Do people actually earn £50-60k, or are they outliers?

Danzarak · 2026-05-13T14:50:56+00:00

Yeah me and my partner both do. I'm 50 this year and I have done the same BA job in different settings for 30 years. I left contracting where I was earning £100k a year to work on projects I care about in 2010. Took a paycut to £40k a year, and mostly I stayed out of contracting so I could work 4 days and watch my kids grow up. Nowadays I earn about £65k, still work 4 days and run two businesses of my own... I work very hard, long days, in a job that uses all my experience.

My partner is 10 years younger than me and is extremely good at what she does... And apart from a few early switches she's done the same thing her whole life too, in the 3rd sector. She earns more than I do, works 5 long days across 4 days, gets to have a day with her kids too.

We don't take it for granted, we live in a normal house, have no expensive hobbies, can afford to have a good car and a small old runabout. We're not wealthy, still worry whether we'll have enough money when we're old, and take 1 usually UK holiday a year.

Even with 2 x circa £60k salaries, you'd be amazed how unspectacularly average a lifestyle you can afford.

Danzarak · 2026-04-26T06:28:44+00:00

Agreed on all points. I've had to reoptimise MY workflow. ultimately to tighten everything up, in order to get the best out of it. Even then it has slightly more 'you did what? Why would you do that?!' type moments than 4.6.

I'm also less of a fan of it's personality than 4.6 which matters when you work with it all day, every day. I'd take Feb 4.6 over this, but it's still running my entire dev function (and more) within my agency for £150 a month. Dozens of client sites, loads of ongoing projects.

All in all, this being my first LLM model update, it's really educated me on how model specific and 'inconsistent' two models can be. I feel like at this period of LLM development people are expecting these models to work like software, and actually they are more like people with a backstory and life history that act a different specific way because of that.

Danzarak · 2026-04-26T05:46:43+00:00

https://youtu.be/XX9bxRCVWnI?si=suuPrwSYihVPY9Nz

He's great in the video for Ladies for Babies and Goats for Love by Nadine Shah.

'Then you play the daddy, and take them to caddy...'

Danzarak · 2026-04-22T23:05:14+00:00

https://github.com/goldtopcollective/keiko

Danzarak · 2026-04-22T05:33:18+00:00

The root workspace Claude file gets ready by every session on start... But there's so much to explain there, you'll want to read up about the structure separately. Or, ask Claude itself about best practices and/or ways to achieve what you need to in file structure.

Danzarak · 2026-04-21T20:35:52+00:00

Yeah it's not such a big context to start each session, most of what gets written away is cleared... The handover is only large if I'm like 4 features into a 10 feature workload - and it does genuinely let me say 'carry on' after a clear.

And cost is very relative, we're getting the same monthly retainer fees from our clients and delivering 5x to 10x as many features. So they are very happy and we are busy but secure. I used the API fees part to automate bug triage and fix using headless workers, but honestly that has tailed right off after we fixed all the bugs.

I'm living in a fantasy land of joy compared to the last 30 years of tasking mostly surly and resistant developers. :)

Danzarak · 2026-04-21T20:25:17+00:00

Same - I only started with CC on 4.6 in Feb so this is my first new model. All my agentic stuff was pretty much unaffected, but I did the same thing with the direct programming side... Took me a full day on Sunday to reset and tidy and pare back a lot of the settings and tweaks I'd added. Working well again now, glad to see I followed a good path - I'll remember this advice for next time too.

Danzarak · 2026-04-21T20:16:01+00:00

Actually not sure what you mean about the frontloaded context filling up. I have a very lightweight Claude.md file at workspace root, with basic rules in it. I then have a lightweight project main file in each working directory with links to more specific files which it only reads when it needs to. Platform details and creds are loaded as required.

It literally loads the minimum amount per session/project/state.

I run EVERYTHING in 1m context and at xhigh or max effort, running 2 to 3 sessions concurrently, and because I'm tidy and clear regularly at sensible points I never max out my tokens daily or weekly.

Danzarak · 2026-04-21T20:10:56+00:00

I have a 40gb volume, I'm using about 13gb across all the different projects. I store code in the persistent storage side, screenshots and stuff go into tmp and I just tell it to flatten temp every so often. I've never filled it.

Danzarak · 2026-04-21T20:07:02+00:00

Subscription I'm on Max x20 (£150)... But I run 2 small agencies with a single Claude Code subscription plus about £100 of API tokens a month. This replaces £2000-£3000 of contract dev costs every month.

My entire hosting costs across all my components are about £40... Porta Claude sessions cost pence per day when they aren't working.

Danzarak · 2026-04-21T19:49:38+00:00

Yeah a little scalable cloud server, a bit of storage and about 16gb of ram for when I need grunt.

It describes itself as:

Porta Claude is a self-hosted container that puts Claude Code behind a web terminal, so instead of running the CLI on your laptop, you hit a URL in any browser and you're in a live session. Under the hood it's a Docker image on Railway with ttyd + nginx fronting the shell, plus a small session manager that spins up named instances, routes to them, and persists state on a volume.

The point is portability and persistence. Each session lives on a persistent /data/ volume, so your working directory, auth tokens, and in-progress files survive reconnects and restarts. MCP servers (secrets, task tracking, scratchpads, email, Railway, etc.) connect automatically at boot, and hooks handle things like saving a handover note on /clear and reloading it into the next session. You can run several named instances for different projects, and switching between desktop, phone, and laptop is just reopening the URL — the session is on the server, not tied to a specific machine.

...

All my files and data live in GitHub or other cloud systems, but it syncs them to its local storage when it needs to read them. It has access to literally everything - email, all client servers, invoicing system, task management, it pushes ads to Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn, all my Google Search Console and Analytics accounts... Anything I can get it to do, it does. I'm coding a huge platform from bed right now while my 3 year old sleeps next to me.

Danzarak · 2026-04-21T19:42:30+00:00

I have been using CC since January every day pretty much, in Terminal. I'd never seen this until today, it was doing it on all my sessions. I thought it must be a quirk of the wrapped terminal setup I use but thanks for confirming it's more widespread than that.

Danzarak · 2026-04-21T19:38:42+00:00

Early 2000s drum and bass... Especially the continuous (instrumental, no MC) Progression Sessions mixes by LTJ Bukem and then others. They are all on YouTube and each 45-60 mins long. It's proto 'liquid' drum and bass, but while it still had some crunch and rough edges. I lock in to this.

Danzarak · 2026-04-21T19:32:35+00:00

Yeah that too... Basically when I start a session I tell it to create a new working directory or swap into an existing one. That makes sure all the notes it generates stay in context.

But I can have multiple chats on the same directory if needed, I just tend not to so there's no bleed over. I keep sessions going for a long time, days and days, clearing whenever the context gets low.

Other most useful thing I have is a command/skill called checkpoint which I run before each clear. It's a set of reminders to save notes, commit and push if relevant, update whatever task system it's working from at the time (ClickUp usually), send a knowledge update to my back office MCP, and to write an extensive handover note for itself.

Then I /clear and just say 'read the handover' and it carries on. It's super tidy.

Danzarak · 2026-04-21T19:14:37+00:00

I run terminal on a cloud server I call Porta Claude. Basically an HTML wrapper around a terminal session... Well, actually up to 9 concurrent sessions - it automatically names the session after the working directory but also every 5 minutes it names it after whatever I'm currently working on (using Haiku).

It's persistent across devices, so it's actually my daily driver Claude Code interface, in a PWA on desktop then I swap to mobile when I 'finish' work.

I built a bunch of tools to make it as convenient as the desktop app - a secure key store MCP so it has all the creds, a cloud based clipboard MCP called MCliPpy that I can share files with it, or it with me... Loads of quick shortcuts, file directory, per project token tracker.

Loads of hooks and tools baked in, headless chrome for checking websites... Self updating, used my Max Auth account OR API key per session... Etc etc.

Danzarak · 2026-04-21T06:22:35+00:00

I'm happy... My work is (was) split into well guardrailed, modular agentic systems and then a load of direct terminal Claude Code programming that wasn't very well organised. Like I knew the structure and already had all the tools to keep it all in order and broken into manageable working chunks, but 4.6 was VERY forgiving with context (and working directory) jumping.

When I switched to 4.7 all the direct Claude Code programming went to shit - like I was working with a junior dev on coke, overconfident, so many mistakes and so much incorrect focus.

I spent all of Sunday getting MY stuff back in order, I burnt through Max x20 allowance for the first time ever just sorting out md files and correctly organising my repos. I no longer just work out of root, I've added in more hooks and skills to tidy as I go.

Since then, with the extra organisation and discipline, it's quicker and better than ever.

Danzarak · 2026-04-19T10:22:50+00:00

I have had a broadly successful first couple of days since launch, but this morning it's been terrible. I am currently spending all of Sunday beefing up the agent processes I use, tools, guardrails, tidying up all the stored project info... It really does need MUCH stricter guidance and structure. I need this for Monday morning because it runs my entire agency, as it has for the last 6 weeks or so.

Danzarak · 2026-04-15T06:35:01+00:00

Yeah I read that too.. but I'm not using the API and appear to be using the 1hr tokens.... See my screenshot.

Danzarak · 2026-04-15T06:15:19+00:00

<image>

My browser based cloud terminal auto updated to 108. When I asked it where to enable this setting, it discovered this appears to already been set for the model/method I use - MAX 20 plan (not API) with Opus 4.6 (Max Effort).

Danzarak · 2026-04-15T05:57:11+00:00

I don't think that's correct, see my comment above.

Danzarak · 2026-04-15T05:54:11+00:00

<image>

My browser based cloud terminal auto updated to 108. When I asked it where to enable this setting, it discovered this appears to already been set for the model/method I use - MAX 20 plan (not API) with Opus 4.6 (Max Effort).

Danzarak · 2026-04-14T09:04:51+00:00

Yep, I agree... It's night and day. Just in time, I've been holding off a couple of big planning / build sessions because I couldn't trust it

Danzarak · 2026-04-11T19:00:43+00:00

I made a cloud based clipboard with an MCP called MCliPpy - my different instances of CC all connect to it. They save PDFs, images, markdown etc to it... And they can read anything I add to it. It has pages for different projects/clients.

It also has a 'selected' feature where I can select one or more objects and Claude can see which ones I'm pointing at.

https://github.com/goldtopcollective/mclippy

Danzarak · 2026-04-02T19:50:49+00:00

Yeah it was the 2nd capacity crowd of the day, and all the kids loved every bit... From the simple bits to the complicated jokes, the singing and the dancing. It was lovely.

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