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by Goronmon 65 days ago
...pay for API tokens and adjust your use of CC so that the actions you have it take are worth the cost of the tokens

Do you feel there is enough visibility and stability around the "Prompt -> API token usage" connection to make a reliable estimate as to what using the API may end up costing?

Personally, it feels like paying for Netflix based on "data usage" without having anyway for me to know ahead of time how much data any given episode or movie will end up using, because Netflix is constantly changing the quality/compression/etc on the fly.
1 comments
kristjansson 65 days ago
Time is a relatively good proxy for spend. There are also more ex post diagnostics like count and cost it can write to the status line.

I agree that ex ante it’s tough, and they could benefit from some mode of estimation.

Perhaps we can give tasks sizes, like T shirts? Or a group of claudes can spend the first 1M tokens assigning point values to the prospective tasks?

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Goronmon 65 days ago
Even time doesn't feel like it would provide consistent information.

Take the response on another post about Claude Code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442

This reads like even if you had a rough idea today about what usage might look like, a change deployed tomorrow could have a major impact on usage. And you wouldn't know it until after you were already using it.

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