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Can you give me an idea of how much interaction would be $50-$100 per day? Like are you pretty constantly in a back and forth with CC? And if you wouldn’t mind, any chance you can give me an idea of productivity gains pre/post LLM?

Re productivity gains, CC allows me to code during my commute time. Even on a crowded bus/train I can get real work done just with my phone.

Yes, a lot of usage, I’d guess top 10% among my peers. I do 6-10hrs of constant iterating across mid-size codebases of 750k tokens. CC is set to use Opus by default, which further drives up costs.

Estimating productivity gains is a flame war I don’t want to start, but as a signal: if the CC Max plan goes up 10x in price, I’m still keeping my subscription.

I maintain top-tier subscription to every frontier service (~$1k/mo) and throughout the week spend multiple hours with each of Cursor, Amp, Augment, Windsurf, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, but keep on defaulting to Claude Code.

Unless you're getting paid for your commute, you're just giving your employer free productivity. I would recommend doing literally anything else with that time. Read a book, maybe.

What's your workflow if I may ask? I've been interested in the idea as well.

I am curious what kind of code development you are doing with so many subscriptions?

Are you doing front end backend full stack or model development itself?

Are you destilling models for training your own?

I have never heard someone using so much subscription?

Is this for your full time job or startup?

Why not use qwen or deep seek and host it yourself?

I am impressed with what you are doing.

Thank you for your perspective. I’ve been staring at Claude Code for a bit and I think I will just pull the trigger.

It's for a paid side gig.

The project is just a web backend. I give Claude Code grunt work tasks. Things like "make X operation also return Y data" or "create Z new model + CRUD operations". Also asking it to implement well-known patterns like denouncing or caching for an existing operation works well.

My app builds and runs fine on Termux, so my CLAUDE.md says to always run unit tests after making changes. So I punch in a request, close my phone for a bit, then check back later and review the diff. Usually takes one or two follow-up asks to get right, but since it always builds and passes tests, I never get complete garbage back.

There are some tasks that I never give it. Most of that is just intuition. Anything I need to understand deeply or care about the implementation of I do myself. And the app was originally hand-built by me, which I think is important - I would not trust CC to design the entire thing from scratch. It's much easier to review changes when you understand the overall architecture deeply.

I am curious what kind of development you’re doing and where your projects fall on the fast iteration<->correctness curve (no judgment). I’ve used CC Pro for a few weeks now and I will keep it, it’s fantastically useful for some things, but it has wasted more of my time than it saved when I’ve experimented with giving it harder tasks.

How do you use Claude Code via your phone?

It’s a wild frontier, but as a recent convert to CC, I would say go for it.

It’s so stupid fast to get running that you aren’t out anything if you don’t like it.

There was no way I was going to switch to a different IDE.

I’m a founder/CTO of an enterprise SaaS, and I code everything from data modeling, to algos, backend integrations, frontend architecture, UI widgets, etc. All in TypeScript, which is perfectly suited to LLMs because we can fit the types and repo map into context without loading all code.

As to “why”: I’ve been coding for 25 years, and LLMs is the first technology that has a non-linear impact on my output. It’s simultaneously moronic and jaw-dropping. I’m good at what I do (eg, merged fixes into Node) and Claude/o3 regularly finds material edge cases in my code that I was confident in. Then they add a test case (as per our style), write a fix, and update docs/examples within two minutes.

I love coding and the art&craft of software development. I’ve written millions of lines of revenue generating code, and made millions doing it. If someone forced me to stop using LLMs in my production process, I’d quit on the spot.

Why not self host: open source models are a generation behind SOTA. R1 is just not in the same league as the pro commercial models.

vibetunnel.sh perhaps

> If someone forced me to stop using LLMs in my production process, I’d quit on the spot.

Yup 100% agree. I’d rather try to convince them of the benefits than go back to what feels like an unnecessarily inefficient process of writing all code by hand again.

And I’ve got 25+ years of solid coding experience. Never going back.

When you say generation behind, can you give a sense of what that means in functionality per your current use? Slower/lower quality, it would take more iterations to get what you want?

you can easily reach 50$ per day. by force switching model to opus /model opus it will continue to use opus eventhough there is a warning about approaching limit.

i found opus is significantly more capable in coding than sonnet, especcially for the task that is poorly defined, thinking mode can fulfill alot of missing detail and you just need to edit a little before let it code.

Everywhere I've worked as a programmer you're just paid to do your job. If you get some of it done on your commute what difference does it make?

It's interesting to work with a number of people using various models and interaction modes in slightly different capacities. I can see where the huge productivity gains are and can feel them, but the same is true for the opposite. I'm pretty sure I lost a full day or more trying to track down a build error because it was relatively trivial fpr someone to ask CC or something to refactor a ton of files, which it seems to have done a bit too eagerly. On the other hand, that refactor would have been super tedious, so maybe worth it?

> data modeling, to algos, backend integrations, frontend architecture, UI widgets, etc. All in TypeScript, which is perfectly suited to LLMs because we can fit the types and repo map into context without loading all code.

Which frameworks & libraries have you found work well in this (agentic) context? I feel much of the js lib. landscape does not do enough to enforce an easily-understood project structure that would "constrain" the architecture and force modularity. (I might have this bias from my many years of work with Rails that is highly opinionated in this regard).

wow. haven't tried Opus but Sonnet 4 is already damn good.

    > I’ve written millions of lines of revenue generating code

This is a wild claim.

Approx 250 working days in a year. 25 years coding. Just one million lines would be phenom output, at 160 lines per day forever. Now you are claiming multiple millions? Come on.

100-200 lines per day, written, debugged, tested and deployed, is normal performance, isn't it? I think I could do it if worked for 8 hours.

Uh... Totaling +1000 at the end of a work week is an easy thing to do, especially if working on a new/evolving product.

Mostly to save money (I am retired) I mostly use Gemini APIs. I used to also use good open weight models on groq.com, but life is simpler just using Gemini.

Ultimately, my not using the best tools for my personal research projects has zero effect on the world but I am still very curious what elite developers with the best tools can accomplish, and what capability I am ‘leaving on the table.’