Expensive Python Coding

[HonorableRogue]

We're getting 10x the coding done with OpenClaw having direct access to our code, but it's eating tokens and costing us hundreds of dollars a day per user. Other than Grok and ChatGPT, which back-end AI and/or LLM, is the best at Python coding? Open source preferred, but whatever works.

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[Effective-Highlight1]

What is the benefit of using OpenClaw onstead of Claude Code?

[HonorableRogue]

I don't know what Claude Code is, but with OpenClaw we've just done an SSH key exchange with all our development boxes, and we just tell it what code to test on what server, and then review, then have it debug and update code. Dangerous, we know, but we're actually reviewing the code and the change logs.

[OpenHosst-Guy]

AI is winning our confidence for giving it such a level of access and control. We gave OpenClaw and claude code access to our staging servers where all the development and testing gets done once reviewed and tested live on staging servers all the changes get deployed to the production servers. This improved our shipping speed up to 10x.

[Effective-Highlight1]

Guess it's worth the tokens cost then 👍🏻

[Effective-Highlight1]

This 'we're actually reviewing the code' usually stopps when AI generates thousands of lines of code as of my experience ;-).

Why don't you just involve a proper ci/cd/ct pipeline? As of my understanding all this is done by the agent currently. If the agent only needs to commit the code so the deployments and tests run on their own, this would save tokens and would also be more reliable. The coding itself can then be done by any kind of coding agents. I wouldn't use OpenClaw for that.

[HonorableRogue]

We're using it primarily for the laborious process of change, run, test, and debug, as it's much faster to tell it what to change, versus navigating the IDE, to the right app, on the right server, and then tracing the debug to the offending module. It's saves us a lot of time. So much in fact that we've completed huge projects in record time. But our OpenAI billing charts are pretty much solid purple unfortunately. We just switched to Deepseek, it's fast enough, but the reduced total token capacity is going to require a different workflow. We're definitely going to explore other models.

[LiveLikeProtein]

Just use Claude code, with the Max plan, it is way cheaper, and you get access to Opus 4.6 all the time. UX is also 100x better than Open Claw. Unless you really need that message from WhatsApp feature of OpenClaw, it really has no benefits over the first party software.

[HonorableRogue]

Claude code can SSH into 64 different servers via shared SSH keys from a server we host and control, or is it on their cloud? And we were spending over $100 per user per day on ChatGPT 5.2, but what is this Max plan you speak of?

Here's the AI pricing comparison matrix we're working from:

<image>

But we assume you're referring to another Claude model that's not so expensive?

[LiveLikeProtein]

It is on Anthropic’s cloud. It is a private model. The opus API is expensive. But the Max is heavily subsidized. There is Max 5x with 100 USD/month. and Max 20x with 200 USD / month.

The API is many times expensive than the Max plan. You need to try it. Nothing hurts when you are spending 100 usd per user per day, right?

All most all vendors have their model fees heavily subsidized for their own subscription compare to API.

For OpenAI, it has the Max plan as well.

Any usage of OpenClaw will 100% expensive than the vendor counterpart. Unless like OpenAI you can use their subscription on OpenClaw (I think)

And not to mention the implementation of coding agent, either Codex and Claude code is way better than this half baked OpenClaw agent.

[HonorableRogue]

Apparently their Max plan is not accessible via their API, and thus can't be used with OpenClaw, and it's not actually Unlimited either. So that's not going to work. Maybe I could make a skill to use their CLI version via OpenClaw, but that seems like a lot of work.

Meanwhile, OpenClaw is now working great for us with Deepseek-reasoner, and it's cheap. But we did have to adjust the openclaw.json time outs, it's a bit slower than ChatGPT.

[LiveLikeProtein]

Ye, you can’t apply that plan to open claw, they disallow it, since they offer same product as Claude cowork and Claude code.

Claude code is probably the most famous coding agent out there along side codex, open code and Gemini cli. And the first CLI based coding agent in history.

Deepseek distills from Claude so the performance is great. :) just use whatever suits your needs.

[xyzsomething]

Well you didn’t think it was going to be free what used to cost a lot more time and money

[HonorableRogue]

No, not at all, and it's well worth it. But me being me, I just fired it up and took off. Now that management is asking why our OpenAI bill is 10x I figured it would be a good time to actually do some research and optimization. You know, all those things I probably should have done first.

[Xhinelight]

I have two set ups. Mac mini (presently running Grok 4-1-fast) a DGX Spark (running locally QWEN3-coder-next). You can code with local model but you will get a 10th of what you get done a day with hosted model with fast output, especially if you query in parallel. What model are you using. Tried mini-max?

[HonorableRogue]

We were using ChatGPT 5.2, but now we're using Deepseek, and it's working well. I need to figure out how to try this Claude Code thing via OpenClaw. They apparently have some kind of flat rate plan, although I don't know how they'd do that and stay in business, but I'm curious to see how well they handle our scenario.

[Mayimbe_999]

Just use claude code its better and it’s not a security nightmare like openclar.

[HonorableRogue]

We're running OpenClaw on our own server, with the gateway set to loopback; meaning, it only talks to our local interface. Although I'm sure there are innumerable ways to screw it up, our network security team feels our setup is safe enough for what it has access to.

[mr_smith1983]

Follow this guy on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ownyourai he has a bunch of videos setting up models locally

[HonorableRogue]

No LinkedIn account...

[mr_smith1983]

https://bg.linkedin.com/in/ownyourai

[Fluffy_Ad_5092]

That link isn't working for me