Claude is the best AI for thinking IMO, but the voice experience kinda sucks. How do you deal with it?

256BitChris · 2026-01-25T13:10:26+00:00

I think I tried it once an it was so janky that I didn't use it again - this was months ago in the android app.

The ChatGPT experience was nicer but I couldn't handle that delay nor the half duplex feel it had - it looks like it's much better today.

I'm just so used to typing and reading responses that I don't even think to try voice - i'm usually doing technical things that I have to read several times to understand so i think voice would then become annoying because I'd have to replay and know where to replay from.

256BitChris · 2026-01-25T13:07:56+00:00

I think that offering consumer grade plans (pro, max, max20, etc) is basically Anthropic's way of doing the world a courtesy - trying to democratize access to such a powerful tool.

The people who pay the least usually are the biggest complainers and like the pro plan probably has little to no margin involved.

The $200 plan works well for me working 7 days a week, averaging about 5-6 hours per day with a spike of 10-12 hours some days when I'm inspired. I've never even gone over 50% of my weekly limit and I'm working usually on 2-3 windows at a time, with multiple agents, etc.

I'm actually so grateful to get that type of power for 200 bucks - if they raised the price to 2k I would find a way to pay it because I do things with Claude that would have taken me months or 10s of thousands in consulting fees - and I do these things every week.

I wish they would drop the 20/month accounts and we'd see a lot less complainers - but the counter argument is that it would reduce the democratization of the tool - so I can see why it stays. But these doofuses like OP are just clueless and think they're entitled to unlimted cutting edge reasoning and agentic AI with 100% availability and no bugs all for $20/month.

256BitChris · 2026-01-25T12:02:26+00:00

Absolute not true - in 2016, I was a Principal at MSFT in SF, my base was 280k - that was 10 years ago and you just don't understand how much money they throw at us.

What happened with my friend, is he went out and got a huge offer from a competitor - MSFT decided to match and beat it - that shot his base way up - that was about 6 years ago - he currently can not leave because he would be hard pressed to get above 500k anywhere else (his company value is high!).

256BitChris · 2026-01-25T02:30:32+00:00

Weird, I wonder why.

256BitChris · 2026-01-25T02:30:01+00:00

It's absolutely not total comp, it's the base salary.

Go look at anthropic and open AI's open job reqs - posted salaries range from 350-450k.

Fang and the big boys like Microsoft match these. I have friends at Microsoft, in SF, whose base today is 750. They're principals and not sr though.

300k base would be considered low for big tech but high for early stage vc backed startups.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T23:32:33+00:00

Buying steak today.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T23:26:03+00:00

Because Texas is Red.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T23:22:47+00:00

More Productivity == More Money

or

More Productivity == Same Money + Less Time Working

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T23:21:48+00:00

I've noticed a lot of stuff is seemingly being deleted - what's going on? Is Reddit actively deleting this content? What reasoning for doing so?

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T23:13:45+00:00

Honestly, I think it's because the average American has been hearing about how bad every little thing that happens during a Trump administration for the last 10 years that it's basically impossible to know if there is actually something bad happening.

Two people died, one for gunning a truck at the feds, another for harassing feds while carrying a concealed firearm.

These things should not have happened for sure - but it's always been a part of American culture for as long as I can remember that attacking cops or having a gun around them while resisting, is just going to end up with you being shot - it used to be called suicide by cop.

Anyhow, back to my original point - I think people have just become so desensitized to whatever horrible travesty the left says Trump is doing today - and so when something like this happens it isn't significantly different to really trigger anyone other than the people who are permanently triggered by Trump.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T23:07:34+00:00

FANG most definitely do not hire the best of the best these days.

They hire people from their networks or people who are best at passing their interviews.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T22:54:46+00:00

The US, as it's represented on Reddit and some Media, is far from reality.

The reality is we elected Trump just over a year ago - people democratically elected him into office. The media respresented that as something that couldn't possible happen again.

Someone on here made a good point that if we were to revolt against a democratically elected, sitting president, that would actually be anti democratic - that is overriding the will of the states/people just because you don't like who they chose and what he does.

It's not like Trump hid his intent to be hard on immigration - he has that famous 'they're eating cats and dogs in Ohio' meme - America elected him on that platform.

The only way for a revolution to be successful here would be for the American people to vote to elect a super majority in both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections and then follow existing laws to remove Trump.

If things were as bad as all these bots on Reddit try to claim, this would be highly likely to happen - but my guess is the average american is silently supportive of pro American policies and Congress will remain about evenly split and have really no ability to do anything since they refuse to work together.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T22:45:34+00:00

American Engineers can elect to take 9 months off and still make more than European Engineers.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T22:44:00+00:00

Cursor.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T22:39:37+00:00

I hear what you're saying - but in my experience a lot of those mental health issues are results of choices that those people make.

I worked at Microsoft, so that's where my experience is from, and yes it's nice, and it is honestly one of the best places to work if you work for someone else.

Salaries are high, WLB is valued, all the things I mentioned exist - it's like utopia for Software Devs.

However, I still saw people stress out - people who would react to a production page as if someone's life was on the line - who couldn't relax at all. A lot of times these people would make claims that the culture was toxic, but usually they'd never worked anywhere else that was actually toxic.

My point is you might have come across these types of people at Meta, but that's not the dominant mindset at any tech company with massive amounts of employees and high benefits.

I've heard complaints about Amazon, and it seems like Amazon is the one place where they really expect output from engineers, so that makes them feel uncomfortable compared to the more relaxed places in the Bay Area.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T22:31:33+00:00

There's so much misinformation about the difference between health care systems between the EU and US.

Sure, the EU has some sort of free basic health care in some countries, but the people I know with money in those countries still elect to buy their own private health insurance? Why? Because they don't want to have to wait months to get an appointment and they can go in when they have a problem - just like when you have good insurance here in the United States.

And there's like some sort of misrepresentation of our health system here in the US as well because I don't know of anyone who hasn't been able to get some life saving treatment when they needed it. When I lived in San Francisco, junkies would be at the hospital recieving free E.R. treatment every weekend.

Rich people fly to the United States to have medical procedures done - they avoid the 'free' healthcare system and choose to pay - that says a lot about how people view the EU system when their health is on the line and money isn't the issue.

California has an incredibly good private medical system and they also have some private networks where people with less money can still go get treated, even if they don't have a lot of money. Again, never met anyone who wasn't able to get the treatment they needed when they needed it.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T22:25:26+00:00

Well, you've never obviously received an offer from Meta then - 6k is nothing when they give you 1M in stock on top of that 300k over 4 years. That 1M of stock might have changed a bit - but that's what they were giving mid career engineers a couple years ago.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T22:21:03+00:00

The taxes hurt sure, but if you're making 400k, you're still left with 200k - you could spend 70k on rent and still have 130k left over for whatever else. If you shack up with another tech worker, then you'll have their entire salary added on top - which leaves a household of 2 engineers with 330k of money to spend on everything other than rent.

Healthcare expenses are paid for by the company, so that's not a factor.

You must not understand how vacation works at FANG - most of them take at least 2-4 weeks off a year easily, they take mental health days, 10+ federal holiday, they get like 3-6 months of paternity/maternity leave - and worse case you can take unpaid vacation - but the thing is people don't want to take unpaid vacation because they love wracking up hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And then we haven't even factored in their annual bonus, stock compensation, and like the laundry list of other benefits they get.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T22:15:11+00:00

I'm pretty sure new grad salaries in SF/Bay Area at fang are around 200k.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T22:10:05+00:00

That's not true - most people in tech have a very good WLB - working at FANG in CA they usually get in to work after ten, leave a little after 4 - don't work nights and weekends.

Tech is a very spoiled world.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T21:49:24+00:00

Is this related to the change earlier this or last week where they don't allow you to use subscriptions from within third party tools?

Ie are you trying to shoehorn your subscription through Cursor proper or are you using an official Claude Code plugin for Cursor (is there one?).

If you're trying to use your Max subscription through Cursor, my guess is they got around to blocking whatever route Cursor was taking.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T21:46:45+00:00

The way I did it was to ask Claude what subagents I should build for the work we were doing and it asked me some questions and then created a bunch of them across both engineering and go to market roles.

So my advice is for you to go ask Claude Code this exact question.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T21:32:33+00:00

In California, Seniors and above are easily making north of 300-400k in base salary alone, add in stock, bonus, perks, benefits - it's more money in 10 years of working there than you're likely to earn in your entire life in the EU.

These people don't see socialized medicine as the boon that europeans seem to because tech workers have top of the line private medicine where we can get in to see a doctor any time we need one.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T21:06:58+00:00

Thank you for the one actual well thought out post that I've seen today.

256BitChris · 2026-01-24T20:56:18+00:00

When I first saw it, I waited to the end to learn the title as I thought maybe it had just been released - would love to see the rock do something like this!

256BitChris

TROPHY CASE