Claude Code was a big jump for me. Another large-ish jump was multi-agents and following the tips from Anthropic’s long running harnesses post.
I don’t go into Claude without everything already setup. Codex helps me curate the plan, and curate the issue tracker (one instance). Claude gets a command to fire up into context, grab an issue - implements it, and then Codex and Gemini review independently.
I’ve instructed Claude to go back and forth for as many rounds as it takes. Then I close the session (\new) and do it again. These are all the latest frontier models.
This is incredibly expensive, but it’s also the most reliable method I’ve found to get high-quality progress — I suspect it has something to do with ameliorating self-bias, and improving the diversity of viewpoints on the code.
I suspect rigorous static tooling is yet another layer to improve the distribution over program changes, but I do think that there is a big gap in folk knowledge already between “vanilla agents” and something fancy with just raw agents, and I’m not sure if just the addition of more rigorous static tooling (beyond the compiler) closes it.
How expensive is incredibly expensive?
If you're maxing out the plans across the platforms, that's 600 bucks -- but if you think about your usage and optimize, I'm guessing somewhere between 200-600 dollars per month.
It's pretty easy to hit a couple hundred dollars a day filling up Opus's context window with files. This is via Anthropic API and Zed.
Going full speed ahead building a Rails app from scratch it seemed like I was spending $50/hour, but it was worth it because the App was finished in a weekend instead of weeks.
I can't bear to go in circles with Sonnet when Opus can just one shot it.
The $200/month Max plan has limits, but making a couple of those seems way cheaper than $50/hr for the ~172 hrs in a month.
Anthropic via Azure has sent me an invoice of around $8000 for 3-5 days of Opus 4.1 usage and there is no way to track how many tokens during those days and how many cached etc. (And I thought its part of the azure sponsorship but that's another story)