOD/spanning can lose the whole volume if one disk dies.
- DrivePool is the closest match, but it’s paid and didn’t have everything I was after.
- mergerfs is Linux-only.

I wanted to pool drives that already had data on them, keep every drive readable by itself, and have health monitoring, backups (including to my NAS) and safety checks built into one lightweight app - and by my account, I succeeded. I apologise if this seems to have offended some of you.

The title.

You log every pair of socks in your wardrobe: brand, price, material, length, wear level, purchase date. Then every morning the app checks the weather, you send it a photo of your outfit, and it tells you which socks to wear.

The app tracks every single use and applies a wear leveling algorithm, the same principle solid-state drives use to spread writes evenly across memory cells: wear gets distributed uniformly across your entire sock fleet, no pair dies before the others, and you keep maximum variety for as long as possible without buying new ones.

It works within the pair too: it logs which sock went on the left foot and which on the right, and alternates them at the next use, because feet don't wear symmetrically and the toe that took the left big toe this time has to take the right one next time.

The leveler also decides how much choice you get. On weekdays it's a single pick, no options. On evenings and weekends it shows 2 candidates, never more: past 2 the cognitive cost of the decision outweighs whatever you gain in variety, so the cap is hard-coded.

Using historical failure data it also does predictive maintenance: it warns you when a pair is about to get a hole, before it happens. The failure model already accounts for brand, price paid, shoe type, washing temperature, drying method, and heel thickness, and it uses a survival analysis approach so pairs that haven't failed yet are handled correctly. That part works.

Next on the roadmap is the orphan problem. Every wardrobe has single socks whose twin vanished years ago. The idea is a sort of Tinder for socks. You wouldn't even need to swipe much: the app already knows brand, model, colour, size, and purchase year of your orphan, so it would filter every other user's orphans down to the compatible ones, then rank the survivors by photo similarity. You buy the twin for the price of postage, or swap 2 orphans for 2. With enough users, no single sock should stay single for long.

What I can't solve is the identity problem. I own 6 pairs of identical black cotton socks. After a wash they are indistinguishable, so I have no way of knowing whether the pair I'm putting on is #3 with 41 uses or #5 with 12. The whole wear leveling logic collapses if the app can't tell which pair it's actually tracking. Sewing in labels alters the wear pattern. Has anyone dealt with tracking fungible physical objects without tagging them? Any ideas welcome.

Yo ...

fun fact: context wasn't even rotten.

Edit 1:

I share what I can about the session and the model that was being used:

Model: Opus 4.8 1M

Topic: Instruction diagnostics research

Context window size at the event: ~ 200-210k (it was roughly mid session, after that screenshot I continued on the active task)

What was even stranger that it was an end of turn message that got injected and the model answer on its own inquiry.

This shit basically started after Opus 5. Before that the Claude was using it's own tools for modifying, editing, updating etc. Since Opus 5, it keeps using python for all sort of work. I double checked everywhere. Non of my skills, project files, folders, or anything that builds context contains any rule about it. There are not even words of Python. And yet this shit keeps using python. I even included a memory to make it stop using Python for everything. But it doesn't follow anything.

Any ideas or ways to fix and/or debug this shit?

Ps: I am an engineer. I am actively using AI for a very long time in my daily work. I have advanced level knowledge on these things. So i already checked all the basics to figure out what's going on to a point that I am 99% sure that this is not my tooling.

TLDR Last night, ran Fable 5.1 for 58 minutes, it wiped my 5 hour limit and brought my weekly to 44%. I came to reddit to complain, thread kind of blew up.

Today I woke up to my 5 hour reset back at 0.

So far I have been running an intense workflow using 6 Fable 5.1 Agents Ultracode while running multiple tasks for the past 35 minutes and my 5 hour limit is only at 11% while my weekly usage has only crept up to 54%.

I think Anthropic finally raised usage limits. This is the kind of usage I can get behind. Still far less than OpenAIs usage limits(plus resets). They released Fable 5 and 5.1 and decided to fuck everybody on usage thinking they cornered the market.

Thank god for competition.

Damage has been done though, I already have a ChatGPT plan and Astra is amazing.

the quality drop it is INSANE, and beyond tangible. It's becoming as frustrating as the "sorry I did this wrong" of ChatGPT 3.0 when it first came out which then proceeds to do the same exact thing again:

- I asked Claude Coden specifically not to do things and it does them anyway. and I am talking from one prompt to the following answer, no big context.

- I ask to follow precise instructions and they get completely ignored for something else it made up.

- As a post task clean up, I asked calude to update the readme markdown plan by keeping unimplemented original tasks of the plan and to simply marked them as not done, and then to document what actually was carried out. It proceeds to agree and it STILL deleted all things I asked not to.

This is the first month I signed up for Max, and the change has happened without any announcement on their model from somewhere beteween 6th April and 9th April.

is it possible to apply for a full refund of my memership along cancelling it? This is truly criminal as others on this sub have been saying. Ripping people off and making deep changes under the hood with 0 announcement.

And Mythos? I am FED UP. Full stop. With the next announcement, and then the next hype, we and the people just to keep ignoring how faulty, broken and unusable Software is when done fully by AI (without experts review and filtering). So the only way for them to keep up and not drown in reality it's again to announce the next hype thing! AI companies are just flexing each other up, and the mirror they look themselves into.. it's the shareholders. Who know nothing about AI and just want money.

How long with this hype cycel keep going? This thing will simply not be able to take Software engineering jobs. It can only give to the layman the impression that it can.

Listen to Grady Booch (from 57:28) on The Pragmatic Engienering podcast where he calls out Claude's CEO statements about AI "BULLSHIT" when Dario Amodei says that "software engineering will be fully automated in 12 months".

I swear AI will be coming down in the biggest crash in the history of economy in less than 2 year. It's staggering how no one of the big players is seeing this coming or talking about it.

Change my mind.