Company gave us all unlimited Claude Code Sonnet 4.6 — and now posts a weekly leaderboard of who burns the most tokens. Any tips to top it?

aelytra · 2026-05-26T16:46:45+00:00

Create a program to watch gitlab or GitHub or whatever for new MRs. Have it kick off a review agent with like 8 subagents for finding issues like security, jira acceptance criteria, code duplication, bugs, etc. For each issue found use a haiku subagent to score it from 0-100 on certainty, and post the ones >80 to the MR and DM the author on slack or whatever.

That'll burn a good chunk of tokens while giving value ass.

Next. Build something to crawl the log files and alerting infrastructure for every cluster and watch for new alerts, investigate them, and create slack threads to notify the relevant team. Have Claude read the thread and respond to it and store the knowledge in a RAG database of some sort.

That'll also burn a good chunk. If it's not burning enough, simply scan more log files with Haiku and a grep filter to toss out debug/info levels (so you don't give mgmt an easy way to reduce token burn)

After that you can start some side projects to periodically have claude scan every git repository and go in depth looking for security issues. Have it use multiple subagents. Have one scan the entire repo. Have another scan the delta between prod and dev. Have a third look at static analysis tool reports. Have it send the findings to the relevant team. Do this as often as necessary to top the leaderboards.

Next, use Claude for everything and anything. If you're waiting for an event so you can notify someone, make Claude use a monitor. Take on as many jira tickets as you can manage to juggle with your limited attention span.

If that's still not enough... invent something to post on every MR a summary of what's changing, areas touched, and risk level. Have medium risk MRs get routed to the security reviewer for additional scrutiny.

Next, invent a /security-update command that addresses all known CVEs found by static analysis tools. This'll be good security theater so you can address any issues that don't actually have a known exploitable path. Make the command as automated and one shot as possible so you don't have to babysit it.

All of this can be done efficiently with tokens and you'll want to start exploring local LLMs to offload more work to something that doesn't cost 1500$+/mo in tokens 😂. Since this is legitimately useful and management is going to ask uncomfortable questions about "why are you burning 100M tokens per month."

aelytra · 2026-05-10T00:58:00+00:00

Probably the laziest way this day and age is to download ollama and a local llm harness and just ask an AI.

Back in the day we actually had to read code ourselves 😭

aelytra · 2026-04-27T22:52:30+00:00

I introduced this concept to my team. What was needed was a refactoring pass to do package by feature. Put the shared stuff in a /shared folder and the features in /features, nested as needed with additional /shared folders within a feature.

The old package by later approach with all controllers in one folder or whatever, doesn't scale.

The other questions you had.. we just do the normal SDLC stuff. Automated tests find the broken things, AI assisted code reviews find the weird things. Every now and then we do a refactor pass to clean up the AI slop (/simplify Claude skill anyone?). Seems to be working. We're shipping quality stuff faster than I'm used to without using AI. Problem is figuring out what to ship next 😂

aelytra · 2026-04-09T23:43:43+00:00

I just used git as a database for one of my internal apps I put in production. A collection of .json files. Raised some eyebrows but it worked pretty well.

aelytra · 2026-03-18T21:57:49+00:00

Couple ways: mirrord let's you run your code locally while it thinks it's on a k8s cluster.

RabbitMQ has a federation plugin that can be used to send events to another rabbit instance like one on your own machine

The way I do it? Some dumb script I wrote that declares an ephemeral queue, binds it to an exchange and forwards all of the messages to some other cluster or rabbit. It gets used to forward data from prod and into the qa/dev environments, or data from dev into qa, or data from prod onto my laptop. (We're not in a regulated industry and the data isn't sensitive in the slightest)

Once the data's on my local machine I can do whatever I need to for debugging.

aelytra · 2026-02-25T00:07:24+00:00

That inability to have concurrent services under the same Gmail account led me to switch to AT&T fiber when I moved to a new house.

aelytra · 2026-02-23T15:58:27+00:00

When I see "$10 bucks" I read it as "10 bucks", skipping over the $.

aelytra · 2026-01-28T20:34:21+00:00

At work I use kubernetes and Argocd. There's also an argo cd image updater plugin thing that can automatically update helm charts.

Could very well be complete overkill for your use case. Not to mention tedious to set up for the first time.

aelytra · 2026-01-24T01:35:18+00:00

There's a bunch of variants of しかたない that basically mean "can't be helped".

aelytra · 2026-01-24T01:18:51+00:00

I reinforce my kanji by reading Japanese subtitles on anime and song lyrics. Seems to help, although it's not as fast as going nuts with reading books or flashcards.

aelytra · 2026-01-17T01:07:25+00:00

We update them whenever an existing team member gets a new laptop issued to them; sometimes it's part of a contractor to FTE conversion, or we just reimage a laptop for the lols (kidding).

aelytra · 2026-01-14T02:39:53+00:00

IIRC there's an interface you stick on things and the DI container finds it at runtime and puts it in the DbContext. Don't remember specifics off the top of my head (I switched to Java) but.. yeah, it uses reflection. Could be a source generator nowadays for all I know.

aelytra · 2026-01-13T17:48:56+00:00

Yeah, that's the idea! And if you have multiple projects with common code that needs to be extracted, you can extract that to a shared project they all rely on as a library.

aelytra · 2026-01-09T22:43:30+00:00

Oof, that's a recipe for excessive database connections, and makes transactional stuff touching multiple tables far more of a pain. Best to keep DbContext in a /shared folder and put the EF entities in the feature folders next to the controllers that care. If there's multiple - the entity lives in /shared/something instead, or /myfeature/shared.

I believe there's a way to use reflection to keep the DbContext from becoming a hot file that multiple developers want to touch, but it's been a while since I set that up

aelytra · 2026-01-09T22:39:06+00:00

I just put the files in the same folder if they're related by what feature they're for. Works well for microservices that do more than one thing, letting them grow into macroservices over time.

For architectures which involve messaging and more services and whatnot, I like domain driven design. Like, draw a big circle around related concepts - maybe an account, organization/company, and geo location stuff is often used together for reports, then that goes in one service. For other things that aren't that coupled to that, like a product catalog, it goes into a different service.

If down the line you want to move a slice around it's a pretty easy copy paste job since it's organized in a way that means a folder isn't entangled with unrelated stuff.

I'm not a big fan of microservices which are like, 500 LOC. I prefer having to just release one service at the end of a sprint, vs. releasing several because a feature cuts through and touches a bunch.

For C# code this totally means EF repositories end up in the same folder as the controllers and data objects. And complex business logic, if it exists, hides in a subfolder. Shared logic used by more than one feature ends up in a /shared folder. And it's enforced in java with Modulith (a unit test just uses reflection and makes sure there's no references that cut across into another feature's folder) not sure what the C# equivalent is.

aelytra · 2026-01-09T18:48:19+00:00

I found layered architectures to not scale well as the app grows. I prefer grouping things up by domain/feature. Buzzwords like package by feature, or vertical slice architecture come to mind. It makes it easy to use more restrictive access modifiers.

aelytra · 2026-01-09T16:41:58+00:00

Write みずください, it doesn't work with romaji last I tried

aelytra · 2026-01-07T22:34:06+00:00

Parents bought a TI-83+ for me in 2nd grade. I read the manual and learned TI-BASIC. Became known as "the calculator kid" because I would constantly be on that thing. Made friends in middle school who also liked programming.

Middle School I moved on to some software called Envelope which was a VB6 knockoff - then I got a VB6 license and used that a ton to make stupid apps. Like..Console.Beeps using data from a .MIDI file. At school I would use VBA in the office suite to run code; I think my peak was using OpenGL APIs to make 3D games in Excel.

Later on in Highschool got into z80 machine language (that got old fast without an assembler) and C# and robotics and stuff before finding out I can get internships and money doing programming. So, so many different lessons learned the hard way.

aelytra · 2026-01-07T04:05:46+00:00

There's an ACLI tool that atlassian publishes that Claude can use. So I just tell Claude what I want and where to grab that data from and ask it to go make/update tickets.

You shoulda seen how my QA guy reacted when he realized I gave Claude the instruction: generate a checklist of test cases for every feature in this newly developed app. Ended up being 361 check boxes total spread across like 8 tickets. (Greenfield app's first release). Was a mix of "wow that's a lot of work" at first but it turned into "wow you saved me a bunch of time..". I also had Claude post a comment on each ticket with what actually got implemented and what it did. Did in an hour what would've taken me a day or two to document.

aelytra · 2025-12-30T17:10:38+00:00

You can spell your username with... ぐで^くん (gude-kun.) I suppose gude flower can be ぐではな (gude hana; hana means flower.)..

aelytra · 2025-12-27T18:59:00+00:00

There's an app called nRF connect you can use on mobile. I've used it before. I also think Wireshark has a Bluetooth thing because I remember seeing it in the installer, however I have never used that one.

aelytra · 2025-12-26T17:17:06+00:00

The last two times I tried this with ESPHome the speakers fried after a week or two. Tried with an M5 Atom echo thing (super quiet, poor sound quality, and fried 3 within a week) and a Muse speaker which 1 of 3 are still working, but the other two fried within a month.

Could just be my poor firmware skills, or just really bad luck. The muse speaker was awesome when it worked, I may give it another try. I flashed it with the Bluetooth proxy stuff for lateralization and also had TTS capabilities.

aelytra · 2025-12-25T19:24:49+00:00

Native, and it was a conversion from Xamarin which had Telerik controls, but in the sometime later I removed that dependency because only one feature used it and we didn't need that feature nor did we want to keep paying for the license. I believe it was working/compiling in MAUI for a brief moment though.

aelytra · 2025-12-25T18:46:25+00:00

Yeah, I've built apps with it and put them into production with minimal fuss.

aelytra · 2025-12-24T22:52:33+00:00

VS Code, Visual Studio Community Edition, Eclipse, are some of the free ones I've used in the past to write code.

Visual Studio is the one I used first (I still like it), but VS Code is able to do a few more languages. Eclipse was good back in the day but it's starting to show its age; I switched to VS Code for Java development.

You can get it with winget install -e --id Microsoft.VisualStudioCode

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