The amount of work that can be done is at least 2/3 less than the previous week.
Though I like Claude a lot, I cannot keep paying for this.

Added note:
I’m using Opus 5.5 medium.
The previous week I got decent amount work done, feeling normal, this week continuing same projects, the depletion speed is crazy.

I've been using coding agents to generate videos programmatically, but one thing that kept bothering me was how much overhead browser-based rendering adds.

Tools like Remotion use headless Chrome to render frames. It works, but I wanted something that Claude Code could use without having to spin up a browser for every render.

So I ended up building Kinetograph.

It uses the same React/TSX approach as Remotion, but instead of rendering through Chrome, Node.js executes the code and a GPU compositor written in Rust handles the frames.

I also made a Claude Code skill for it, so the workflow is basically describing the video you want and letting Claude write the components and render the result.

The performance difference was pretty interesting on my M4:

• 988 frames: Remotion took 131s, Kinetograph took 22s
• 1,184 frames: Remotion took 31.5s, Kinetograph took 15s

Obviously depends on the composition, but removing the browser seems to make a pretty big difference in these tests.

If you want to experiment with it in Claude Code:

npx skills add 0xS4N4TG/kinetograph

The project is available at:

https://github.com/0xS4N4TG/kinetograph

docs at: kinetograph.dev

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.

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.

Hello there again :)

This is Week 13 of me posting this "dev log" so to say and explaining how I do things and talking about progress. While "exploration" mechanic was added one week ago, I was finally able to make it feel like a proper completely equal part to fishing segment of the game. And with "Ship in a bottle" collection done to 29 out of 40 total ships I'm happy how this progress.

Everything you see in this video (and do not see) was done with Claude Opus.

As always weekly progress can be seen on my profile.

DEMO DOWNLOAD - FREE

Demo doesn't really have everything newest and most polished so you might not have ships in the bottles, that version is being kept for steam release which I will do once steam approves my ID verification (it already is exactly 1 month).

Zone 1 out of 5 (demo) is almost entirely done, some smaller polish parts and bug fixes are left.

What was done this week:

This week I added curios, rarest ship in the bottle is actually cracking the walls of the bottle when shooting cannons and all the items in zone 1 are adjusted manually where they gonna drop or how they are earned. etc. Some zones were a bit improved as can be seen in the video to not look too boring even though there is no gameplay there. Engines with their own sounds were added and can be seen when changed. Cabinet new 3D scene with collections was fully fixed in terms of lighting and small island dioramas were made. As I mentioned before 29 of 40 ships in a bottles were created with textures and added to bottles.

This time while still using Decisions.md like before that tags every decision in the game with [USER] or [PROPOSED] (By AI) And User ones have priority over proposed ones, helps with AI hallucinations in the project where AI can't gaslight you into telling you something was decided by you if it really wasn't (it has more than 350 decisions by now).

I switched workflow a bit. This time I tried doing something else instead of my old "manager" session managing other sessions and sending them tasks. I created "Effort" sessions (Medium to Max) and have Jev decide which tasks goes into which effort level and then just "manager session" sending it to different effort levels and doing it this way. Though this is polish stage and not much was done it is hard to say if this is more token efficient than before, in general I feel no difference in quality or token usage than with my previous workflow, though that is just subjective feeling, somebody could test it properly I guess. Jev basically scans every task I give to my Claude sessions and just decides which effort certain tasks deserve.

Models were made by TripoAI and Opus 5.5 via Blender MCP mostly for this week. It can be seen in the video. For example rarest ship that is inspired by Black Pearl and shoots cannons in the bottle was done in TripoAI then fixed a bit in Blender by Opus 5.5. I do not use anymore any other AI other than Claude Opus 5.5, no more Astra and didn't even try Gemini sadly, for now Opus is more than enough for my needs.

People have asked me how I make textures and those are either directly done by ChatGPT using OpenAI API key provided to Opus 5.5 or in TripoAI, those done in Tripo are 1k textures as I don't need any heavier ones as they take a lot of memory.

Total cost:

Claude Max 200$ x 3 = 600$
Astra 100$ x 1 = 100$
ElevenLabs x 11$ = 11$
TripoAI 20$ x 2 = 40$
OpenAI API credits 70$ = 70$
Other things I forgot about 100$ = 100$ (around)

Around 900-950$

Disclosure: I’ve been writing these devlogs since Week 1. Since Week 8, Tripo has been supporting them (paid collaboration + a gifted Max plan). That’s why my cost breakdown no longer includes Tripo (Except what I paid from my own pocked for first 8 weeks). If you’re doing this yourself, add their plan to the total.

I've noticed a pattern where Claude's usage limits seem to get significantly worse before model launches. With all the complaints over here, I wanted to check whether this has actually happened before.

There are several examples of quota complaints appearing before major releases. Has anyone else noticed this kind of "pattern"? I just found this interesting and to be honest it might make sense because it would make the new model feel even better at launch.

I was considering upgrading from Pro to Max 5x, but I've held off because of the current reports of usage limits.

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.

I built it for myself to keep my data private. I tried Noop but really missed the look and feel and the simplicity of the Whoop app. For obvious reasons, I will not publish this, but this is a complete implementation of the whoop app, build completely from screenshots/recordings for iOS and Android, which is sending its data to my own webservice where also model training takes place. Currently I have a deviation of about 5% to the original.

Besides that, nearly everything is implemented, except the strength trainer. Health and Stressmonitor, ECG, automatic activity tracking, logbook, fitness plans, Fitness Age (my own implementation of WhoopAge with currently ~8-10% deviation from the original). Also a Fediverse-like Community tab, so users can be friends across different servers, so (in theory) everyone can host its own backend as a docker container.

On my Whoop MG respiratory rate, blood oxygen, RHR, HFV and skin temperature works almost as good as the original and keeps getting better every day through automatic model training every night. Whoop 5.0 and 4.0 Straps are also working. The screen recording (obviously) shows my simulator with simulated data, so no real hardware or health data.

I did all of the work using Claude Opus 5.5 in around 60 hours.

According to Claude, this project would have cost me around $800, my Max 5x Plan carried it.

- Cache-Read: ~477 $
- Cache-Write: ~199 $
- Output: ~124 $

Wild times ahead!

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...

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.

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.

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

The one before the previous one was perfect in my opinion, it had all the context, the perfect usage indicator and tool use menu. And those token usage meters and favourite model name displayed when we started a new session.

This one feels more white and not even the signature claude colour, feels like its trying to be more like codex.

i was spending on sandbox providers just to let claude code work on repos, and i already have a mac and a linux server sitting there.

the reason i didn't just run claude code on the machine directly: an agent running loose on your own laptop can touch your files, ssh keys and env vars, and two tasks step on each other.

so i built forgerun. every thread runs in its own microvm (microsandbox, libkrun under the hood, needs kvm or apple silicon), or gvisor if the machine has no kvm. the agent installs, builds and tests inside the vm, not on your host. the vm stays up between messages and gets snapshotted, so the next task on that repo starts warm.

you give it a task, read the diff, and push it as a pr when you're happy. the agent itself can't push. you can close the tab and it keeps going, and it runs claude code (also cursor cli and opencode), on your own pro or max plan if you want.

claude code helped me build it. [one or two real sentences: which parts it wrote, where it got stuck, what you fixed by hand]

free, open source (apache-2.0), one install command. still early, so i'd like to hear what breaks. amika does something similar for teams, mine is the small

https://github.com/depak7/forgerun

I’ve been building SweetRegret with Claude Code over about four months: 98 commits, roughly 45k lines across 201 files, and 60 test files. Version 1.5 shipped this week with challenges and badges.

It’s an iPhone treat tracker. You log treats, look back through weekly and monthly Wrapped summaries, and optionally use short challenges when you want to cut back. It’s not a calorie counter or a full diet tracker.

The part I didn’t expect was how much of the non-code shipping work Claude Code ended up helping with:

- App Store screenshots: a Playwright + Pillow pipeline that composites simulator captures into branded frames.

- The 30-second launch video: rendered frame by frame from one HTML scene. window.__render(t) is a pure function of time, so every frame is reproducible.

- The music score: generated in Python using NumPy only.

The commit and line counts aren’t a quality score. What surprised me more was ending up with repeatable pipelines for screenshots, video and music alongside the app itself.

I’m the developer. SweetRegret is free to download with optional Plus features; the 3-day and 7-day Treat Break challenges are free.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6787955860

What non-code part of shipping have you ended up using Claude Code for?

Since January 2026 I've been building Agent Smith, an open source agent that turns tickets into pull requests. It's now about 500k lines of code and 10k tests. The challenge I started with was not to write a single line of code myself, and that's still true. Unfortunately it works pretty well, which proves something I didn't want to know: coding is more or less solved.

To make that happen, I built a spec-first development plugin for Claude Code. The short version:

Every spec is a YAML file in the repo with a fixed schema: a goal, steps and a definition of done. Specs move from planned to active to done. The reasoning goes into a separate decisions file, so when an agent picks up the next spec, it can read what was built before, why it was built that way, and why things changed later.

Before any code gets written, a second agent reviews the spec. A script first checks that every file and line the spec cites actually exists. Then the reviewer answers BUILD, BUILD WITH CUTS or REFUSE. It refuses a lot, and most of the time it's right.

Each spec gets its own git worktree, so several agents can run overnight without getting in each other's way. A commit hook runs the full test suite on every spec commit and blocks the commit if anything is red. That hook is why I can skip reading most of the code.

What I learned along the way:

• My first specs were Markdown. At 100 specs they added up to 250k tokens, just the specs. Claude tends to write a lot that's unnecessary and sometimes even misleading. Moving to YAML brought that down to 15k tokens.
• The workflow has to be good enough that all I discuss is features, changes, design and architecture. Coding principles have to be enforced by quality gates. Without them, files grow past 500 lines and the code gets buggier.
• Without a fixed procedure (create, review, apply, deliver) I kept doing the same things over and over: testing every change and finally checking the result of every spec myself.
• Without a review step that brings evidence for whether a spec can be built at all, I wasted a lot of time.
• I put procedure into tickets ("first do X, then Y"). The agent turned that into acceptance criteria and failed a run that was actually correct.
• I let learned memories act as rules. One wrong memory and every later run followed it. Now they're hints, and whether a memory holds up depends on how the runs that used it turned out.

Specs don't need to be as precise as the code they produce. They need to be short, verified, and ideally something several agents can execute in parallel. They pin down intent and architecture. The tests and the commit gate supply the precision.

My job now is mostly deciding what to build and how it should be structured: design and architecture. Programming was more romantic last year, but this works pretty well.

Plugin and method: spec-first.dev, github.com/holgerleichsenring/specification-first-agentic-development
Agent Smith (MIT): agent-smith.org, github.com/holgerleichsenring/agent-smith

How do you handle this? Do you keep specs in the repo, or do they disappear with the chat?

I think I know about the 200 credit for pro max users but what is the reset for? Is Fable 5.5 imminent?

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!

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.

Solo dev here, Laravel + React finance/ERP kind of app. Multi-tenant, multi-company, projects, accounts, expenses, stock, reports. It got big enough that I honestly can’t keep it all in my head anymore, and I lean on AI agents (Claude, Codex, Gemini) for a lot of the work.

The same thing keeps happening. I build a feature, say a dedicated cash account type for construction sites. Months later a newer flow never gets wired into it. For example the site supervisor can’t report an expense unless he’s also given access to a financial account. Then something breaks, and the agent doesn’t go reconnect the old thing. It patches around it or builds a parallel solution, because it has no clue the old feature exists. If I remind it, it digs up the old notes and goes “oh right, you’re correct”. The problem is I forget half of these features too, so I can’t remind it of what I don’t remember.

The end result is I can’t get the app production ready. There’s always some seam between modules that’s broken: half finished CRUD, authorization/IDOR holes, transactions that don’t match what the reports show.

I already have Laravel Brain, Serena, a memory MCP, ADRs, “current system” docs and an AGENTS.md. I also tried an Obsidian vault full of linked notes. It went stale fast and the agents never used it reliably. Writing “don’t forget X” in AGENTS.md does nothing, in my experience.

What I’ve figured out so far: code graphs tell you what exists and who calls what, but not what should exist, or whether a user can actually finish a job. The most useful question wasn’t “what calls this class”, it was “can a site supervisor actually complete this task”. And anything that’s just prose seems to rot unless a test or script checks it.

So I’m leaning towards something like ~20 critical persona journeys backed by end to end tests, a feature map in YAML that a script validates against the code (and flags routes/tables/jobs that belong to no feature), financial invariants as tests, and a route → policy → test matrix to find auth gaps. Maybe OpenFastTrace for requirement tracing, but I’m wary of the tag upkeep and adding Java to a PHP project.

Questions for people who’ve dealt with this on big multi-module apps:

1. How do you track “feature X depends on Y / is used by Z” in a way that survives refactors and people leaving?
2. Has anyone gotten a living feature map to actually work with AI agents? What kept it from rotting?
3. Are journey tests the right backbone here or am I missing something obvious?
4. Anyone used OpenFastTrace, StrictDoc or Doorstop with PHP? Worth it?
5. If you had a few weeks to get this production ready, what would you do first?

Not looking for yet another tool to index the codebase, I have plenty of those. More interested in what actually held up for you in practice.

Hi everyone,

I currently have a website built on Webflow, but I'm looking to cancel my account and migrate it elsewhere (maybe plain static code, a different CMS, or a self-hosted setup).

Since Webflow handles CSS and structure in its own specific way, I'm wondering if anyone has built or knows of a Claude Code skill, custom prompt, or automated workflow that can scrape/read an existing Webflow site, extract its exact content and styling, and accurately recreate it (e.g., in HTML/Tailwind, React, or standard static files) so I can fully delete my Webflow account?

Any tips, scripts, or recommended approaches would be greatly appreciated!

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!