[vidarh]

I can easily get Claude Code to run for 8-10 hours unsupervised without stopping with sub-agents entirely within Claude Code.

I think it is more likely that if you stick with Claude Code, then you are more likely to stick with Opus/Sonnet, whereas if you use a third party CLI you might be more likely to mix and match or switch away entirely. It's in their interest to get you invested in their tooling.

[KronisLV]

> if you use a third party CLI you might be more likely to mix and match or switch away entirely.

I really like doing this, be it with OpenCode or Copilot or Cline/RooCode/KiloCode: I do have a Cerebras Code subscription (50 USD a month for a lot of tokens but only an okayish model) whereas the rest I use by paying per-token.

Monthly spend ends up being somewhere between 100-150 USD total, obviously depending on what I do and the proportion of simple vs complex tasks.

If Sonnet isn’t great for a given task, I can go for GPT-5 or Gemini 3.

[vidarh]

I don't do this much because I really like Opus 4.5, and so far I haven't hit the limits on the $200 subscription much, but I do have some projects where I might need far higher limits.

As a matter of principle, I really would like the flexibility though, as while I love Opus now, who knows which model I will prefer next month.

[mlrtime]

On the flip side I started using Claude with other LLMs (openai) because my Pro sub gets maxed out quickly and I want a cheaper alternative to finish a project.

I just use claude code proxy or litellm and set the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to my proxy and chose another LLM.

[vidarh]

That would seem to be a very good reason for them to make Claude Code good enough that people would prefer doing that over the inverse...

But also, they're a bit schizophrenic about what they want Claude Code to be, given you can stream JSON to/from Claude Code to use it as a headless backend including with your subscriptions.

[j45]

Multi model is the way of the future though as much as I like and prefer Anthropic.

[dabernathy89]

I've yet to come up with a workflow where I would want Claude to do this much work... unless I had an extremely detailed spec defined for it. How do you ensure it doesn't go off the rails?

[AnotherGoodName]

You pretty much just said it. Define an extremely detailed spec. I have one that's five .md files to iteratively churn through. It had to be split into that many files since i don't want to break context length limits on the AI.