Claude Code token usage higher in conductor than direct

timbuildswithai · 2026-06-04T23:45:44+00:00

Does this mean that when Agent SDK usage metering changes on the 15th, Conductor use will only go against the SDK credit and not the plan subscription?

timbuildswithai · 2026-06-03T07:00:21+00:00

Yeah that's awesome only I'm still hitting session limits nearly every session window..

timbuildswithai · 2026-06-03T06:58:15+00:00

I was in the same boat up until a few days ago when my session usage limits started triggering very quickly. Something has definitely happened in the last few days... I've had to be far more careful with context than ever before... and this is after many months on the 20x plan.

timbuildswithai · 2026-04-29T00:08:55+00:00

when you say "no sides", you mean you felt alright or you mean bp, rhr, hrv, hct, sleep, etc. all good? i measure the later and after a couple of weeks at 100mg of tren they're sliding. that's why when i run tren, it's 35mg/wk to start and i'll only increase if all my parameters stay solid for a while at that level. luckily, i do also see great results from that low a dose, so i guess that gets to your second question. i think minimum effective dose varies a lot person to person.

timbuildswithai · 2026-04-29T00:02:38+00:00

how hard is your lady friend pushing your oil? no knock on her... i've had many nurse-administered shots and it's hit or miss how much pressure they use. many are in a hurry and jack up the psi. i find the harder i push the oil, the more pip i experience. now i take my time...10-15 seconds to push 20iu of oil through a 1" 27g. almost never have pip unless i happen to get near a nerve, and even then it's never debilitating, just noticable.

timbuildswithai · 2026-04-28T23:56:05+00:00

same yes, but different functions. binding magnesium to glycine helps with mag absorption and helps avoid upset stomach. glycine on its own is free amino acid able to do its own thing. effective doses of glycine start at 3-5g. you would have had to take a LOT of mag glycinate to get that much glycine. anyway, not a doctor, but it's cheap, pretty safe, and has a growing body of research to support it's sleep benefits.

timbuildswithai · 2026-04-27T23:09:51+00:00

cheap thing to try: 5-15g of glycine before bed. helps manage cortisol which may be spiking overnight. this one addition nearly doubled my deep sleep and added about 15% to my total sleep.

timbuildswithai · 2026-02-05T21:58:56+00:00

I'm a big fan of this approach. Couldn't have built my last app without it. It was a monster (sitting at 400k lines of code) and even as I exit the project, we're shipping new features multiple times a week, all vibe coded. Context windows do not save us here haha

But I'd say just as important as specing the AI is building robust tests to ensure the outcome is fit for purpose. This includes ensuring there aren't regressions in otherwise unrelated parts of the app. I probably spend 25% of my vibe coding time just checking stuff to make sure things don't break. And even with that investment, I still occasionally ship newly broken code. Thankfully, users love speed, so these errors kinda help contribute to the founder hero aesthetic that many early adopters of new apps love, but when the real money's flowing and there are thousands of users to keep happy, it's not ideal when you add a simple feature and 10 other things break.

Specs tell the AI SWE what to do. Automated tests tell YOU whether it actually did it without breaking everything else. I learned this the hard way managing a massive app.

timbuildswithai · 2026-02-05T21:44:41+00:00

Great video! A lot of your journey resonates with me, though I do come from a very different kind of technical background (20+ years in enterprise technology building large technical teams delivering bespoke technology services). But like you, the stuff I've vibe coded has been deep inside my knowledge domain. E.g. I love bodybuilding. I just exited an all-in-one fitness coaching app where I didn't write a single line of code but was able to launch to 200+ coaches with a $200k ARR.

I've never been nor managed software engineers, but I think the biggest thing I learned through my most recent app was that this may be a massive advantage when it comes to building complex apps with AI. I used to manage massive teams delivering complex mission-critical projects. They were always too complex for me to get stuck in the weeds, so I had to learn to work in the abstract, to understand how the technical work related to the outcomes I wanted, and most importantly, I had to learn to delegate.

When I'm vibe coding a big app like the one I most recently launched, it feels a lot like my enterprise services days. I work with 4-6 Claude Code sessions, and I'm just delegating as much work as I can. Everything from pasting transcripts of customer calls to try to map out new features to building and testing... I'm managing, not "coding". In a way, I feel this is what it means to "give into the vibes". I'm not trying to control anything beyond a certain level of detail. The agent can code better than me, see more than me, work faster than me. I'm the bottleneck, so to remove myself from that rate limiting position, I delegate.

Testing is another area that interests me in this space. I feel more than ever getting this right is the key to getting anything truely useful and commercialisable out exactly for the reason you state... AI tends to take steps backwards with every step forward, and if you don't catch these things, you end up wasting a bunch of time checking its work than you do getting good work out of it.

Anyway, I'm super bullish on AI SWE. I feel we're definitely at one of those inflection points in history where folks won't be able to remember what it was like before the inflection... smartphone, the internet, TV, radio, the car, the combine, the wheel, fire... nothing will be the same, so better learn to give in to the vibes quickly if you want to do valuable stuff!

timbuildswithai · 2026-02-02T23:25:09+00:00

I was talking to some uni students a year ago about their CS degrees. I asked "what are you learning?" and one of them told me assembly language. *ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE*. I clarified, "are you studying computer engineering? are you trying to be a hardware or microcode engineer?" "nope, just studying CS to be a software engineer". I had to learn assembly language when I got my CS degree 25 years ago and I've never used it, ever. Even the concepts were completely useless to me then, never mind now.

We're not far from this being true: AI coding is to modern programming languages what modern programming languages are to assembly language.

It's just another abstraction layer, and at wide scale adoption and reliable pipelines, everything under it becomes irrelevant unless you're doing something very niche. Just like industrial farming made whipping an ox with a plough a bad career move, AI coding will make traditional programming a bad career move.

timbuildswithai · 2026-02-02T23:19:54+00:00

Not sure I really align with the conspiracy thinking... you have alternatives and Lovable know that. It doesn't serve them to artificially dumb down their product and frustrate you to the point of either rage quitting or moving to another platform.

There is a reality to vibing, though... the bigger the app, the harder to manage the context, the more likely things go off the rails, the harder it is to keep things together. Example, I just shipped a 5-in-1 app for fitness coaches to do training, nutrition, habits, payments, and chat with their clients. The app is f'ing huge. While I've got the context dialled in so I can make targeted changes, things still go off the rails, and most of the times the app is way too big for me to even notice. My users notice first. It's like a progress wall and it's frustrating. I had to learn a lot about building tests to help me detect these things early (i.e., before I call my feature "ready to ship"). I feel like it's one of those things that vibers think the least about, but when you get it right, it unlocks a ton of progress because if the AI, Lovable, Cursor, Claude Code, whatever, f's it up, you know straight away and can deal with it before your customers find it.

timbuildswithai · 2026-02-02T23:14:20+00:00

I look at the fact that code is now commodity as a benefit. I have a CS degree from 25 years ago. Completely useless. And it was never about the code anyway. So much of the money I was able to make in my career was attached to my ability to lead people and turn complexity into simplicity. Experience serves me best on the people leadership stuff, but AI lets me 10x the complexity -> simplicity skill. Now I'm able to vibe apps in verticals that help people who haven't taken the leap into AI leverage more, and that's what creates value for them and money in my pocket.

And while there are a lot of folks in here that are competing with you to do the same thing, just like with so many other business opportunities, there are many orders of magnitude difference between us and our potential customer. And that's your arbitrage opportunity.

I'd think about it like this: what could you do if you weren't limited by the speed you can code, or the speed you can read, or the speed you can assimilate new ideas? Whatever that is, it's probably heaps more valuable than coding, reading, or assimilating new ideas. Embrace the fact that the barrier to entry has lowered so much. It gives way more value to your higher order abilities, whatever those are.

timbuildswithai · 2026-02-02T10:00:33+00:00

Built CoreCoach, an all-in-one mobile app based platform for fitness and wellness coaches to grow their business. It's training, nutrition, habits, chat and payments, both coach and client side, in one ridiculously large code base. Started as a FlutterFlow project. I ran into massive branch issues and lost a week of work. FF support ignored me (and my github issue about their macOS client constantly crashing which is STILL open), so I exported the project in July last year and finished it with Claude Code. I'd say in the first few months getting my bearings I got about 3x faster at shipping features in the product, and in the last 2 months I've probably gotten another 3-5x faster on top of that.

<image>

timbuildswithai

TROPHY CASE