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Discussion (108 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I've tried throwing unsupervised agentic software factory workflows against the wall, and they burned through my tokens like nobody's business but didn't produce much.
Supervised, human-in-the-loop process on the other hand is much more productive but doesn't consume nearly as much. Maybe that's why everyone's pushing agentic approaches so much.
Yes, but in a "oops this is gonna take another two months to finish" kind of way, not the "oops this is the 12th time this month 8 developers have burned $2K in tokens in a single day and no one really knows how it happened" kind of way.
I tend to work with the agent, and observe what's going on as well as review/test and work through results/changes. I spend a lot more time planning tasks/features than the execution, even using the agent as part of planning and pre-documentation. It works really well. I don't think people burning through the 5hr allotment in under an hour are actually reviewing/QC/QA the results of what they're doing in any meaningful way, and likely producing as much garbage as good (slop).
I'm really curious as to HOW the MS employees were using the agents as much as what they were doing.
Colleague used Sonnet 4.6 on some pretty normal agentic coding tasks through AWS Bedrock to keep the data in the EU, 100 EUR usage in a single day. In comparison, the Mistral subscription costs about 20 EUR per month and we tested that for similar tasks it was okay, the usage got to around 10% of that monthly limit in a single day. Or Anthropic's own Max (5x) plan where you get way, way more tokens to do with as you please.
I feel like the sweet spot is having a monthly subscription with any of the providers (you're subsidized a bunch), but if you have to pay per tokens, now I'd just look in the direction of what tasks DeepSeek would be okay for, sadly probably not in the situation above. For a startup, though...
On the other hand, this feels a bit hypocritical:
> It was part of an effort to get project managers, designers, and other employees to experiment with coding for the first time, and sources tell me that Claude Code has proved very popular inside Microsoft over the past six months.
They're gonna say that the future is all AI... until they get the bill.
The results for a function implementation and test of levenshtein distance in js are pretty similar but Mistral is 30x cheaper than Opus 4.7 and 4x faster than Sonnet 4.6.
https://5m6qnuhyde.evvl.io/
> I understand that Microsoft is planning to remove most of its Claude Code licenses and push many of its developers to use Copilot CLI instead. While Claude Code has been a popular addition, it has also undermined Microsoft’s new GitHub Copilot CLI coding tool — a command line version of GitHub Copilot that runs outside of development apps like Visual Studio Code.
And people here are interpreting this as related mainly to the Claude burning too much tokens too quickly and suggesting Microsoft should rather use SomeOtherLLM©?
Is this Hacker News or rather Marketing Wars?
Eso mensaje de hijo de Carlos
I've launched an internal demo of Claude Code and Deepseek on the same day and we burned through our monthly allowance for Claude in just over a week, with more than a half of that budget being spent in one day. With DS people are unable to go through that same amount of money in a month, not even close.
With that Claude feels like an expensive toy, while DS is a shovel, purely because developers do not feel like they are eating into a precious resource while using it. Also it does not feel like there is much of a difference in capability between Claude and DS-pro. DS-pro and flash do feel like sonnet/opus and haiku, but flash is still very-very capable.
After 2 weeks of Claude getting progressively worse and worse, today was the final straw.
I don't care if they have a phone app. The model is COMPLETE garbage after you subscribe long enough and they think they've "got you".
I can't code on my phone if the model literally moves in the wrong direction and does the opposite of what I tell it to. If I wanted to make my code worse, I'd just randomly commit garbage. I don't need a mobile app for that.
This would never fly if stock market was rational. But it never is.
So you're getting 2 for the price of 1.5. Scale that up to 500 devs at a big company and it's a big chunk of change saved on payroll.
Keeping your headcount or hiring humans instead, AI would have to start to cost upwards of $15k/month/developer or more before it costs more than hiring. You're looking at about 4 billion tokens per month before humans start to break even or are cheaper.
But even taking a more realistic 1.25x (20% time savings) gain, lets say you drop from 500 to 400 devs, you'd have to hit around $4,000/dev/month in token spend before hiring humans again would break even.
Payroll is just expensive, in most companies it's by far the biggest expense. AI still has to cost drastically more before investors would call it out as being worse than increasing headcount, from a pure dollars perspective.
While LLM Opex is "some future quarter" and very easy to co-mingle with other expenses.
I expect the r/LocalLLaMA guys to be going nuts about this news.
> It was part of an effort to get project managers, designers, and other employees to experiment with coding for the first time.
I suspect they weren't as efficient as they could be with token use either. Sounds like they were trying to encourage non-developers to vibe code stuff
Speed without judgement always compounds badly.
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
At least Codex is trying to win validation on merit.
This is a warning to any company, not building their own AI, that AI assisted development could become really expensive really fast and most likely won't pay off. What Microsoft is suggesting is that the current price is to high, but it's still not high enough for e.g. Anthropic to be profitable, or AI coding tools are only as good as the developers using them. So you can't meaningfully do layoffs by replacing the developers with AIs, because the cost is to high.
How does Microsoft plan to fix CoPilot, so that the cost will be so much lower than Claude, that budget overruns won't be a problem for their own customer?
Smaller companies will have departments that distill larger models into something more specifically manageable and useful for them. At least, that's my personal prediction :)
I do think your prediction makes sense, because the AI really isn't the product, it needs to be baked into something and licensing the models saves you the R&D and cost of implementing your own.
There may be a spot of “good enough to pay for and make a profit” that exists.
The frontier model space costs 1000x as much to develop as the small language models, and is only 1.5 years ahead.
Factually, the frontier models have not paid for themselves. So, if you're MSFT and Apple, you don't need to run in a race where even the winner loses massively.
You can try to train models 1.5 years behind that are highly likely to be profitable, given your market position.
The average person is lagging behind what AI is capable of by 3+ years anyway...
So you can save 1000x on training and 10x on inference and just use SOTA small models.
Why spend $5B training a model that's for sure not going to make $5B (after inference costs) when you can spend $5M building one that WILL make far more than that after inference costs?
At one point there were rumours that they'd do that. They also have the rigts to oAI models for a few more years still, so they could always use that but apparently they're also compute starved (like anyone else).
Similarly companies seem to reward high token usage as a sign of someone willing to play ball with AI and again have forced higher costs on themselves for people reward hacking or using tokens out of spite.
Fun fact, up until you face a consequence for crime, all crime is free! Have fun and go win the competition game against your co-workers.
There are papers describing KV cache precomputation for commonly used documents (e.g. KVLink), but, of course, it's not a priority for model providers: they'd rather sell you more tokens, also they would rather get to AGI/ASI first than optimize usage of existing models...
Normally KV cache works only if your context prefix is identical, but there are papers which demonstrate documents can be cached between different contexts.
I found Opus 4.7 to be slow and wasteful with token usage. It's shocking how inefficient it is with tasks like bash tool usage and web searching, delegating them to a dozen subagents only to get stuck and never return until you esc and intervene. That, in addition to all of the broken tooling Anthropic built in to limit token usage like the broken monitoring tool made managing Claude a chore. I was happy to pay $200/month for Opus 4.5 when they had more capacity, but 4.7 felt like a huge step back and no longer worth the price and inconvenience.
I remember an OpenAI employee comment on the GPT5.5 release post about how they specifically geared it towards long-horizon tasks and its been a breathe of fresh air in that regard. I have five two-week long sessions going right now and there's been no degradation in performance or efficiency. It's much better at carrying rules/learnings forward even in long-running sessions and grounding/refreshing itself in verified facts when it loses context.
Its funny because in two weeks I've gotten way more done with GPT5.5 with way fewer tokens and way less handholding. I think this goes to show how important tooling and the harness is and how a capable model like Opus 4.7 can be severely handicapped by bad product decisions.
call me a luddite, i'll be wearing it as a badge of honor