I don't really know if really fits the description, but the whole effort (`\effort`) gate is pretty on point. I mean, you can go up to Ultracode which takes over the whole bottom portion of the terminal with a shiny glow, Ultracode for sure give a lot of "up the ante" vibes...
I think the whole nature of agentic programming is variable reward: kick off a bunch of prompts, obsessively check “which one nailed it??” Or at least I get a dopamine hit when the agents notifies me that it’s done with its turn.
Timers. Such as these five hour and seven day limits.
If you see any sort of timer anywhere, you are in a Skinner's box simulator. You are being subjected to positive and negative reinforcement via the reward schedule. This is habit forming.
It's a little more like App Store "gems" imo, with some clarity and honesty removed. Pay for "usage" that disappears arbitrarily: coded that bug fix for you, 3% usage consumed. Would you like to upgrade your plan to pro for "more" usage or max for "much more" usage? Buy pro max for "most" usage and access to our latest model, until we revoke it 15 minutes from now.
>> During this period, the company also reset users’ weekly usage early on several occasions to celebrate milestones, including adding another million active users across the two (now unified) platforms.
> Such a casino vibe.
No no no! It means we're all in it together! Feel the parasocial vibes!
I used to think it was pretty great but now it just means you can't plan your usage across the week.
It's a slightly entitled complaint but when you 'waste' 80% of your remaining usage because you get a reset you weren't expecting, there's a ping of disappointment there.
I've seen a lot of people who seem to think it's inevitable that they'll get resets, making them more likely to over-spend early because they'll get a reset anyhow.
It could leave them out of availability later when they need it.
I think there can be many complaints about large scale AI providers but given that large companies are now pushing for local models it seems that we are luckily avoiding the situation where AI is a utility
They now give out resets you can choose when to use, but with a "best before" date. With Anthropic you don't even know what model you'll have access to next week. A few months ago I wanted to try a subscription to Gemini but I couldn't figure out how to give them money. The other one thinks he's Mecha Hitler.
To an extent I get it, this is not like a normal SaaS where you just buy seats, but their commercial offerings, especially B2C ones, feel like complete amateur hour. If they were selling literally anything else I'd have ran for the hills a long time ago.
Yeah. I switched to codex 1.5 months ago to try it, and for some reason the "vibe" kept me here. It was really the unpredictable rewards from the constant resets though. I am not convinced it's a better product or that sol + any combination of luna is better than Claude.
> This is necessary as (a) the 5h limit allows us to smoothen the load on our compute, allowing to keep the plan generous in terms of weekly usage
Seems fair, but then maybe the 5h usage should also drain slower during off-peak hours? Perhaps it already does.
> and (b) users on the Plus plan are relatively casual and new users, but then also just accidentally eat through their whole weeks usage and then are confused, making it not a great experience.
Wouldn't this one be fixed by making the 5h limit a guardrail you can opt out of? If so, then this doesn't work as justification for a mandatory limit.
Also, I want to be able to eat through my whole week's usage at once. What if I was busy all week and want to work on my personal project(s) Saturday or Sunday.
That is a pathological use case for OpenAI, and precisely why they have instituted these limits. Part of the tradeoff of doing your work on someone else’s computer is they get to set the rules about when you use it.
It is pathological for their utilization, as in “worst-case behavior.” Like how a program that makes and frees millions of differently-sized heap allocations is pathological for memory fragmentation.
I’ve been hit with limits at 4am Eastern time when I’d expect for not a lot to be going on. I always thought the quotas would be used best for shaping demand curves, but as you said — there are no off-peak hours anymore.
Imagine being a student and using codex for some night studies and hit the limit at the wrong time saying let's continue after exams, still we have normal chat available.
Maybe for projects also but we still have no limits in normal chat section but that ain't codex for working on our projects.
Given that it's not possible to buy the USD 100,- or USD 200,- subscription on a team/corporate plan this effectively introduces the 5h limits again for all corporate users.
At this point the 40 USD/120 USD Cursor Team subscription suddenly becomes a lot more attractive. You'll get more generous limits and a single monthly limit.
I'm curious about why you see ads, I didn't think anyone on HN does, nowadays. Given how easy it is to install uBlock, is it a conscious decision to browse adfully?
Some of us don’t use an adblocker because we are aware that ads are how most websites get paid for on the internet. I pay for sites I care to support, but for something like LinkedIn, I’d rather have their monetization scheme push me away from any usage than block the ads and make the site slightly more palatable.
Why not? I owe my life to ads. Thank you Google AdSense and Yahoo! Ads for the hundreds of thousands of dollars you paid for 16 year old Rob to slap them on his MySpace layout website in 2006 so Timmy could put a glitter graphic of Stone Cold Steve Austin on his banner.
LinkedIn has a couple of useful features: Getting in touch with former coworkers; seeing who might know the hiring manager for a position you're applying for; uh... that's about it.
The rest is garbage but I guess is how they make their money.
probably less - I sometimes manage to burn like most of my 5h credits on Claude 5x Max plan in 2h.
The annoying things is that you gave bigger tasks and is such session finished maybe 70% and after 5h pool resets cache will expire so that if you "please continue" it will wipe out again a lot of your 5h pool)
Tighter limits, forcing people to higher plans. Most will go as they are addicted and dependent on those tools. They need to use to finish the project they started as no human will touch that pile of code. If you didn't saw this coming, as it has been the standard business strategy from all kinds of SaaS in the last years, you haven't been paying attention.
There are solid, cheap options like xAI, z.AI, MiniMax, Kimi, DeepSeek, and Alibaba. Heck, I can run a coding agent on my 32GB MacBook Pro M1 right now and it's actually pretty good (just slow). No one is forced to keep paying OpenAI and Anthropic. That's their major strategic risk: distilled models are far cheaper to build and run and they're only a few months behind.
This sucks, but really the value of the $20 plan has been insane. I routinely get weeks of work out of the weekly limit, so yeah I'll just move up plans if needed.
Personally I have been using Deepseek V4 flash and it is enough for my needs. You can use OpenCode Zen/Go and also get access to many other models, including OpenAI ones. Writing purpose specific agents can make cheaper models close the intelligence gap with the most expensive ones
How is that the case? ChatGPT not only gives a lot of Codex/Agentic usage, once you've run out of that you still have a massive quota of Chat usage that's entirely separate. You can still use plug-ins with Github, Google Drive, etc... using the Chat usage as well.
There are many providers and harnesses. You could go almost 90% of the frontier models for the fraction of the price. You have 3 more free days of ox alpha.
Geofencing has been quite good at creating feeling of being ripped off in the developed countries - from which the bulk of the companies revenue come from - that companies seems to be dropping it lately.
Anyway - China's advances seems to have caught the big 2 unprepared, so price war seems to be going on.
And there are Chinese resellers for frontier models if you are desperate for high end frontier tokens.
Is there a world where we look back at how AI usage is charged today and we equate it with how we had minutes on AOL and how absurd it seems looking back?
I think without a doubt that will be the case, unless the trend of compute getting better over the last 60 years suddenly stops. It should become less tough to run a local model and our devices should become more powerful.
However I think there is still a significant runway for these models to scale, so there will always be some sort of offering from providers. I can't imagine that our current use of the context window will be how that looks in a handful of years.
I think you're underestimating the "more expensive". It's not a 30% discount or similar. API is at least 10 times more expensive (own experience), ~40x as expensive if [1] is accurate.
At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.
I tried for example Deepseek V4 Pro for a bit (via API pricing), but it's _more expensive_ than Sol via subscription, even though $1.7/Mtok is a lot less than 20$/Mtok.
> At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.
Could you elaborate on that?
Off topic:
You did the ISBN visualization thing! Awesome!
Haha. I've been pretty happy using similar limits on Claude precisely for this. It provides a really nice work:life balance without that nagging feeling that I should really get a few more hours in.
Such a casino vibe.
If you see any sort of timer anywhere, you are in a Skinner's box simulator. You are being subjected to positive and negative reinforcement via the reward schedule. This is habit forming.
it's like nitrous oxide, you're sure to have that epiphany with just one more pull
> Such a casino vibe.
No no no! It means we're all in it together! Feel the parasocial vibes!
Free drinks? Keep customers happy? Reward your heaviest users? Casino vibes
It's a slightly entitled complaint but when you 'waste' 80% of your remaining usage because you get a reset you weren't expecting, there's a ping of disappointment there.
It could leave them out of availability later when they need it.
To an extent I get it, this is not like a normal SaaS where you just buy seats, but their commercial offerings, especially B2C ones, feel like complete amateur hour. If they were selling literally anything else I'd have ran for the hills a long time ago.
I'll be switching back.
Seems fair, but then maybe the 5h usage should also drain slower during off-peak hours? Perhaps it already does.
> and (b) users on the Plus plan are relatively casual and new users, but then also just accidentally eat through their whole weeks usage and then are confused, making it not a great experience.
Wouldn't this one be fixed by making the 5h limit a guardrail you can opt out of? If so, then this doesn't work as justification for a mandatory limit.
which TZ?
> There are no off-peak hours.
Probably US west coast hours, but there's no public stats
At this point the 40 USD/120 USD Cursor Team subscription suddenly becomes a lot more attractive. You'll get more generous limits and a single monthly limit.
https://openai.com/index/premium-seats-chatgpt-business/
I'd rather the site asked me to pay directly, or not at all. I will not see any ads I can avoid.
The rest is garbage but I guess is how they make their money.
https://openai.com/index/premium-seats-chatgpt-business/
The annoying things is that you gave bigger tasks and is such session finished maybe 70% and after 5h pool resets cache will expire so that if you "please continue" it will wipe out again a lot of your 5h pool)
Tighter limits, forcing people to higher plans. Most will go as they are addicted and dependent on those tools. They need to use to finish the project they started as no human will touch that pile of code. If you didn't saw this coming, as it has been the standard business strategy from all kinds of SaaS in the last years, you haven't been paying attention.
It’s more expensive, yes, but I assume most people here use it for something that is worth spending money on?
I’m basically replicating myself multiple times for a ~10% salary surcharge.
In my mind it’s impossible to not see it that way, unless you just want to capture the subsidy surplus for free.
I could burn through my Opus usage in 1 hour whereas with Sol, I can go 3–4 days.
Geofencing has been quite good at creating feeling of being ripped off in the developed countries - from which the bulk of the companies revenue come from - that companies seems to be dropping it lately.
Anyway - China's advances seems to have caught the big 2 unprepared, so price war seems to be going on.
And there are Chinese resellers for frontier models if you are desperate for high end frontier tokens.
I don’t mind the 5 hour window but this is a reminder to not hinge your workflows on any one tool.
However I think there is still a significant runway for these models to scale, so there will always be some sort of offering from providers. I can't imagine that our current use of the context window will be how that looks in a handful of years.
Maybe if we have some breakthrough in how to get equivalent ai capacity out of less compute it’ll seem crazy in retrospect.
But the magnitude of flops per token on SOTA models is mind boggling huge.
There's your answer
I don’t think everyone here is using Claude/GPT/… to create indie games?
If you’re using it for work then waiting another week/day/hour is a business expense, effectively.
Maybe it's like this guy I know who purchased a new-ish Bugatti but all the service is done by a local mechanic, during his time off, in a barn.
At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.
I tried for example Deepseek V4 Pro for a bit (via API pricing), but it's _more expensive_ than Sol via subscription, even though $1.7/Mtok is a lot less than 20$/Mtok.
[1]: https://tibotattle.com/
> At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.
Could you elaborate on that?
Off topic: You did the ISBN visualization thing! Awesome!