i got $100 of credit at the start of the year, and have been using +1$ each month, starting at $2 in january using aider at the time. just switched to claude code this week, since it follows a similar UX. agentic CLI code assist really has been growing in usefulness for me as i get faster at reviewing its output.
i use it for very targeted operations where it saves me several roundtrips to code examples and documentation and stack overflow, not spamming it for every task i need to do, i spend about $1/day of focused feature development, and it feels like it saves me about 50% as many hours as i spend coding while using it.
What do you prefer, between Aider and CC? I use Aider for when I want to vibe code (I just give the LLM a high-level description and then don't check the output, because it's so long), and Cursor when I want to AI code (I tell the AI to do low-level stuff and check every one of the five lines it gives me).
AI coding saves me a lot of time writing high-quality code, as it takes care of the boilerplate and documentation/API lookups, while I still review every line, and vibe coding lets me quickly do small stuff I couldn't do before (e.g. write a whole app in React Native), but gets really brittle after a certain (small) codebase size.
I'm interested to hear whether Claude Code writes less brittle code, or how you use it/what your experience with it is.
I tested Aider a few times, and gave up because at the time it was so bad - it might be time to try it again, and I'll add that my experience with seeing how Claude Code works for me while lots of other people struggle with it suggests to me that my experience with Aider might well be that my style of working just meshes better with Claude Code than Aider.
Claude Code was the first assistant that gelled for me, and I use it daily. It wrote the first pass of multi-monitor support for my window manager. It's written the last several commits of my Ruby X11 bindings, including a working systray example, where it both suggested the whole approach and implemented it, and tested it with me just acting as a clicking monkey (because I haven't set up any tooling to let it interact with the GUI) when it ran test scripts.
I think you just needs to test the two side by side and see what works for you.
I intend to give Aider a go at some point again, as I would love to use an open source tool for this, but ultimately I'll use the one that produces better results for me.
Makes sense, thanks. I've used Claude Code but it goes off on its own too much, whereas Aider is more focused. If you do give Aider another shot, use the architect/editor mode, with Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7, respectively. It's produced the best results for me.
The two worst ways of burning API credits I've found with Claude Code are:
1. Getting argumentative/frustrated with the model if it goes off the rails and continuing to try to make something work when the model isn't getting anywhere.
If it really isn't getting something in the first few prompts, stop and rethink. Can you go back and set a smaller task? Like writing test cases that it's broken approach would fail? If it's not making forward progress after a couple of prompts, it's not likely to unless you split up the task and/or provide more details. This is how you burn $10 instead of $0.60 for a task that "should" be simple. It's bad at telling you something is hard.
2. Think about when you either /compact (trims the context but retains important details) or clear the context entirely. E.g. always clear when moving to another task unless they're closely related. Letting it retain a long context is a surefire way of burn through a lot (and it also slows you down a lot, not least because there's a bug that affects some of us - maybe related to TERM settings? no idea - where in some cases it will re-print the entire history to the terminal, so between tasks it's useful to quit and restart)
Also use /init, but also ask it to update CLAUDE.md with lessons learned regularly. It's pretty good at figuring things out, such as how my custom ORM for a very unusual app server I'm working on works, but it's a massive waste of tokens to have it re-read the ORM layer every time instead of updating CLAUDE.md.
> If it really isn't getting something in the first few prompts, stop and rethink. Can you go back and set a smaller task? Like writing test cases that it's broken approach would fail?
This.
I was fighting with Claude for a good chunk of yesterday (usage limits seemed broken so it didn't really time me out) and most of that was getting it to fix one small issue with three test cases. It would fix one test and break the others, round and round we go. After it broke unrelated tests I had to back out all the changes and, by then, I understood the problem well enough so could direct it how to fix it with a little help from Deepseek.
As there are a bunch of other sections of code which suffer from the same problem I can now tell it to "look at the fixed code and do it like that" so, hopefully, it doesn't flail around in the dark as much.
Admittedly, this is fairly complicated code, being an AST to bytecode compiler with a bunch of optimizations thrown in, and part of the problem was a later optimization pass undoing the 'fixes' Claude was applying which took quite a while to figure out.
Now I just assume Claude is being intentionally daft and treat it as such with questions like "why would I possibly want a fix specifically designed to pass one test instead of a general fix for all the cases?" Oh, yeah, that's its new trick, rewriting the code to only pass the failing test and throwing everything else out because, why not?
> Now I just assume Claude is being intentionally daft and treat it as such with questions like "why would I possibly want a fix specifically designed to pass one test instead of a general fix for all the cases?" Oh, yeah, that's its new trick, rewriting the code to only pass the failing test and throwing everything else out because, why not?
The best one I've seen is when it tries to disable a test because it can't make the code pass it.
You do need to treat it as if it's trying to sneak stuff past you sometimes because you do get the occasional bout of what in a human I'd have treated as "malicious compliance", at a level well beyond stupidity.
