alt Hacker NewsLuna is unusable garbage. When I see people in threads talking about how useful Luna is for all of their tasks and it's so cheap and fast, it reads to me like people relating anecdotes about how tasty the garbage scraps they're eating out of the dumpster behind McD's are. Sol Max is the threshold of "just barely usable", and even then it's certainly not what the people are hyping it up to be.
> But GPT also offers a $100 plan with five times the usage limits. And how long would that last me?
Sol usage is basically unlimited on the $100 plan if you're human-in-the-loop, reviewing the code, and not doing some useless Gas Town crime against humanity.
Replies
> Luna is unusable garbage
What are some uses for which you found Luna to be unusable garbage?
From my side, I use Harbor to score tasks and Luna certainly performs when the prompt is either well or overspecified.
We have dramatically different experiences. I use specification driven design. I have Sol or Opus designed a specification, the plan, and the task breakdown. I then use Luna as the implementation agent. It is told to do test driven development. I have tasks to run tests on just the modified code. Luna knocks it out of the park pretty much every time.
My biggest complaint is that it melds IO concerns such as timeout, with business requirements. Normally, I just to put that in the IO layer. After that, it’s basically done.
Given my pattern, a new feature normally involves Luna creating 20 to 50 files. After it thinks it’s done with its work, a Sol agent will review the code. This loop goes twice. If there’s still issues, I have to deal with them. I’ve not had to deal with them.
This when I’m at work. At home I do pretty much this but with GLM 5.3 Flash. Even less money.
Codex, 6.1 Terra Ultra gets pretty impressive mileage on my plan.
maybe you just aren't very good at prompting and need the highest level of intelligence possible to kind of make it work?
for myself anything over medium overthinks and is worse.
Luna is as great and extremely efficient at exactly what OpenAI advertises it to be good at: focused tasks, small edits, automations.
If it's used for that then using anything more powerful is just inefficient usage of your tokens.
In my private coding benchmark Luna Low effort is beaten by Qwen 3.8 Flash Next Coder IQ_1 served by Strata locally https://github.com/niko1221/strata
Luna medium effort is very slightly better than its output and completes tasks in 5-10x less time.
I’ve been slowly converting my org to use opus 5.5 as default over sonnet and the difference is night and day. More usage, because it does shit better the first time. Less cost, because it does shit better the first time. It’s literally been the thing that’s kicked our org in the pants to actually adopt agentic methodology at scale.