[i_have_an_idea]

Yes, this is a paid comment, in the sense that it's probably a bot. 22 day old account, with 1 post, praising Claude.

For more than a year, Anthropic has engaged in an extensive guerrilla marketing effort on Reddit and similar developer-oriented platforms, aiming to persuade users that Claude significantly outperforms competitors in programming tasks, even though nearly all benchmarks indicate otherwise.

[sixhobbits]

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [e-mail] and we'll look at the data. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[zarzavat]

I believe that's talking about general insinuations, e.g. "you're just a russiabot" and the like.

The GP account above with only one comment that is singing the praises of a particular product is obviously fake. They even let the account age a bit so that wouldn't show up as a green account.

[i_have_an_idea]

The most alarming to me thing is that it seems to be happening at scale. This is one of dozens similar posts I've seen all over the programming communities with similar characteristics (high praise, new-ish accounts, little if any other activity).

[apwell23]

seems justified in this case

[christophilus]

Well, I’m not a paid comment, and I agree 100% with the op, and have the exact same experience. I haven’t touched Cursor since paying for Claude Code (max or whatever the $100/mo plan is). That said, I never found Cursor very useful. Claude Code was useful out of the gate, so my experience may not be typical.

[lmeyerov]

I recently wrote a 5+ page internal guide on how I do vibe coding and one of the first sections is cost

Keep in mind much of the guide is about how to move from 30s chats to doing concurrent 20min+ runs

----

Spending

Claude Code $$$ - Max Plan FTW

TL;DR: Start with Claude Max Pro at $100/mo.

I was about $70/day starting day 2 via the pay-as-you-go plan. I bought in $25 increments to help pace. The Max Plan ($100/mo) became attractive around day 2-3, and on week 2 I shifted to $200/mo.

Annoyingly, you have to make the plan decision during your first login to Claude Code, which is confusing as I wanted to trial on pay-as-you-go. (That was a mistake: do Max Pro.) The upgrade flow is pretty broken from this perspective.

The Max Plan at the $100/mo level has a cooldown of 22 question / 5 hour: That does go by fast when your questions are small and get interrupted, or you get good at multitasking. By the time you are serious, the $200/mo is fine.

Other vibe IDEs & LLM providers $$$

I did anywhere from about 50K to 200K tokens a day on Claude 3.7 Sonnet during week 1 on pay-as-you-go, with about a ratio of 300:1 of tokens in:out. Max Plan does not report usage, but for periods I am using it, I expect my token counts to now be higher as I have gotten much better at doing long runs.

The equivalent in OpenAI of using gp4-4o and o3 would be $5-40/day on pay-as-you-go, which seems cheaper for using frontier models… until Max Pro gets factored in.

Capping costs

Not worrying about overages is typically liberating. Max Pro helps a lot here. One of my next experiments is seeing about self-hosting of reasoning models for other AI IDEs. Max Pro goes far, but to do automation and autonomy, and bigger jobs, you need more power.

[owebmaster]

Creating a post that convincingly appears human on HN probably is considered a benchmark task there