Yeah, if you're a heavy user of Claude code, you pretty much need to use it with a Max subscription rather than a BYOK approach. But that starts at $100 / month so it's a significant bump from cursor.
For any professional SWE 1/200 a month is basically nothing in terms of the value it delivers. They just rolled it out to the 20/month plan with limited usage but as soon as people get used to it I have no idea why they wouldn't upgrade unless they are just entering the field and don't have a job yet.
Anyone pulling that a month not working for themselves doesn't have to think about the cost. That kind of salary is paid by corps with strict privacy policies.
Unless you do nothing else with your time I'm not sure how you'd utilize the $100/mo plan fully.
the pricing is for token usage in 5/hr windows not monthly caps. if you use it intensely a couple times a month within a 5hr window it's not hard to hit the cap and want to upgrade. Personally I just work on some side projects during work on another monitor and just every half an hour so throw something at it and that's been very valuable for me.
225 messages every 5 hours? You hit that on the side while you're doing your day job? I suppose if you push all work to Claude and do nothing else all day it could be a concern but I don't think it would be a very effective way to work in it's current state unless you want to be left with a giant mess.
I admit their transparency around limits is a bit questionable. Why don't they just list out the tokens and remaining time?
Yeah I hit it again today, refactoring can use a ton. It did make a bit of a mess but planning it out making sure everything is tested and having it run through checking the tests making sure they all still pass uses lots of tokens but passively doing that while I'm working is way faster than doing it manually.
Sometimes I'll just experiment with weird stuff and end up reverting it or delete it afterword's. Also fun to build really nice data visualizations for data I'm working with.
> For any professional SWE 1/200 a month is basically nothing in terms of the value it delivers.
If it is delivering that value indeed, then 100-200 dollars each month is exactly what that professional SWE is worth.
That SWE is going to have to pivot into something adjacent to provide value-add, and if the only value-add is "I can review and approve/reject", then it's only a matter of time[1] that there are no SWEs who can review and then approve/reject.
And that is assuming that the LLM coding performance remains where it is now, and does not improve to the review, orchestration, design and planning levels.
