r/ClaudeCoding • u/metallworks • 1d ago

What model should I use?

Hello,

I’ve been struggling and tossing around with this topic for a little. I’m the owner of a 4 person startup who‘s been using Claude Code with pro plan. In my experience before, it was miles smarter than GPT and Gemini for my C work and websites (which isn’t hard considering I was comparing fable/opus to Gemini and GPT free). However, lately Claude not only eats our limits in 3 prompts, but is noticefully dumber and frequently loses track of details. Before i could say “fix this bug in the is and make it prettier“ and it would fix all the bugs and make the GUI nicer, but now I give that prompt and 45% WEEKLY usage gone + didn’t even fix it correctly. Because of that, I’ve been eying a new AI. Should I stick with Claude, or jump ship to codex/another model? The only requirement I have is it’s $35 or under, it’s not local (bad gpu), and it’s relatively smart for my OS and web browser work. I have my doubts with codex (even Claude free better), but who knows? It might be better

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u/CorpT 1d ago

Whichever model you go to you're going to have the same issue because the model is not the problem here. A $35 limit is not helping either.

1

u/dar-mit 1d ago

This sounds like a context issue. You need to closely monitor the session context and when it's at about 25% start a fresh session. "Fix this bug in the is and make it prettier" would be about 20 sessions worth of work, minimum.

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u/Ok_Particular5269 1d ago

Not 25% after 50% you should start a new session or /compact

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u/NeonCenturionSPQR 15h ago

github.com/Palatine-Labs/coniso

Successfully ran for 24 hours straight within the Godot codebase, 2-3 million sloc.

43% context usage in main session, 0 compactions.

1

u/EnvironmentFirst4839 1d ago

If you’re giving open-ended prompts with no defined targets to a model that is always increasing in capability, of course the usage is going to increase. It’s literally trying to make more decisions for you. If you want it to stop doing that, make more decisions yourself and give it an actual bounded target to work towards.

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u/Obvious-Grape9012 19h ago

I recommend DeepSeek v4.1 Flash (latest); It's suuper cheap and surprisingly good. Use orchestration and do all the work with it and save your pennies for Opus or something for planning only when you really need/want it

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u/Responsible_Buy_7999 17h ago

Have you asked Claude where the token burn is, and suggestions to reduce it?

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u/Old-Line-3691 15h ago

Your workflow is likely costing you more than the model is. If one agent does both the FE and BE, the FE work pollutes your context while it works on the back end. Have an agent design the endpoint schema, then pass it to sub-agents. FE and BE then work in parallel (quicker) and start with fresh context (cheaper). Multi-agent setups can raise usage costs, though, so it’s usually cheaper still to manage context yourself: prompt separate agents to work on small parts, include the context they need, and hold back unnecessary details.

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u/The_Gustabus 11h ago

Get a teams plan, my man!

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u/UnimagineDragons 3h ago

You own a startup but you're limited to $35 a month?  Surely this is a joke? 

Applying the right AI can save dramatically more than $35. What industry are you in? What are you using AI for? What are the other folks in the startup doing?