Totally! Though I maintain that the only good aspect to microservices is that krazam video. You know the one.
I do get frustrated when I see people not using Plan steps, copy/pasting from web front-ends or expecting to one-shot their entire codebase from a single dense prompt. It's problematic because it's not immediately obvious whether someone is still arguing like it's late 2024, you know what I mean?
Also, speaking for myself I can't recommend that anyone use anything but Opus 4.5 right now. 4.6 has a larger context window, but it's crazy expensive when that context window gets actually used even while most agree that these models get dumber when they have a super-large context. 4.5 actually scores slightly better than 4.6 on agentic development, too! But using less powerful models is literally using tools that are much more likely to produce the sorts of results that skeptics think apply across the board.
Haven't looked into 4.5 vs 4.6 in depth (since the latter seems good for my needs), but
> but it's crazy expensive
was something I struggled with until just going for the Max subscription and cancelling my other ones.
I'm not sure what Anthropic is doing, but they're either making truckloads of money from those paying per-token (especially since you're not supposed to use subscriptions for server use cases --> devs can use Claude Code, but not code review bots etc.), or heavily subsidizing subscriptions.
100 USD is worth it for me, I've only hit the 5 hour limits a few times, and haven't hit 100% of the weekly limits once. I fear to think how much comparable usage with any of the Opus models would have been, if I were to pay per token - even Sonnet could get similarly expensive.
I don't get/like/want Claude Code. I do everything in Cursor, and I am very happy. I recommend it! And there's no time-based limits. You get deeply discounted API calls included in your monthly subscription, and then overage is billed at the same discounted rate. It's essentially committing to an "at least" amount per month in exchange for a preferred rate.
I have a USD$200/month Cursor plan, and I do hundreds of hours worth of Opus 4.5 prompting with it every month. I tend to pay $250-300 a month after overages, and I consider myself a heavy user. During Opus 4.1 days, one month I paid $700. 4.5 got substantially cheaper and smarter, and I consider that the real moment agentic coding got real.
I don't know your financial situation and I recognize that $300/month is more than much of the world makes in a month. I am just saying that for me, what I'm working on is important enough that I am absolutely willing to pay a premium for access to the best tooling available, because every dollar I spend represents literally an hour of my time. Maybe more? It's so incredibly cheap compared to hiring an unreliable human who needs to sleep.
You can't pay someone $3600/year to lick stamps, much less pair program application development.
That's pretty cool! I haven't really been a heavy user of Cursor, but found Cline/RooCode/KiloCode in VSC to be pretty good, while letting me preserve my existing setup and also easily switch between multiple providers, sometimes in the middle of some work, to let another model check the output of the first one!
I think most I ever spent per month was 300 USD, but I had to cut down on that and Anthropic's subscription being way more affordable than paying per token (alongside GitHub Copilot, which also has multiple model support and pretty generous limits alongside unlimited autocomplete), since I'm also helping a friend with expenses during their chemo and some other friends with some meds and stuff, even though policemen and teachers and others have way worse financial circumstances than software devs in Latvia, the economy here doesn't give that much breathing room for that kind of thing.
Oh for a while I was also using Cerebras Code which gives you really generous token limits (like 24M per day on the 50 USD per month tier), though the GLM 4.7 model I tried out still made me go back and work on fixing its output more often than I'd like. Eventually I kinda settled on SOTA.
That said, I do remember a post here on HN where some founders were thinking whether they should throw something like over 1000 USD at Anthropic (the API variety) per month and they realized that for them that amount of money was totally reasonable, compared to getting some junior devs or whatever.
I read that same post, and for me it wasn't just something I remember; it had a profound impact on how I came to be typing at you casually about how I have spent up to $700 a month on Opus tokens in Cursor (which absolutely lets you switch between providers... I just really like Opus 4.5!)
To me, all of the switching between dev environments + all of the time spent undoing errors causes by less powerful models has a huge time cost; not to be cliche that means it's very expensive to use error prone models and obsess over trying all of the new half-baked things (I've never even heard of most of the stuff you mentioned, lol). Like, if I spend an hour of my time mucking around with some tool, that's a good chunk of the $200/month I commit to Cursor.
Anyhow, at the real risk of sounding like an unpaid Cursor salesman, IMO it's worth every penny. For me, the jury is still out on whether people find Opus 4.6's 5x context to be valuable enough to pay significantly more for it over 4.5, which again is rated as being slightly better at agentic coding than 4.6. Since agentic coding is what I do....