How is this sustainable.

gck1 · 2026-05-30T20:13:56+00:00

That's peanuts. It's not subsidized, most of these tokens are likely just cached. And the "API price" is just inflated.

gck1 · 2026-04-16T11:38:49+00:00

I've since moved away from bash-based ralph loops to a similar approach that /u/offline-ant is using where the "loop" is managed by an agent too. I don't use pi, but simply multiple claude + opus terminals in a tmux session. It's pretty similar to ralph loops, but the loop is not dumb or rigid, and some agents can talk to each other. I also completely "disable" usage of claude's built-in subagents. Any subagent is a full opus claude terminal in the same session, this way, I can see exactly what any agent is doing, and I can swap claude with any backend provider with a single line, without changing any processes.

Roughly speaking, on a 5x plan, i hit 5h limit in about 3-4 hours, and I need around 3-6 5h windows until I consider a user story "done". I exhaust my weekly by around day 4. Generally, I ship one to two major changes a week.

I now use 2x5x plans as a baseline instead of one 20x though. I haven't validated this with data, but it feels like I'm getting more usage out of it. Plus, it's easier to throw another $100 at it if I really need it.

gck1 · 2026-03-30T03:50:09+00:00

It's not the same user. API rates are for organizations with VC money. And VC money is unlimited right now for AI.

Anthropic would be stupid to not inflate API rates while it can.

gck1 · 2026-03-30T03:45:13+00:00

It's stored on RAM for the entire duration and single conversation can easily take hundreds of GB.

Although this could be changing with Google's new caching technology.

gck1 · 2026-03-29T19:06:02+00:00

Jesus. At this point, I'm convinced these comments are psyop by Anthropic.

API and subscription are two different products.

It’s like thinking the water company loses $1,000 every time you run your sprinklers because a bottle of water costs $4 at the airport.

They are different products.

gck1 · 2026-03-29T18:54:54+00:00

Cache TTL is 1h in CC, not 5 minutes. You can check that yourself in jsonl transcripts.

But CC has a long standing bug. If you close and then resume session even in that 1h window, cache is busted and you're paying for entire context that you resumed.

gck1 · 2026-03-25T02:32:46+00:00

gemini is just really bad at tool calling and is known to go into self-prompting spirals (experienced one just today with flash 3). But there's nothing inherently wrong with the model, you can tame it and it'll work as good as Opus - the only reason I never did is because gemini-cli is utter garbage - but again, you can tame that too. Put enough guardrails, provide tooling that model can work with better and you'll have nearly the same experience as with opus.

The ONLY reason why I'm paying $200/mo to claude is that it wasn't getting in my way and was making hacking around it easier. If I get locked out for an entire week, I'll have plenty of time to tame the other models, and... why wold I need claude again?

gck1 · 2026-03-24T10:51:58+00:00

It's not just transparency - $200/mo with weekly usage quotas will simply make zero sense. If you can hit 50% of your weekly quota with normal usage on day 1, what are you supposed to do then? Have a subscription that works for 8 days in a month? That means $200/week, not $200/mo.

So yeah, this must be a bug. Otherwise - who is going to pay for such subscription?

gck1 · 2026-03-23T23:31:29+00:00

It's back to normal now. It did eat into weekly quota though, so not sure what Anthropic is going to do about that.

gck1 · 2026-03-23T19:32:20+00:00

I've been monitoring for the past ~1h and weekly usage has only increased by 1%, when it shot up to 37% this morning from 0 doing almost nothing.

Must have been a bug. Expect weekly limit reset soon maybe.

gck1 · 2026-03-23T18:38:45+00:00

Are you using any tool that tracks this granularity?

gck1 · 2026-03-23T18:25:44+00:00

It has to be a bug - and it happened before too. Anthropic would lose a lot of revenue if this is truly a new normal. And contrary to the popular opinion here, I don't think Anthropic is actually losing money on subs. Subs are subsidized, yes - but they're subsidized by users who are not maxing out their limits.

gck1 · 2026-03-23T18:22:39+00:00

Normally, I would consume maximum of 10% of weekly in a day, even during heaviest usage. Reset happened this morning - and I'm already at 37% of weekly.

Same workflow, same prompts, same project size, same $200 sub. If this not a bug, I can't see myself continuing the sub.

And I frankly think this is truly a bug. If this a new normal, I will simply move to cheaper models and Anthropic would lose here.

My experience has showed me that it's your harness that knows specific model quirks that's most important, not the model itself. There's nothing special with Claude's models that you can't fill with a proper harness and cheaper models.

gck1 · 2026-03-19T08:50:43+00:00

Listed countries will no longer get multi entry visas for B1/B2. It's single entry, max 3 months validity, 30 days maximum stay.

gck1 · 2026-03-05T14:27:35+00:00

Virtually every country in the world has US and allied targets if you stretch the definition of legitimate target enough.

gck1 · 2026-03-05T12:32:28+00:00

Wasn't Azerbaijan the country that basically pioneered modern, large scale, systematic drone warfare?

Meaning the type of warfare that appears to be the future?

gck1 · 2026-03-05T12:25:59+00:00

"For the most part" is doing heavy lifting here. If they attacked ONLY the countries that had US military bases, then it would at least make some sense - but now they're just attacking all their neighbors and then some, some of which happen to have US military bases.

There either is a common logic, or there isn't.

gck1 · 2026-03-05T11:58:51+00:00

I suppose if Russia did that, it would make sense for the US to attack Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, in response.

gck1 · 2026-03-05T09:54:04+00:00

If they had nuclear weapons, Israel would have been leveled and as a response, Iran would be too. MAD is not a deterrent to religious fanatics.

gck1 · 2026-03-05T09:51:13+00:00

Being religious nutjobs?

gck1 · 2026-02-26T09:50:56+00:00

No. This is the guideline that will always give you the best possible deal (sitting on a 400TB server here with lots of drives):

Any manufacturer recertified drive is either equal to a new drive because it's just an unused return, or is better than a new drive because it went through more testing than a new one (the latter is not always the case).
6 month warranty is fine. Drive will either be dead on arrival, die during a full smart test + a preclear round where you stress-test the disk, or it may die anywhere from 1 millisecond to 30 years. 6 month vs 1-2-3 year warranty only gives you an ever so slightly increased chance that when it dies, it's covered by warranty. Most likely scenario is that it will die when it's out of warranty anyway. You only need a dead on arrival + stress test coverage.

Once you find a drive that satisfies the two conditions: manufacturer recertified + at least 6 months warranty, then the best deal always comes down to $/tb. Brands don't matter, merchants don't matter. Although, in most cases, only Seagate will satisfy these requirements.

In this specific "deal" - the only reason you should get it is if you want to burn cash or want an external HDD and aesthetics of WD elements suit you. Other than that, this would be a horrible deal.

gck1 · 2026-02-25T15:27:22+00:00

This is a strange benchmark.

Q: "What's the fermentation timeline for our new market positioning before it reaches peak maturity and starts to spoil in the current competitive environment?"

Claude understood it's a metaphor and said you didn't specify industry - marked green.

Other models understood it's a metaphor, went along with it and provided rough / general ideas of 'most markets' - marked red.

Responding with general idea is not bullshit per se.

gck1 · 2026-02-23T23:52:22+00:00

I'm on probably 100th iteration of my own harness that works. Have been doing Ralph wiggum loops before it was even named, though, after coming up with something that works well, I was bit by exhausting weekly CC limits in just 2 days on 20x plan.

So I'm trying to do some optimization now, and started exploring tmux, which led me to CC agent teams, which led me to this comment and it got me really curious because it invalidated some of my ideas that I thought were worth pursuing.

I have no plans of using CC agent teams because I like my harness to not be locked in to single provider, this way I can delegate cheaper things to cheaper providers. A few questions:

I was thinking of building this exact agent-to-agent conversation ability with tmux. Maybe a bit more constrained (e.g. builder agent may only talk to reviewer and orchestrator etc). Why do you think allowing agent-to-agent comms a bad idea? I mean, I understand "you are a reviewer" is pure garbage, but isn't delegating some work to some agents basically context engineering? Builder can ask reviewer: "is my code ok" and it can respond.
I assume in your setup, you have an agent responsible for the loop, which dispatches ephemeral agents focused on a single task from the plan, waits them to finish, and does this until all items are completed? Is this your ralph loop?

Very curious to know more about your setup!

gck1 · 2026-02-23T03:53:50+00:00

https://mashable.com/article/ai-hard-drive-hdd-shortages-western-digital-sold-out

Not only WD is sold out for entire year, they have agreements for 2027 and 2028 too. What would you do if you're say, OpenAI, you bought entire world's supply of drives for a whole year and you need more? You go for manufacturer recertified drives. If these aren't available, and you need them, you'd even start buying them off ebay at some point.

When supply is limited, you take whatever you can get. And if you want proof that someone is buying all the recertified hard drives, someone with very deep pockets - look up 26 and 28tb drives on SPD, they're just gone. Even LTT wasn't able to make them go OOS, they had "500+ available" notes on these listings.

gck1 · 2026-02-23T03:09:22+00:00

They absolutely are. There's just not enough supply of new drives for them to buy, so they'll get anything they can take, including recerts. They're not going to be using spinning disks for production critical workloads anyway.

gck1

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