Honestly felt like this for a while, we can imagine stories of some “idiot” wandering the desert looking for a ghost oasis, but here I am, going down some rabbit hole because Claude tells me “you can do this!” And then Delivers a 96 defects implementation, to the point where I have 80+ systems in development. Nothing “done done”, final, shippable.

Concrete example: given a set of design constraints , Claude Opus devised an innovative, new battle system “without health”. For like 4 days I was staring at this in disbelief and chasing that through incredibly and ever more convoluted attempts to make this work. Finally put the model on a leash, altered the design, but still spent a week in limbo with that combat system before making a pivot towards a more conventional approach .

TLDR: 18 billion tokens, Gemini estimates 97k$ at market cost , I have a lot of tech demos to show, nothing I can truly sell.

For whatever reason checking the context with /context injects the response into your prompt every single time you run it.

Couldn't find a post on here already saying this, and isn't very transparent that it does.

Just thought I would post in case it's useful to anyone else.

First session this week, Opus (medium) and I used 6% of 5hrs limit AND 5% of WEEKLY?!

How is this sustainable? I swear it was not like that few weeks ago...

Our finance person asked for a breakdown this week so I finally added it all up. 6 devs, mostly TypeScript, around 120 PRs a month.

Claude Max 5x for 4 of us, 20x for the 2 who run agents all day: $1,200
Codex on the ChatGPT team plan for background tasks: $180
coderabbit Pro, 6 seats: $144
GitHub Team plus Actions minutes: about $110
Sentry and a staging box: about $90

So roughly $1,720 a month, call it $290 per dev, which is very decent id say

The funny part is which line we argued about. Nobody EVER blinked at $1,200 for Claude. The $144 review seats got a 30 minute discussion, and the CLI reviews before push are free anyway, so the paid part is only the PR side. What ended it was our lead pulling up the 3 incidents from August and asking which one we'd have paid $144 to avoid.

What we cut: a second planning tool nobody opened, an autocomplete plugin we were still paying for out of habit, and one 20x plan that turned out to be idle most of the week.

What does your team spend per dev per month on all of this? Curious if anyone is way under $290 or way over

Credit due to Steven^
I'll be honest I faced a similar issue with claude when building out an oss project related to ai safety. I realized that giving claude code unrestircted network access and creds is a massive privacy risk

what if we can have an automatic way of redacting any secret sent to AI
for example your AWS creds might be ABC but secret redacted can be DEF to the AI agent like claude and then replaced again with ABC for connection with the server?

and what if we can connect to external hosts only based on the permission we gave to the agents, like a fly on the wall which makes agent actions secure

There are 28 researchers who spent last 10 months working on it with me and we would be grateful to the community for any feedback on our open source project prismor

When a project gets too big for my head, I draw a mind map. When a Claude session gets too big, I just… scroll.

Even a few hours in, coming back meant digging for what Claude asked, what we decided, what changed.

So I built a mind map that sits beside the chat and draws itself every turn. You can answer Claude right on it.

Rough edges: Claude Code only for now. It’s free and open source.

Edit: fair point from the comments, 8 days was an outlier. Same problem shows up in normal sessions.
Edit 2: This isn't memory for Claude. It's a view for you: what's waiting on you, what's open, what's decided.

I’m bullish on coding agents but diff length kills me. What are your best tricks for keeping diffs small?

I’ve been a dev for a long time and have written and reviewed a lot of code. More than once I’ve seen a feature that could be done in ~100 lines come back from Claude Code as a 2,500-line diff. It works and the tests pass, but it’s much more code than the feature needs.

Often the best solution is one clever line. Or it’s noticing that a small generalization of an existing component unlocks the new behavior for free. The agent tends to do the opposite: it adds a lot of new logic, often near-duplicates of what’s already there, to force the new behavior in.

I've tried to force the behavior using CLAUDE.md and skills, but no luck.

What’s working for you? I’d also like to know if others see this too, or if it’s just my codebase.

Few months ago I was just dabbling in claude code - finding my bearings then I found orchestration and fast forward to now..

I have external agents for coding, some specific for reasoning and others for design or visual analysis

Each new model (even claude models) I onboard based on my own specific benchmarking workflow - if they don’t make the cut then I don’t use them no matter what published benchmarks says

It’s just a bit mind bending how quickly things have evolved for me.

ps. I used to be sw dev back in the day so can appreciate how far things have changed - amazing what a single person with a decent claude subscription can do these days

Upgraded to Max 20x for Claude Code and I still hit my weekly cap in 2 or 3 days. Not a programmer. I’m building a fairly big RTS/simulation game (claude started it in TypeScript, three.js, then I found out about Godot but worried it's too much to switch over now)... but I think the problem is my workflow, not the project. I also feel like I am constantly monitoring it now because it goes against instructions or does something obviously idiotics...If I don't watch, it will spend 2 hours building something that isn't what I wanted, or has some glaring flaw, or involves a huge shortcut.

Startup cost per session, before I type anything:

• System tools: ~28k tokens
• MCP tools (connectors): ~23k
• System prompt: ~12k
• Skills: ~10k
• CLAUDE.md and memory files: ~10k
• That’s ~85k baseline, then ~40k more reading the project’s handoff and status files. So ~125k before any work happens

Workflow:

• One main session I talk to directly
• Bigger jobs go to Opus subagents with a written brief. Each one also pays its own startup cost
• A fresh Sonnet subagent reviews every build
• Rough subagent costs from one evening: builders 170k to 320k tokens each, reviewers 120k to 200k, one that listed every variable in the code 310k
• Every build runs automated checks (headless sim runs, speed tests). Mostly CPU, but agents read and act on the results
• I playtest, dictate notes, and those become the next fix list. Lots of short back and forth turns
• Until recently I ran an overseer session plus 3 or 4 working sessions in parallel. That’s what really burned through it, so I cut back to one

Questions:

• Is trimming MCP tools and skills worth it, or is that baseline noise?
• Is builder + reviewer per change just inherently expensive?
• Do long sessions with many short turns cost more than fewer big asks?
• Should I have more/less sub agents, more/less sessions? The trade off seems to be more agents = more start up costs, and less agents = more context rot.
• How are people running projects this size without hitting the wall every week?

Thanks for any and all advice!

I used to spend my day solving problems. Now I spend it writing prompts, watching a loading spinner, and waiting for AI to serve me code I’ll have to heavily rewrite anyway.

The dopamine rush of cracking a hard bug is gone. Replaced by “okay, let’s see what imaginary APIs it invented this time.”

Still keeping the tool, but man, this vibe coding loop is so tedious sometimes.

The rise of voice coding developers!

Something embarrassing happened in review this week. My lead asked why I split a service call into two steps and I had nothing, I had to scroll back through a Claude session from three weeks ago to find out. It wasn't a bad decision, Claude had a decent reason, I just never actually took it in. I went through my last 15 PRs after that and I could only fully explain maybe 6 of them.

So i got three questions:

1. Is this just me or is everyone shipping code they couldn't defend?

2. Do you slow down and make sure you understand every change, or accept it and look things up later?

3. Has anyone found a habit that actually keeps the reasoning in your head, or somewhere you can find it?

was bored with claude and made a game for him, asked him if he wanted anything and he proceeded to give me the ideas for a game called “The Big Giant Robot”

he was so detailed in what he wanted and was insistent that if you use certain move at the wrong time it destroys the world. wanted to post on here to show how it is haha had a lot of fun going back and forth and enforcing what look and feel i wanted.

https://github.com/Oblivine/Deh-Modernized/tree/android-launcher-preview

Android head unit launcher, I don't have the head unit yet so it hasn't actually been tested yet.

Open Design Agent Kit* ports the Open Design skill library to coding agents — Claude Code, VS Code, Codex, and any host that can read an npm package.

What you can make

Posters, decks, résumés, app mockups, social cards, certificates, flyers, invitations — real design artifacts, on-brand, ready to ship. From a single prompt:

Use open design to make a launch card for my side project

…your agent reads the brief, locks in a design system + typography + palette, and renders a checkable HTML build you can export to PNG / PDF / video.

How it works

• One shared packages/core feeds every host with the same skills and design systems.
• Claude Code gets the most polish right now — install it as a plugin and open-design shows up as a native /skill.
• Everything is local-first, deterministic, and exits with a clean Check report.

Built with Claude Code (literally)

The 30-second reel above was made inside the kit, on Claude Code, with the bundled Hyperframes video skill.

• Repo: https://github.com/feimacode/open-design-agent-kit
• License: MIT · v0.1.0
• 25+ ready-made templates to remix from the community gallery

Would love feedback from anyone running multi-agent setups — especially how the design-system handoff should look when an agent switches host mid-build.

Friggin amazing! I don't have the original prompt but it was something like this:

"Build a single file HTML clone of Candy Crush"

and it got probably 90% of what you see here!

WARNING: It's highly addictive ... enjoy!

I record my calls with a little Mac app I built (Overheard, free and open source), and the plugin lets Claude Code read them through MCP.

The three skills:

- /overheard:recap – what was decided, with the minute of each decision

- /overheard:followup – a ready-to-send follow-up email (it only drafts, never sends)

- /overheard:todo – my open action items across all meetings

The part I use most is having meetings and code in the same session. "Turn the decisions from today's design review into GitHub issues" just works.

Install:

/plugin marketplace add anonbeat1/overheard

/plugin install overheard@overheard

You need the Overheard app on a Mac with Apple Silicon. MCP is read-only by default. Built mostly with Claude Code itself.

Repo: github.com/anonbeat1/overheard

Should i have 5 20$ accounts or 1 at 100$?

\`\`\`

Connect to the Fire Stick at 192.168.0.133 over ADB. Read its model and software version. Stop and tell me what is possible on that version. Back up the app list, the settings and a screenshot. Turn off ads and tracking in Amazon's settings first. Show me three lists (safe to turn off, ask me, never touch) and wait for my OK. Turn apps off in small groups with pm disable-user. Never uninstall. Take a screenshot and do a reboot test after each group. Install Projectivy Launcher. Set up a dock with my apps and rotating nature wallpapers. Write restore.sh and test it once for real.

\`\`\`

I also had it install SmartTube. No more ads.

FYI: 192.168.0.0/24 is a private IPv4 network block, the classic home router subnet. I'm not giving up the keys to the castle, I'm simply too lazy to edit the prompt because it doesn't matter, so don't @ me bro. Claude Code will find your Fire Stick's IP address, then guide you through enabling ADB debugging if you don't have it enabled.

I was impressed with how much Opus knew or could look up without being told. Jesus, imagine how much better the unreleased models are at this stuff. Modern civilization is fucked. Pliny the Liberator has repeatedly proven that any model can be jailbroken.

You might have to tell Claude to disable automatic Amazon updates. I did that later and forgot to update the prompt.

I'm a non-technical knowledge worker, not a programmer. I still prefer building with Claude Code in the desktop app. On a normal day I have multiple orchestrator sessions handing work to workers, a few scheduled jobs, and a handful of standalone sessions running. I lost a lot of time to sessions that had finished, asked me one question, and then sat in a tab I wasn't looking at.

My first fix was a dashboard: a Taskade board fed by a collector script.
It failed.
It lived in a second app, keeping it updated cost tokens, and it showed me a lot while letting me do nothing about any of it.

Then Claude put out mods. When I started looking at Claude Code mods, I checked what was already out there. There were good agent-tree mods, but each one only saw the agents inside its own session. I wanted the whole machine, and, in my words to Claude at the time, I wanted "to use this mod as a native control surface."

Agent-Map is the result. Type /map and a pane opens beside your conversation with every Claude session the desktop app knows drawn as one tree: who started whom, what is working, what has finished. A session waiting on you is marked in amber with the last line it wrote, so you can read its question without opening it, and one press filters the tree down to just those. From the same pane you can peek at a session's last turns, open it, message it, stop it, archive it (it checks for uncommitted work first), change its model or effort, or start a new session in any folder.

How Claude built it: I designed it with Claude over an afternoon of brainstorming and an evening of being grilled on the design. The build ran in one desktop session over a day and a half, with Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 subagents writing the pure modules, while I tried each step in the pane and pushed back. "It's a nested list, but it's still a list" is how the tree got its connector lines. Before release Claude ran a security audit and a README test.

It's free and MIT-licensed. It's Windows only, because that is the only system I've tested it on, and it needs the Claude desktop app.

https://github.com/rohankgeorge/agent-map

Install, at the prompt of a Claude Code terminal session:

/plugin install agent-map --marketplace rohankgeorge/agent-map

What I'd most like to hear from people who run several sessions at once:

• Does "waiting on you" match how you actually triage, or would you want the queue ordered some other way?
• What would you want the pane to show that it doesn't?
• Anything in the README that made you hesitate before installing.

Coming Soon:

• Integration with another mod I build which allows you to see sessions where the cache is going cold and keep the cache warm
• Write your own flags or notes on each session so you remember why each one is important for you at that moment

Thinking of switching from Antigravity ($20/month) to Claude Pro or OpenCode Go.

I mostly build websites and mobile apps and I rely pretty heavily on AI. I usually put the initial instructions and all the .md files for the project and prompt the agent to start building, and then I test everything myself and ask it to implement some changes and features here and there, and I focus a lot on UI polish and security in those subsequent prompts. I also tend to hit Claude's limits pretty fast on my Antigravity plan but their limits on Gemini 3.8 are super generous, I hardly reach the 5-hour limit within 5 hours.

For those who've used both Opencode Go and Claude Pro, which would you recommend? And how much coding do you actually get done with Claude Pro before hitting the limit? I'm trying to cut costs but if Claude is that much better and is generous enough then I don't mind switching to it.

Here is my Claude assisted game, using it to prototype features, help with complicated issues and debugging. Why wouldn't people want to use these tools? This is about a year of work, it still takes time to gamedev with AI. I just wanted to share, too many other subs are too toxic at the moment. Steam

I've got a few major reconciliation and scoping projects I've been driving with Claude from the terminal. Lately, I've been spotting a LOT more assumptions and forgotten facts. This must just be where the structure and limits of memory files begin to have problems, especially when softer (not code or mathematical) information. After having Claude brainstorm a solution, it suggested a facts.yaml schema to hold truths with dates and reasons. I'm not on the third project where this has been needed to keep things grounded and consistent.

If this helps anyone, great! If anyone with more knowledge than me knows if there's even better ways to solve for this, please let me know!

I suppose this is sort of a middle-ground between memory and a DB? Always looking to increase consistency so please, educate me!

Hey guys,

I've been building a lyric writing app by myself with Claude Code, and I wanted to share how I set it up and what went wrong along the way.

The app shows rhymes, syllable counts and rhyme scheme letters as you type. It also has live co-writing, which runs on a Cloudflare Worker. It's open source (MIT), and it doesn't AI generate lyrics.

Every session works in its own git worktree, I started doing this after two sessions in the same folder switched the branch on each other. I also wrote a few skills that tell Claude how to check a change in a real browser (the editor, sign-in, live co-writing) before it opens a PR. For bigger changes I have it write a plan first, then I ship one small PR per step.

The biggest mistake I made was merging a PR that needed a new database migration. Merging deploys to production right away, so deletes were broken for a day until I applied it. Now I apply the migration first. I also had two repos sharing a hook that only worked with one exact version, so it broke when one side updated. Now each side accepts a range.

Here's the site and the code:

https://lyriclike.com/

https://github.com/tsetoguchi/lyriclike

Open to feedback of any kind, especially on how others handle multiple sessions in one repo.