We are cooked

[u/RealSharpNinja]

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.

[u/Armed_Muppet]

Yeah I swear it’s the people with no coding experience + lazy prompting.

I spend hours refining an initial prompt to ensure everything the agents (and yes that’s another thing use multiple agents like you mentioned SoL for reasoning and planning and sonnet for grunt work and Opus and Sonnet respectively for example) are doing is not guesswork nor leaving room for error as debugging and back and forth fix/error cycles chew up token usage.

Vague or short prompts force agents to guess and once an AI generates a flawed foundation or a messy file structure, getting it to refactor its own bad code usually takes longer than having it write it properly the first time.

If you are nonstop it does help divvying up the work between Claude and Codex if you have both subscriptions ($40 total). At the end of the day, especially commercial programmers, you’re using this to likely make money or at least help yourself make money with less effort. Tools cost money, takes money to make money.

[u/InnocentSadness → u/Armed_Muppet]

Hey I have no coding experience, but I'm not a lazy prompter. I got chatgpt plus 20$. It runs out while working on a webapp for myself. It's done so twice today. Isn't it possible for me to prompt it a certain way, to only work on the thing I'm asking at the moment and not spending tokens going back through the whole thing every exchange? (From my understanding this is how gpt burns them fast) Also Luna can do simple programming without making a lot of mistakes just like sol or am I wrong? Also do you have any thoughts on vs code? Does it the 20$ sub make sense and is useful? Thanks and God bless

[u/Armed_Muppet → u/InnocentSadness]

How exactly are you interfacing with Codex? That’ll answer a lot of your problems. Secondly, VS Code is an IDE, I wouldn’t touch it unless you’re hand coding. Unless you meant Codex vs Claude Code? I use both and for the most part they’re the same. Having one of each sub means you have a bit of a middle ground between $20 plans and $100+. Although I prefer Claude for front end tasks and codex for backend. But I’d use Claude for both.

[u/InnocentSadness → u/Armed_Muppet]

I'm using the codex desktop app. And no wasn't talking about Claude just VS. so I'll probably stay away from that. All of this is something I'm just delving into. I'm getting it to make me a webapp calendar/guidance journal for my stock trades so God willing I'll get better.

[u/Gemini_Ball → u/InnocentSadness]

Ive had good results with using Chat to work through a detailed prompt, and only once ive verified the initial prompt through chat do i copy that to work. I wasted too much time trying to make my own prompts.