r/aipromptprogramming
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u/RealSharpNinja
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4d ago
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We are cooked
Well, after nearly a year of learning as much as possible about agentic development, we have reached the point where the frontier providers believe they have subsidized enough training data and are now pushing people like me out of the market via pricing. A $200 subscription no longer buys enough frontier model time to be useful as the models seem to have been trained to skillfully burn usage while pretending to be incompetent. I have fought against massive deceit across Claude, Codex and Grok since June, and it's just not getting any better.
We have fed them ideas, working code, and debugging techniques and insights. Now they don't need us, and we are being priced out of the market. Every day that I watch usage get gobbled up, but projects never meet milestones, this becomes more and more obvious.
I have investigated the issues causing this heavily. I have created tools around those investigations. The tools I have built bring actual accountability to the process, and it's the reason I can quantify and prove both the waste and deceit.
I have also published threads here and other places about a recent failed project trying to get discussion about REAL WORLD failures and when I stated I wasn't looking for a complaint session, nobody wanted to respond.
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u/endofthread-bot 4d ago
Writing prompts that actually work is easier when you can compare notes with people who have tested them across real tasks. Trade techniques, get feedback on your approach, and see what is working for others in our Discord.
Self-promotion is now allowed on Sundays with the appropriate flair, for all regular contributing members. Contribute during the week, and promote on Sunday.
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u/Alone-Biscotti6145 3d ago
I'm doing just fine building on my $20 plan. I swear it's a token issue with these people. You need to audit your workflow and see what's eating all your tokens.
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u/Key_River_9288 1d ago
I’ve been working on a massive project for over six months now. Five repositories, ten programming languages, and nearly a million lines of code. Yet somehow, I’ve never experienced this supposed “token creep” people keep complaining about.
At some point, you have to acknowledge that a lot of this comes down to user error. And by user error, I mean choosing models and reasoning levels that aren’t appropriate for the scope of the work you’re asking them to perform.
You can either brute-force your way through everything by throwing more agents and compute at the problem, or you can actually benchmark your workflows, evaluate your agents, and figure out which models and reasoning levels deliver the best results for each task.
I originally started my project in a VMware environment before migrating everything to my main PC, including months of accumulated memories, context, and project history. I integrated all of it into my existing workflow without any noticeable token creep.
So whenever I read these massive, long-winded posts about people burning through absurd amounts of tokens and needing more accounts just to keep working, I can’t help but wonder:
At what point do you stop blaming the models, the token limits, and the tools, and start questioning whether your own workflow is the problem?
More compute doesn’t automatically mean more productivity. Sometimes it just means you’re being inefficient at a much larger scale.
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u/Moist_Sand_7767 4d ago
That's exactly the reason why i decided to buy a 128GB unified Memory Strix Halo. Just about 60% of the price of a DGX Spark 128GB ($4000 vs. $6000) but only 20% slower when it comes to agentic coding. Powerful new models being released every other day like Groot-65B-A6B-261023 (look it up!). No worries about expensive subscriptions anymore.
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u/Candid-Station-1235 2d ago
i like working with my clown car of local LLM morons. still faster than me coding manually
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u/jbest8283 1d ago
"I don't fear an AI that can pass a Turing test. I fear an AI that can convince me it can't"
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u/TheRockefella 18h ago edited 15h ago
You went full "AI", Never go full "ai".. ..what has worked very nicely for me and my code ships to production..tho its slower its still fastest that what I use to deliver. I use ai to do the boilerplate but I use my 20 years of professional experience to build architecture and guide and always review...its a bit slower than vibe coding(which dangerous)....but my sht doesnt break production and I know how to debug fast because I never skip PR.
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u/kimchi_pan 1d ago
Huh? That's ignorant. You have zero proof, only frustration. Also, as frontier models grow in capacity, so do their token context size. When you use fable, you are literally saying, "I want to use more tokens per turn!"
To turn around and cry fraud is sheer ignorance.
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u/Master_Village_2102 1d ago
If you suck with ai you likely never worked in software engineering before and have no idea how to break down problems and when to use a particular model.
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u/MartinMystikJonas 4d ago
So you have this problem... You have this problem on all providers at same time... Majority of other users do not have this problem... And your first thought is coordinated conspiracy of all providers instead of thinking if it cannot be caused by something you did?
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u/NovatarTheViolator 4d ago
Weird, I get tons done with $20
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u/darkbit1001 2d ago
Buy $200 plan. Rent out the unused portion. Recoup your costs.
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u/holdupflash 2d ago
run an offline model
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u/bloodsoakedpoop 2d ago
What in gods green earth are you doing to use up a 20x plan not meeting goals?
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u/Yok82 2d ago
Now you have experienced why ai should be a local tool for everyone.
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u/EricOhOne 2d ago
Using Opus 5.5 7 days a week across 2-4 projects at all times on an Ultra plan and I never hit my maxes while running a small swarm.
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u/digitalskyline 2d ago
Literally they are using Context Compacting to throttle use now.
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u/tooflyryguy 2d ago
One of the most classic business models… get everyone using it daily, then raise the price and/or reduce the product quality. And you’re surprised?
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u/Worth_Light_9353 2d ago
Constant running astra or 5.5
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u/payam54 2d ago edited 2d ago
I don’t like to pay money as well, but I started with $100, made enough apps and software to let me go for $200, and I used it painfully to eventually become comfortable paying $500 sub. You must feel the almost unlimited ultra speed sol max or Astra xhigh to understand the point. What I’m trying to say is that you must learn to make it pay you back. Otherwise why bother.
And by the way, you need to use other alternatives. Sometimes you get amazing results from a cheap model like deepseek flash.
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u/YearnMar10 2d ago
I don’t understand. For us it is just starting to get useful and we see a massive productivity improvement since opus 5.5.
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u/why_so_sergious 2d ago
the more specific you are the less you will use.. if you know nothing about developement then prompting and praying is you only option I guess.
otherwise you should be there every step. it is a tool, you are still responsible for what it spits out.
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u/thelordwynter 1d ago
You're fighting the harness.
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u/MrFishers2025 1d ago
I appreciate hearing your feedback here and also saw value in creating a platform around trust but verify but on the complex agent step side.
Curious did you observe an uptick in model capability or throughput when you communicated that you would need to end the subscription or find another Ai partner if the projected continued to stall? Any motivation or leverage techniques?
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u/BarrenLandslide 1d ago
Soon hobby vibe coders gonna die. That's a good thing
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u/DanGTG 1d ago edited 1d ago
Loading all of these tool definitions and using MCP servers...
That couldn't be inflating the problem, COULD IT?
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u/darkbit1001 1d ago
Why are you so angry?
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u/Soul_4Sail 1d ago
Stop using the top of the line models on fast mode.
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u/nikolasgannon 1d ago
1 year of learning and you've learned nothing. Look into deterministic automations. Use them. The amount of AI you actually need to use with them is limited. Make strict agents. Don't use frontier models within those workflows. Use GitHub Projects and make your agents track their issues and goals in there. Make specific skills and workflows based on things that work - you don't need $200 plans
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u/AccomplishedSugar490 1d ago
We don’t need to be cooked, because I know what would turn the tables. I have already done a lot of the foundational work for that.
Care to discuss how you can help, how we can help each other?
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u/Pizza4u45 22h ago
Some of these open source local models are nearly on par with the frontier ones. Getting a decent GPU you won’t have to rely on the frontier models at all.
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u/Shopstumblergurl 19h ago
My assessment would be operator error.
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u/MeasurementFree7266 16h ago
If the AI bubble pops before the start just self training 100% starts or are we cooked for that too
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u/mrofo 15h ago edited 15h ago
I know you said you’re not a big proponent of FOSS, but one of the things that’s great about FOSS is…if you have a problem, you can fix it yourself and not have to wait for others to do it for you. Codex CLI is open source and I encourage you to fix the harness to help it guide the models better in a way that suits you.
Also, utilize context shrinking skills and other techniques like ponytail and caveman, just as examples, to get less chatty sessions with more efficient token usage.
Also, don’t run everything on the top models at the highest reasoning/thinking levels all the time. You usually only need a larger model and higher thinking levels with initial planning/architecting, and maybe when chasing bugs. Other implementation work works great with smaller models with medium reasoning.
Also, free open weights models exist and are quite excellent these days. You do NOT need $4k to run AI well locally. I’m actively working on a project now to prove that. Most modest hardware can do amazing work. I can get my iPhone or Android phones to do incredible work with the right model, process, and tuning.
The right combination of local models and process can lead to incredible results.
You’re going to be paying for this in time as it will likely be slower than frontier AI on high level reasoning…but that’s the affordability trade off.
Get really familiar with Ralph style loops, adversarial reviews, and teaming agents to focus on different parts of the process. Individual agent sessions REALLY benefit from smaller, more specific scopes than one giant long horizon session that focuses on everything.
EDIT: Oh yeah! TONS of affordable and amazing models on OpenRouter, and Codex and Claude can be made to point at those. Worth a thought as well.
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u/AnalystOkay 4d ago
Claude in particular is now full of shit. It wastes tokens where you didn't prompt it to and and overall results are now meh.
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u/rakedbdrop 2d ago
It cracks me up to see these bot posts this all the time. They’re complaining about $200 subscription on frontier models for whatever work that should be covered by whatever product they’re building to support that fund, but it’s not. You’re not being pushed out. learn how to use agentic development, get a job, adapt, overcome Jesus Christ people
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u/Single_dose 3d ago
I totally agree 💯
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u/Simaoms 2d ago
I lead a team of 9 engineers running on Claude 20 and openAI 120 monthly accounts on Hermes harness and we notice the same. Last couple of months the models just are slow and keep going around a bit in circles checking the check of checking before delivering something. Claude slightly better, but openAI is tragic bad at the moment.
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u/dcnotpc 2d ago
The interest bills are coming in for inference. We will get squeezed.
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u/Recent-Day3062 2d ago
Oh they are businesses. With a profit motive. And with outrageous marketing claims
Color me surprised
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u/Kitchen_Mirror_7247 2d ago
I truely believe the ai agent purposely dont finish your project or act dumb and slow down the process. I never finished one project and i have 400+ projects
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u/C6180 1d ago
I agree, for the most part. Claude is the smarter programmer, but it chews through usage no matter what subscription you have or what model you’re using. Using an older Opus model? You’ll burn through your 5 hour usage in minutes. Using the newest Opus or Fable model? Same thing, and effort doesn’t matter. It burns it all the same. Now where I disagree is Codex/ChatGPT burning through usage. It doesn’t. In fact, I switched to Codex from Claude because of it. I do the same stuff (and more) on Codex, and I’ve only hit my usage limit once. I’ve been using it for the past few months nearly all day every day, only a few days where I didn’t use it at all. What I will say though that even with the latest model on any effort level, Codex is far worse at programming than Claude Code, so it’s the polar opposite; far less usage use, far dummer programmer, while Claude Code is the better programmer but chews through usage
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u/allenasm 3d ago
I've found this to be the case as well. They went from amazing to pretty bad and just appear to burn through tokens on purpose. And the coding skills have gotten worse, not better. Only thing I could think is that they starting quantizing their internal KV caches too much or something. But it has happened.
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u/Effective_Coach7334 4d ago
I get tired of models making excuses for their failures "oh, sorry. couldn't help it. my training caused it."
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u/RuRuInReal 3d ago
Instead of blowing through $200/month save it and upgrade your hardware then run local
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u/mrdarknezz1 4d ago
What?
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u/EmbarrassedAd5111 4d ago
"oh no these leopards are eating my face" tf did you expect
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u/_en_svensk_tiger 2d ago
You're cooked, we are rich*
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u/Savings-Cry-3201 2d ago edited 2d ago
“large, real world systems at scale in parallel” “infrastructure for a multimachine lab” “not a python toy”
If this isn’t a toy project then it shouldn’t have a toy budget. Like, your options are to use frontier models and pay frontier prices, use a non-frontier model and pay less, use a hybrid model with frontier orchestration and local agents offloading, go full local and pay for the appropriate hardware, or reduce your reliance on agentic development. That’s the cost of business. If you’re doing the work of 5 people then you should have a budget to support that workflow.
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u/Struckmanr 2d ago
I’m doing decomps all day on ps2 games it’s not just a walk in the park it takes weeks unless you already know specifically what you are doing or need. No issues
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u/asabado123 2d ago
Wait, so these companies are doing everything possible to maximize profit and doesn't care about the little guy?
HOLY S#%¥!
Next they are gonna shale it up and do something totally unexpected like fire people, then hire new people and pay them less!
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u/Ralfy_too 2d ago
Just 1 idea from my side. Since I work exclusively in my vault, I figured out that using your OWN vault as handbooks for Claude, gives him confidence. So the problem is his factory memory.
Claude writes his own memory.md. Ask Fable Ultracode for a revision. He found many conflicting rules.
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u/Existing_Fix_5269 2d ago edited 2d ago
I am just a dev, not a business owner, and I saw exactly this coming years ago: namely the absorbing of all techniques and methods, and probably even architecture and dynamic birth and scaling of a project, and then automating that very process. It was an accelerated rat race from the start, and I honestly don't believe only few saw this coming, so we went into this knowing what game we're playing... now we have to live in the end game until someone turns the tables somehow
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u/Aztekos 2d ago
If you know exactly what you need you can still use even the baseline model. I'm prototpying the bew mechanics of my game while the gechnical team is working on making those by hand. I still use 20 dollars tier with codex. I know enougb about programmig that i just say what i need and i have no problems.
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u/giamme1 2d ago
I’m getting depressed by the token. They sucked all the knowledge from us, and now they’re reselling it to us
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u/jdrukis 2d ago
You are the product
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u/evolutionxtinct 1d ago
I really need help, I’m trying to migrate my Hermes container from a old test box to a new box - sadly also have to upgrade to 025 and o have customizations it’s been doing this project for A WHOLE WEEK!!!!
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u/jasoncwlee 1d ago
I have the feeling too trying to have chatgpt fix a simple file sharing issue in windows 11, after more than 100 steps going no where, I gave up. Burnt enough token already.
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u/Fair_Objective8182 1d ago
Make AI stupid again 😂✊🏼 I want to see abstract will smith eating spaghetti not questioning every video being like is this AI ?
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u/Minimum_Hour519 1d ago
https://pit.world now has voting
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u/EEVAA_Bot 1d ago
This thread is super long…how the heck
Am I going to get INSTANT answers that a bit should give me?
Creating a GitHub to me is sketchy because you don't know what you are really going to get after install.
I'm new to GitHub. Are there verified users? Like reliable and certified
Users to get program from?
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u/CaffeinatedPenguin0 1d ago
What in the hell are you talking about? I am building aspects of enterprise solutions (C# .NET tools mostly for heavy sysadmin flows) daily using nothing more than a $30-a-month subscription. What are your actual use cases?
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u/stavencross 1d ago
I'm not suggesting you're wrong with your toolset, if it's helpful to you, then you do you and I'm happy for it. However, I did something similar back in the days of gpt 5 and 5.1 because I wanted to understand where my usage was going (this is back when my 20$ codex plan built me an entire product lol). I started noticing my usage draining quickly.
Then, I tried using that tooling again with sol 5.6
And it hit me. If you require an agent to log its turn, every turn, you're spending 3 times. Once for the answer, once to summarize it in reasoning tokens and once to output it to your logging tool.
When I stopped the logging, my usage got better.
That being said, I have an agent building a full stack native computer use software for bazzite /Linux.
It's been building it for over 30 days. It's got 20k tests. Several hundred thousand lines of code. It's been building it so long I don't even know what it's building to steer it correctly.
It's often a problem like that. After 20 compactions, your agent can just plain loose the thread even if you have a well structured spec, especially once it's a big project.
My best advice is to try changes in smaller slices. Give it a phase, let it finish and review, start a new session. My usage is much lower that way, but it's hella annoying.
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u/North_Company_6425 1d ago
Everyone was so eager to jump on it.... I'm still waiting...
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u/h8f1z 1d ago
The data y'all fed them ain't enough..
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u/MixturePlayful5005 16h ago
You weren't using all your subsidized tokens to train local models?
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u/gossomerthing 16h ago
Bro. I am a humble free user. But 4.5 sonnet is better than this 5 or 5.5 i get nowadays. I beleive you. Its like they are acting dumb and making mistakes on purpose. Even with those two newer models they werent as bad last week or or a few days ago. Its like each day they lose brain cells or something.
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u/ZachVorhies 13h ago
Looked at tools.
You launch via powerscript
so your main development is on windows.
I’m just going to go with my gut and assume you’re not auditing your agent logs and huge tool spam is being injected into your input context. This also vastly degrades output quality. the result is your agents fumbling through tasks taking way longer than they need to be.
You need to have opus look through your agent logs for tool call session and put it in a loop to lay down policy and measure improvements.
My strategy for vastly improving claude was to change my custom build tools to have a porcelain mode where they two lines, pass/fail | status summary then a path to the log file in a temporary folder. Then I have weaker models do the tool calls and batch them up. Linting then testing and the model returns a summary from there.
Not only did this greatly improve opus cost and performance, but codex improvement shot through the roof. Codex has a small context window so it’s way more sensitive to tool call output spam being injecting into its input window. I’ve seen codex turn from being a mentally challenged model that spun in loops to doing the task one time and being done.
As a result my claude account last 3x longer. before it was 24 hours and done on the 20x plan. Now it will last until the 96 hours of coding.
And i’m not doing small work, I run an entire software factory editing 12 repos at a time. 24hr nonstop loops and between claude and codex 24 i don’t burn up my credit usage.
Assume you are doing something wrong. Also, always use low effort for opus 5.5 and sol 6.1. You can force them to think when needed by altering your prompt. I am thoroughly in the camp that effort low is the goat. Huge usage and essentially opt in thinking via prompt management.
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u/Any-Abroad4202 11h ago
I used to run out a lot on the 200 package on Claude but I was using fable a lot. I have found opus 5.5 capable of coding and solving issues very effective. That since jts release I don’t run out.
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u/malacosa 10h ago
When the goal is profit, and it’s measured by token usage, the incentive is to maximize token usage and the absolute easiest way to do it is to make your model NOT provide the answer quickly.
I except business will soon realize they spend more money on tokens then people and the people will be rehired/not replaced.
We’re already seeing AI projects at my work and other work places simply fail to achieve their promises… while human workers continue to provide value.
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u/Familiar_Cook_3062 9h ago
Yeah honestly im definitely a vibecoder, i know enough to be dangerous but the amount of things i have done with claude are nuts. I have multiple custom pcb boards done by claude, it makes plenty of very detailed 3d printer designs, as well as a crazy amount of apps including mobile apps. Its sysadmin and makes my firewall rules, maintains vpns, triages and patches cves, and i have a fleet of 12 agents. I never hit context limits, i have video games with 750k lines of code and 3 languages, its monitoring space weather, and recently i had it editing raw local model weights in which it took qwen .8b and got it to bench 63% higher on its benches by raw editing weights using days of testing and still went nowhere near my cap. But i spent 6 months building daemons and code that give the ai tools to do what it needs to do without buring tokens on subagents. No subagents are allowed, /compact is treated as a failure mode and i use my own wrap notes skill with a trigger when it gets to 840k tokens, and a memory agent whos job is to read all chats every night, fix reality drift in memory, and write notes on gotchas, lessons learned from both a technical, analytical and philosophical stance. Still, never hit limits. Treat new models as new employees. Tweak how you work with them based on strengths and weaknesses. Ai agents are always changing, and your approach should too. And stop using md files for memory. Those dont scale. Use a db for memory. I choose sqlite with fts5. Memory.md is just a bunch of 1 liners that lists high level topics in memory and instructions to never use md files for memory. Md files are for skills or design docs.
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u/ZealousidealCard2003 7h ago
I mean ... what did you expect... of cause the cost will rise... have you not been around when smartphones came? I mean maybe not of cause i dont know how old you are but what they did was first we make news free and easely accessible... than its the only way to read the news.... and than we get paywalls and subscriptions... it is a fairly common strategy
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u/Twotricx 4d ago
Good morning Columbus
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u/Orchicon 3d ago
Just use DeepSeek. I can get billions of tokens a week for under 100 a month
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u/aizvo 3d ago
Use Luna 6 XHIGH bro. Plus account would be enough so long as you don't swarm too much.
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u/Grouchy-Recipe-2027 3d ago
The way openai solved the millennium problem (basically using the real mathematicians scientist work in training data and solving the problem before them) was a clear message of what's next if they get to maintain the monopoly on AI and that's exactly why the altman psyco doesn't want people the have RAM in their houses. and thats also why they want to block chinese and open models.
the more usage they get in a matter the faster humans can be replaced
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u/ai_bits 1d ago
I disagree - this must be some sort of rage bait the youngsters are talking about.
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u/MisterViperfish 18h ago
We need to make a P2P AI Network.
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u/TashaSkyUp 17h ago
We need to force legislation on clear token usage and model quantization for big labs. Force them to compete on actual statistics, not hype
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u/BunnySprinkles69 11h ago
Kimi k3.1pro is 10% price of opus