By Monday lunch, I had burned through my Claude code credits. I’d been warned ; damn the budget, full prompting ahead.
When that still couldn’t solve the issue, I summoned Opus, the biggest & most expensive model, to solve it.
Now two days on, I’ve needed to figure out alternatives. Do I :
- Switch to API billing (how much will that cost?)
- Try another vendor? Gemini’s model is great, but ageing ; at nearly 8 months old, its a capable jalopy. Cursor’s free coding model Composer 1 sprints at problems with aplomb but a bit overwhelmed at times. Codex, the plodding giant is brilliant at large-scale technical challenges.
- Create another Max subscription & switch between them? Can I ask AI to write a script to save me the hassle of changing my identity?
- Stand-up GPT-OSS to run locally? A little bit more latency but potent & twice as fast on llama.cpp compared to Ollama.
- Go back to writing code the old way? The hedonic treadmill moves quickly. I tried to return to the old ways, but it was painful. I’ve already forgotten where the blog server script is. Claude? Do you remember? Claude?
I’m working through the math of which option will cost more. How much is the Max plan subsidized? Will knowing the true API cost of my Claude Code usage increase my willingness to pay?
Switching between tools incurs costs. The tools, the workflow, the prompts that I’ve optimized for Claude code must all be ported (at my expense!) to other tools.
As the capabilities of these models begin to plateau, the costs to shift increase. So does my willingness to pay for Claude to answer me.