alt Hacker News> There's definitely a way to use Claude code that is token conscious.
Colleague used Sonnet 4.6 on some pretty normal agentic coding tasks through AWS Bedrock to keep the data in the EU, 100 EUR usage in a single day. In comparison, the Mistral subscription costs about 20 EUR per month and we tested that for similar tasks it was okay, the usage got to around 10% of that monthly limit in a single day. Or Anthropic's own Max (5x) plan where you get way, way more tokens to do with as you please.
I feel like the sweet spot is having a monthly subscription with any of the providers (you're subsidized a bunch), but if you have to pay per tokens, now I'd just look in the direction of what tasks DeepSeek would be okay for, sadly probably not in the situation above. For a startup, though...
On the other hand, this feels a bit hypocritical:
> It was part of an effort to get project managers, designers, and other employees to experiment with coding for the first time, and sources tell me that Claude Code has proved very popular inside Microsoft over the past six months.
They're gonna say that the future is all AI... until they get the bill.
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> They're gonna say that the future is all AI... until they get the bill.
I mean, the will continue to say so, they just want to be the ones being paid for the service, not anthropic :)
I was trying to get a better sense of the time cost quality matrix of these, so I threw together a quick eval of Sonnet 4.6, Mistral's dev model, and Opus 4.7 (figuring it's what you'd use if you were on Max).
The results for a function implementation and test of levenshtein distance in js are pretty similar but Mistral is 30x cheaper than Opus 4.7 and 4x faster than Sonnet 4.6.
https://5m6qnuhyde.evvl.io/