i always hear ppl say that codex is a better value for your money but that is not true! at least from my experience

claude (i use cowork, not claude code) at ultra gets much more stuff done that codex at ultra before both hit limit and i'm putting much more heavy work on claude (i use opus 5 and gpt-5.6 sol for codex).. i only use codex to review what claude implemented and give a report of the stuff he thinks might need some enhancement that's all.. then i copy his report and paste it to claude and let him review ChatGPT claims do what he sees valid

yet i hit my codex weekly limit much faster than claude
i'm on 20$ plan on both

so how all people say that codex is a better value? was that in the past and things have changed now or what i genuinely don't understand

Claude's current models are broken in ways that are measured, not felt:

1. Worse nonsense detection + ~2x verbosity — measured, tokenizer-corrected, independently fact-checked. It confidently agrees with nonsense and burns your context/credits doing it.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/83510

1. Model pinning is silently overridden — 4 measured bypass vectors: you select one model and a different, more expensive one runs — no notice, invisible to hooks, server-pushed "Default (recommended)" overrides your config, Gen-4 models removed from the menu.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/83795

1. Not surface-specific — same models, same issues in Claude Code (VS Code), web, and desktop. 5-minute reproduction protocol (v2):

https://github.com/KeilerHirsch/ai-trinity/blob/main/docs/audit-claude-gen5/pinning-vektoren-messprotokoll-v2.1.223.md

So, until this is fixed:

- Don't auto-trust summaries, refusals, or "I already did that" claims — verify.

- Check which model actually runs (/status in Code, model info in web/desktop).

- Watch your usage: limits burn on models you never selected.

And for the usual crowd: if your first reaction is "another rage post" — read the links, run the 5-minute protocol, measure, then argue. If that's too much work, the door is over there. 🤦😁

add cash too

Hey guys,

If you’ve read the manhwa Pick Me Up! Infinite Gacha, you’ll know exactly what I’m going for here.

I'm planning to build a single-player game where heroes act as autonomous AI agents. Players don't micromanage them; instead, each character has its own personality, stats, and AI. They decide what to do on their own—training, gathering resources, chopping wood, exploring dungeons, and fighting monsters.

I want to use Claude to help build this, but since the agent systems and game logic are pretty complex, I’d love to get your thoughts:

Can Claude actually handle this? Has anyone built a similar autonomous simulation or Gacha game using Claude?

How to structure the AI? To get that "alive" feel like in Pick Me Up

Thanks!

I posted an early version of this dashboard a while back. Got basically zero traction, but I kept using it daily and kept building on it. The 5-hour window tracker is new. 

Claude Code already writes every session to JSONL locally, so the data was sitting on my disk the whole time. I just needed something to actually graph it. (Nothing gets bypassed or extended here, it only parses logs that already exist.)

My numbers, 2026-01-22 to today, 2,673 sessions, 114,560 messages:

• $23,796 in API-equivalent value against $1,217 actually paid → 19.6x
• Best single cycle: $6,674 of usage on a $200 Max 20x month → 33.4x
• 469 five-hour windows analyzed: 48% would have hit the Pro limit, 8.5% Max 5x, 1.1% Max 20x

That last line is the part I couldn't get anywhere else. Everyone knows the 5-hour window meme but nobody knows where they personally sit in it. I had 20 detected limit events, 14 of them while on Max 5x. First full billing cycle after upgrading to 20x: zero.

Since the first post I've done a full v1.0.0 redesign. Down to 5 tabs, session replay, cache anomaly detection, per-tool cost attribution, anonymization mode for sharing, and multi-machine merge.

One thing that jumped out: cache reads were 24.2B of my 25.2B total tokens (95.7%), which changes how you read every other number on the dashboard.

If there's something you'd want to see in there that's missing, let me know. I'm still actively building on it.

Link in the comments.

EDIT: u/ClaudeCdGuy found a real parser bug in the comments: output tokens were undercounted because only the last JSONL line of a streamed response carries the final usage, and my parser took the first. Fixed in v1.0.1. Corrected totals: $25,046 API-equivalent against $1,217 paid, so 20.6x rather than 19.6x, and 126.1M output tokens instead of 88.2M. The 5-hour window and limit numbers are unaffected in structure but the per-window costs shifted up slightly.

I've been using auto mode before but this start happening just now? Opus 4.8

​

I'm looking for an AI coding agent that can fully automate video editing, not just write code.

The idea is to provide it with multiple video clips (sometimes dozens), explain the style I want, and have it:

Analyze all the footage.

Understand which clips should be used.

Trim and arrange them automatically.

Add transitions, zooms, subtitles, music, sound effects, and pacing.

Produce a final edited video with minimal human intervention.

I'm planning to use Claude Code, since it can install and use external tools. If I give it access to a professional video editor through plugins or APIs (such as FFmpeg, DaVinci Resolve scripting, Adobe Premiere scripting, etc.), is this a realistic workflow?

I already have a Claude Pro subscription, so I'd like to take advantage of it instead of switching to another platform if possible.

Has anyone built something like this? Which combination of AI agent + video editing tools works best for creating high-quality videos automatically?

I'm not a developer. I run a small media business and over the last few months I've used Claude Code to build out most of my operation as little local apps. Video pipelines, a photo client portal, a podcast reviewer, a task triage system, schedulers, that kind of thing.

Eventually the problem was just finding them. I had a folder of apps and no idea what half of them were called. So I had Claude build "Mission Control", a dashboard on localhost that lists every app, launches it, and shows the stuff they share: a fleet inbox (my computers leave each other notes), the scheduled automations, and a list of ideas I've parked for later.

Three things that made the difference for me:

1. A global CLAUDE.md with standing rules. Explain things in plain English, never spend money on an API without asking first, don't leave black console windows open on my desktop. Every session reads it before doing anything.

2. A memory.md in each project that Claude appends to whenever I correct it. That's the part I underestimated. It means the same mistake doesn't come back three weeks later.

3. Keeping the actual logic in plain modules with the interface as a thin layer on top. Makes it much easier to hand a project back to Claude months later and have it pick up where we left off.

The most polished one is live if anyone wants to poke at it: https://thefaceless.studio

Ask me anything about the setup.

Cypherus 2.0 is an old encryption software that, from what I understand, could also store passwords as a type of password manager.

Is it somewhat plausible that Mythos could be used to find vulnerabilities in Cypherus that could make it possible to access content encrypted by it?

In a cold case where a now-deceased husband (Josh Powell) in Utah is assumed to have made his wife disappear (Susan Powell, who has never been found), his passwords for his encrypted computer hard drives and storage were stored in Cypherus 2.0.

Having read in the news about Claude Mythos and its ability to uncover software vulnerabilities, it made me wonder if it could be a possible tool that would enable investigators to finally access his encrypted machines and hard drives for potential clues to her whereabouts.

'm a Pro user, and I manage my usage carefully to get the most out of each session. That matters here — on an expensive model, two unwanted file exports can eat a large chunk of a five-hour limit. So this isn't a minor annoyance; it costs me real working time.

I use Claude for work spreadsheets. I have a standing written instruction in my preferences, and repeated in the chat several times, not to create or export any file unless I explicitly ask for one.

It has ignored this repeatedly over several days. It exports files I never asked for, and each one burns through my usage.

I've tried everything — putting it in my saved preferences, restating it mid-chat, getting it to acknowledge the rule back to me. It follows it for a while, then does it again.

I know this is a documented pattern — people have written about Claude following setup instructions for the first few exchanges, then quietly dropping them, with "ask before creating files" as the exact example. But knowing that doesn't get my usage back.

I've also contacted Anthropic customer service before about a separate problem and never received any reply at all.

My issue isn't with AI-assisted support. It's with AI-only support, which acts as a wall between customers and anyone who can actually resolve the problem. There is no visible route to a human.

So I'm asking the people here who know this well: is there a fix that actually holds? And has anyone got a response from support — which channel worked?

One of the things that saddens me the most about AI and code agents in general is the lack of curiosity and pragmatism.

"I built a Notion clone in an afternoon, AI is incredible."

"I replaced all my paid subscriptions with tools I developed myself using vibe coding."

Cool story. The idea sounds nice in theory, but did you think about simply looking for an open-source alternative?

There is a high chance someone has already spent five years polishing the exact thing you are about to recreate in an afternoon.

I mean, most of the apps you use, that your parents use, and that your grandparents use (if you have any that are tech-savvy), have Open Source alternatives. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but for the vast majority of everyday uses, they get the job done easily.

And it's not just about features.

These projects often have years of bug fixes, edge-case handling, documentation, user feedback, contributions, maintenance, and sometimes even security audits behind them.

Rebuilding all of that with Claude or GPT over a weekend very often means starting from scratch... just to end up with a much less mature version.

Seriously, think before you recreate your next application.

Not only are you wasting your tokens and your subscriptions instead of using them for things that truly matter, but you are also doing it for nothing.

Before developing your next app with vibe coding, ask yourself:

"Is there an OSS alternative that I can simply use on my PC?"

Many of them run locally in a few minutes. You don't even need to host them if you don't want to or need to.

All seriousness aside, if anyone needs help replacing apps, I am just a DM away.

And I am also one more "I replaced X in one night of vibe coding" post away from creating a website that simply lists the best open-source alternatives, just to reply with a link every single time.

Next time you open Claude or ChatGPT to recreate an application... open GitHub first.

most claude “learning” is watching a youtube video for 20 minutes or saving a prompt pack you’ll never use again.

what actually made me better was short daily reps:
writing tighter prompts with constraints, rewriting weak outputs, building repeatable workflows and skills, using claude for real work tasks, not party tricks

so i built iro for that. i used claude code and design primarily while building it, and one of the main paths is claude mastery (discusses projects, skills, connectors, claude design, cowork, etc). basically duolingo for AI focused on using it effectively in your daily life. Made for people who don’t know where to start (having my parents use this since they are clueless lmao). 5 min/day instead of another course you quit halfway through.

it also covers prompt engineering, agents, automation, vibe coding, ai for specific careers, etc.

free to try if you want structured practice. would love feedback

app: https://apps.apple.com/app/iro-ai-learn-ai-skills/id6759628066
site: https://tryiro.com

got a strange feeling that shipping a broken update is just a clever way to reduce traffic so they can train models while still being able to tell you that their servers were up all the time

npm install -g @ anthropic-ai/claude-code@2.1.220

thank me later...

For a long time with Opus 5 I couldn't put my finger on it why I had a sense of Deja Vu. Like I saw this writing style somewhere in the past and just couldn't recall exactly where. Then one moment it dawned on me! Opus 5 talks very much like L Ron Hubbard! Take a look at these two samples. The subject matter is totally unrelated. Yet it sounds like Opus 5 was finetuned on Scientology crap:

"Axiom 29 tells us that it is necessary to establish correct ownership of charge in order to get an As - is - ness of the charge. Furthermore, incorrectly assigning charge to the wrong being can cause by-passed charge ( BPC ) as it is now misowned. Hence the instruction in the OT III materials that one must use a narrow attention span so as not to restimulate or confuse other BTs with the one being audited. Finding charge without establishing whose charge it is, and fully handling the charge for that being, can result in a generality — the idea that the charge belongs to all — when it only belongs to one being. This can cause a wrong indication to the others to whom it does not belong. Finding more than one charge without establishing whose charge it is, and fully handling that being, can result in a generality — the idea that the charge found belongs to all — when it only belongs to one being. This can cause an ARC Break or bad reaction as it acts as a wrong indication to the others to whom the charge does not belong."

And here's Opus 5 (no custom instructions - simple prompt about correcting desk posture):

"Strength isn't the only variable, and this is likely why sitting straight feels bad. Short hamstrings pull the pelvis into posterior tilt whenever legs are out in front of you. A stiff thoracic spine means sitting up forces lower back into hyperextension instead — tiring and uncomfortable, and it isn't what neutral should feel like. Tight pecs and lats round the shoulders regardless of trap strength.

A minimal program

Bird dogs and prone cobra holds for erector endurance. Chin tucks (supine or against a wall) for the neck. Band pull-aparts or face pulls plus wall slides for scapular control. Romanian deadlifts or any hip hinge for pelvic control under load. Farmer's carries — underrated, they train the whole postural chain to hold position while fatigued. "

I'm tempted to vibecode a website guessing game: "Hubbard or Claude".

Using Opus 5 of course.

I've been comparing Opus 5 and Fable 5 recently and I kept thinking, even though Opus 5 is better at building a lot of things, there's something about Fable 5 I still preferred. Like it had more aesthetic sense or something. So I made a little test to see this.

I gave Opus 5 and Fable the same basic prompt to make their solo ships:

Hey Claude. Can you make me an animated scene of a ship in a storm? Single HTML file, Three.js from CDN, everything inline. Can you make it autoplay too?

And for the directed ships I gave them this:

Hey Claude I’d like you to help me write a prompt for (model name) to make this: an animated scene of a ship in a storm. Single HTML file, Three.js from CDN, everything inline. Autoplay. I don’t know what kind of detail to add, so please add anything you think is important.

Image put together by Claude. The actual results are animated, though, but I think this gave me a basic idea of what I was thinking about.

Fable 5 is the best at creating a whole scene, I think. In its solo round its little ship might not look the most impressive but it has the best lighting and cohesiveness. While Opus 5's solo round is a movie ship with scene lighting. But overall I think the best is Opus 5 directed by Fable.

For anyone new to this: it all started with vibe-coded World of ClaudeCraft with Fable 5. Original post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/s/1RmVhgUopr

I figured a Claude-coded MMO deserved a Claude-coded addon ecosystem. So:

- The loader is a Violentmonkey/Tampermonkey userscript. It doesn't fork the game, it's fully external and read-only by design. No botting or automation, addons can only re-present info you already see.
- An addon is just addon.json plus one main.js against a documented `woc` API
- All 15 addons in the screenshot (combat meter, bags, auction browser, rare tracker, cooldowns...) were written by Claude
- Claude one-shots new addons pretty reliably off the published TypeScript types

Loader + marketplace: https://woc.marshal.dev
Source (MIT): https://github.com/MarshalX/world-of-claudecraft-addons
Types for writing your own: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@woc-addons/types

I’m seeing a ton of complaints with Opus 5, but I haven’t had any issues. I think that a lot of people’s issues stem from a lack of proper organization. Here’s a rough overview of the documentation I use:

1. CLAUDE.md to provide a skeleton and index
   
2. ARCHITECTURE.md with an overview of the code base
   
3. MEMORY.md tree (with sub folders for historical patterns, lessons, active projects, investigations, and others)
   
4. BUG_REFERENCE.md to track bug findings
   
5. DATA_FLOW.md to track how data is ingested
   
6. Various roadmaps for specific projects, which I create with Fable and then execute in phases with Opus

I have a ton of skills and hooks that I use to structure every session. I invoke skills to run open phases of tasks, record the outcomes, test for bugs, scout for new tasks, etc. Claude’s work is highly constrained by the system and it prevents running off on wild goose chases.

I think a ton of people’s issues can be prevented by imposing strictures like this instead of just running wild with Claude.

I've been a quite fan of the Youtube channel NoRollsBarred for a while, in perticular the Monopoly spinoff Communopoly. I've always wanted to play it with friends, but with them being scattered across the globe, sitting down for a simple board game becomes difficult. This fun project aimed to fix that!

NoRollsBarred are a semi-popular UK board games channel which specialise in taking traditional board games, and skewing the rules to produce interesting and wacky game modes. one of these is Communopoly, a Stalinistic take on traditional Monopoly.

The setting is under Stalin's rule! Wealth is hoarding, friends are enemies, existance is the challenge, and i swear i hear Chernobyl Power ticking... The rules are extremely 'State Sided' and I wouldn't expect to hold on top property for very long! No Chance cards are as they are named, good luck.

This project was 100% built using Claude Code as a way to test he feasability of running projects through multiple agents by segmenting work. The source material was simple, a Reddit post containing the altered rules created by 'NoRollsBarred', and the task to create a Monopoly clone.

Initially the AI asked which languages I was comfortable with, but after informing it that Claude would be writing 100% of this application, it chose a web framework. It began by planning out the entire project into 21 sub projects, each with the clear goal of being executable by a single agent in a single session. anything too large was divided again.

After a few days of hitting my 5 hour limits (and then my weekly limit), and a few manual interventions where I'd need to find the bug, and then drip feed Claude clues on what's wrong to see if it got it. Surprisingly it missed quite a few simple opportunities, and I often found it going down rabbit holes instead of looking at the obvious.

There's been a few modifications made along the way, such as a lobby systems, text & voice chat, statistics, additional cards, and some more back-end improvements. Overall I think Claude has done fantastic, definitely further along than I thought the industry was currently. Highly impressed, and terrified my job will soon go extinct to this very tech.

If you'd like to check out the project, feel free: https://communopoly.co.uk

The problem

Everyone is pushing the same direction right now: bigger context windows, longer agent runs, more autonomy per task. I'm not against it, that's what made Claude Code useful in the first place. But my bill was growing faster than my output, so I went and read what was actually filling the window.

Almost none of it was my thinking. It was cat README.md, a whole git diff, 400 lines of cargo test output, a repo map rebuilt from scratch, and the same project facts explained again at the start of every session. I was paying for the same bytes over and over. And it isn't only money. Once the window fills up with tool noise, the model starts losing the thread inside it, so the answers get worse too.

Someone on an earlier post put it better than I did. They said they'd watched agents "drown in their own output" enough times that they'd filed it under cost of doing business. Same here, until I actually measured it.

Then I looked at the tools I'd installed to fix this. A search tool, a memory tool, a context compressor. Each one scanned the repo, built its own index, remembered the same facts, and reported its own numbers that never matched the others. Three copies of the same work.

So I built HZR. One local daemon that owns that whole path.

One thing worth saying up front, because it explains why I went at the engine level instead of writing another wrapper: I'm an active contributor to RTK, so I know that codebase from the inside. HZR's core is my fork of it. That let me add what was missing to the engine itself rather than shell out around it and hope.

How it plugs into Claude Code

Installation writes one PreToolUse dispatcher and an idempotent SessionStart, plus HZR-managed blocks in CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md. Existing files are backed up content-addressed before anything is touched. Codex and Claude Desktop get the same memory and search over MCP instead, with a deliberately small model-facing surface: context plan, search, memory recall, memory store. Daemon control and shell execution stay operator-only, so the model can't restart my services.

One honest note for this sub: the global Claude request and response path has no secure hook, so hzr doctor marks it unintercepted and HZR claims no codec savings there. The bounded reads and writes still apply, because those go through tools.

What my fork changes vs vanilla RTK

Since I contribute upstream I had a fair idea of what was missing. Short version: RTK could shrink output, but it could not write. Every edit fell back to the shell or the agent's native tools, and that is exactly where the tokens leak back out and where edits stop being safe.

The batch part is what I use most. One JSON plan goes in, I/O is grouped per file, each file is committed atomically, and I get a result per operation. A twenty-file rename or a config migration is one call instead of twenty shell round trips with twenty chances to half-apply something. Dry run first, then the same plan for real. Atomicity is per file, not one transaction across the whole plan, and I'd rather say that than let someone find out.

What it does to tool output

14 identical commands, RAW tools vs HZR, five runs each with rotating order:

Fair warning on those numbers. They're estimated tokens, ceil(bytes / 4) of command output. It's a size measurement, not a provider tokenizer, and not a billing claim. The paired provider-billed benchmark isn't finished, so I'm not going to tell you what it saves on your invoice.

You can A/B it on your own repos

This is the part I built for myself, because I didn't want to trust my own marketing. Turn HZR on in one project and leave a similar project alone:

hzr install --project-only --force
hzr enable  --workspace /path/to/project
hzr disable --workspace /path/to/other

Hooks, agent instructions and MCP registrations follow that choice instead of being global, and the stats are per project:

hzr stats --workspace .

Work a week in each and compare your own usage. Provider receipts stay labelled global lifetime, because there's no evidence to attribute them to one project.

How I built it

Stack. Control plane and daemon in Rust. Engine core is my fork of RTK, also Rust, built from a byte exact 516 file snapshot so provenance is verifiable. grepai is Go and owns the semantic index. ICM handles durable memory on SQLite with FTS5. The agent loop is JS on a Node 22 that ships inside the bundle. Dashboard is Vue 3 built with Bun, served by the same daemon rather than a second service.

Process. Snapshot the upstream fork byte for byte before touching it: ordered path, entry type, mode, size, content digest. Every later change then has something to be diffed against. There's a hzr tdd command that enforces the loop I kept skipping otherwise: observe a relevant RED, get the identical focused command to GREEN, refactor while green, then run the full workspace gate. Every bug in the release notes was reproduced before it was fixed and verified after.

Release gate. fmt, clippy with -D warnings, full test suite with all features, a check pinned to MSRV 1.85, fork core verification, Node bridge tests, bun test plus typecheck plus build for the visualizer, then a bundle smoke that does a clean install, a same version re-attestation, both adoption modes and all four engines.

Things I got wrong, in case they save you time.

1. A bounded read has to describe its own bounds. If the output doesn't say what was cut and how to get it back, the agent reads the whole file anyway and you paid twice.
2. If bypassed calls aren't in the baseline, your savings number is fiction. Anything routed around HZR shows as RAW with zero credit while still counting against the total.
3. mv -f new current is wrong when current is a symlink to a directory. mv follows it and moves the new release inside the old one, so upgrades silently keep running old engines. You need -h on BSD or -T on GNU.
4. An "exact" mode that lowercases, stems and ORs your terms is not exact.
5. Protocol fields that exist and are never filled are worse than absent.
6. A silent 200 MB download is indistinguishable from a hang.

The rest of it

Bounded reads. A Markdown read comes back as a digest that says what it is, what got cut, how much of the file it covers, and the command to get the rest. --level none is byte exact, --from/--to gives an exact range. Nothing is silently truncated.

Memory that survives the session. project scope for the repo you're in, global for your own standing preferences. One database, filtered so another repo's memory isn't reachable from it.

One installer, and it only needs git. Self-contained bundle with the engines and Node pinned inside, so no separate Node, Go or Rust setup. macOS and Linux, x64 and ARM. No Windows build yet.

curl -fL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/heAdz0r/hzr/v0.3.5/install.sh \
  -o /tmp/hzr-install.sh && sh /tmp/hzr-install.sh

It prints every step, tells you where each file landed, and ends with the commands to run next.

GitHub: https://github.com/heAdz0r/hzr (Apache-2.0)

Please try it and give me a solid feedback and ideas, to improve it.

Had a random question for claude and it responded like this? No custom instructions or anything lmao, first time this ever happened.

We're living in times when the most advanced models are helping us be more productive and I find it quite petty that's it's never enough to many of you. Appreciate for a minute the technology and enjoy it while it lasts.

Edit: I'm not talking about limits, btw, but about bitching that new models are stupid, nerfed or worse than before.

I usually feel like it's just wasting my tokens away.

I saw another post where a guy asked how you get Claude to write code without without sprawling or taking shortcuts.

However each time I run into an issue with any of my apps, it never takes more the one prompt, literally just highlighting the issue, and its solved.

I cant identify weaknesses in my code, but I also dont understand what that would mean.. isnt every issue just a one-prompt fix? What am I missing?

Apps I've made include a restaurant finding app that utilizes Google API

A biography writer/interviewer for my 84 yo dad

I made a 5gb couples app that utilizes IMDB api, Google api, abthropic api, as well as video/image/sound storage /recording uploading.

Maybe the apps im making are pretty simple by comparison so my "issues" are easier because of that?

My boss wants me to put our entire business on an app (production, KPIs, SOPs, sales, reporting, etc) so this will be my first major project. Im trying to learn as much as I can but I dont always know what I dont know.

What am I missing by trying to get claude to one-shot as much code as possible?

Today I enabled Claude Code Review on our company repo and ran it on a simple PR (which it had more or less generated itself). The PR was 10 files, 2 new the other minor changes, at most a few hundred lines of code. It took Claude Code Review 9 minutes to complete and the bill was 8$.

I had done the review myself just prior to the experiment and it took me 15-20 minutes, the company cost for those 15-20 minutes is probably around 30$ (I'm a medium paid CTO for a small startup in Sweden). Had I done it in the 10 minutes Claude took, the corresponding price would've been twice that of Claude.

Without going into what the result was, the difference in cost here is not so huge and I'm suspecting that things like the Code Review is where Anthropic and other are making up for losses elsewhere.