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Comment by joe_mamba | Hacker News Reader

>the Claude Pro plan is mostly unusable for any serious coding effort

Why? Seems to go a giant the opinion of the masses who mostly use Claude Pro for serious coding.

I think ths comment is referring to the usage limits of the Pro plan. You run out of usage very fast if on anything less than a Max ($100+/month) plan.

Anecdotal evidence but last week or two Claude changed something related to their quotas. I'm a Pro user(now Team Standard) and while I did quite a lot before with that subscription, past week the 5h quota quite literally lasts maybe 5 semi sized prompts. I don't "vibe" anything, I give it clearly defined tasks or things to debug/fix, nothing hardcore. I ran out of the quota every single day past week, often twice a day, this never happened before. It's rather unusable for actual professional usage now. I'm tempted to test Codex over next week to compare hence why we're waiting with going to Claude Max sub.

Claude is opaque as regards token usage. So you might end up using your 5hr limit in 7-10 minutes using regular Sonnet. Meanwhile, OpenCode etc give you exact breakdown in terms of how many cached tokens used per session etc which you can use to estimate burn rate.

All these coding tools are extremely wasteful as far as resources are concerned. Almost designed to make you move to the next tier. You have to consciously restrict their scope all the time to make your plans last. Even with Kimi/MiniMax a 3-4 hour session often ends up with 50-70M cached reads. Not a small amount at all.

The masses don't know shit. Claude pro in my experience runs into usage limits over 2x as fast as even ChatGPT plus.

Both using their respective CLIs, on a relatively small project.

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