Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
pimeys | on: Claude Fable 5
We pay by token at work. I just finished one session with Opus that was 4000 dollars. In about three days.

Now that 200USD subscription starts to feel cheap...

zozbot234 | parent | next
That would be about ~300 tok/s over 72 hours at Claude Fable output token prices? I'm not sure that this passes a sanity test.
unholiness | root | parent
Subagents are a helluva drug.
esafak | parent | next
That's the price of several engineers!
rubyn00bie | parent
Just outta curiosity, as I’ve never gotten a spend anywhere near that, what variant were you using? Like max context window and fast mode? Or was it just chugging along non stop for three days?
pimeys | root | parent
Fast mode max content window. The task was: replace all 1600+ queries from one database to another and make the whole integration test pass. We did multiple passes, with different concerns when changing from database to another. My OpenCode session right now says $4,365.02.

I haven't gotten close to this either before, but now we wanted to move fast because this branch gets conflicts all the time and we want to get over with the migration asap.

rglullis | root | parent
It's a bit of a left field question, but I am curious: Let's say that if the company wasn't paying the whole bill but only subsidizing it - e.g, if it paid 90% of the $4000. What would you do?
pimeys | root | parent
I don't know, why would I pay to do my job? It's not my first database switch for a startup. Only this time it doesn't take two months of grueling work. I know exactly how this is done, but the amount of grunt programming and testing and repetitive work is just not great. And it's not a task that brings new customers or a new product. Just a mandatory and annoying thing to deal with when we are growing.

And don't get me wrong. Opus did an absolutely horrible job at first, second and third round in this task. You really needed to steer it to get to the right solution.

And now Fable is out. And its first round of code reviews for this huge PR was definitely worth the money too...

Don't think that I'm just shrugging to that number. I see it every day, and I don't like that it's in the thousands now. But for people paying the 100 or 200 dollar plans, I'm not super sure if you will be able to use them in the future if the token price is in the thousands for a bit bigger task...

If I'd pay this from my own pocket, I'd definitely go with DeepSeek or local models and figure it out how to make the best use of them.

rglullis | root | parent
> If I'd pay this from my own pocket, I'd definitely go with DeepSeek or local models and figure it out how to make the best use of them.

IOW, you don't really think the value of this work is really worth $4k.

> why would I pay to do my job?

The question is: how long do you think that you employer will be willing to pay for you and Anthropic, if you yourself said if it were your money you'd put some time and effort to work with an open model?

pimeys | root | parent
> The question is: how long do you think that you employer will be willing to pay for you and Anthropic, if you yourself said if it were your money you'd put some time and effort to work with an open model?

I wonder what this question really means? Anthropic is useless if you don't know what to do with it. It's very useful if you do, and you can guide it to do the right things. Yes, it will for sure reduce the amount of people we need to hire. But we are always looking for hires who know what they do and can utilize agents to be faster.

But if you think about how long employer is willing to pay 10-20k per month per seat for Anthropic? I can't see this to be feasible and it will have to end at some point.

rglullis | root | parent
Regardless of the actual value produced by the models, if I am the CTO of any company that has the budget to spend $10k/month/seat on Claude, I'd take 5%-10% of that to build an alternative in-house.