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diavelgurutoday at 12:27 AM4 repliesview on HN

This is a real thing. I spent all of January doing Greenfield development using Claude (I finished the requirements) and all I can say is thank goodness I had the Max 5x plan and not the 20x as I got breaks once the tokens were used up till the next cycle. I was forced to get up and do something else. That something else was biking, rowing, walking. My productivity had never been higher but at what cost? My health no thanks. So I'm glad I'm using the time till token reset for my health. I time it perfectly. I do a walk, row, bike for 1 hour then as I arrive back the tokens are reset. I get like 3 hours nonstop use per token batch with the 5x plan. I've been thinking about going 20x but am scared...


Replies

TheAceOfHeartstoday at 1:22 AM

Hypothesis: limiting usage / tokens could have a positive effect on project quality, since it forces the developer to think more carefully about the problems they're working on. When you're forced to stop and slow down, you try to be more deliberate with token usage. But if you have unlimited tokens you can just keep generating infinite lines of code without thinking as hard about the problem.

I've seen people on social media bragging about how they're able to produce a mountain of code as if this was praiseworthy.

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unshavedyaktoday at 12:32 AM

I don’t get this tbh, I use Claude too and my issue is the opposite - too many small breaks. Every time I hit enter my brain wants to checkout because the agent just spins while it creates thousands of tokens and churns on the subject. Even if it’s only 2m, that’s 2m where my mind has nothing to work on.

Hard to stay in flow and engaged.

Feels weirdly similar to being interrupted over slack.

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democracytoday at 1:42 AM

Great shilling attempt )

cpncrunchtoday at 1:25 AM

Does a person review all the AI generated code?

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