The Claude Pro subscription is basically useless at this point, in terms of usage limits with respect to the settings required to achieve actual useful output.
Meanwhile with 20 bucks a month for gpt plus, you can get shit ton of usage out of gpt 5.5 on codex if you know what you are doing and not just letting it swallow the whole project like an idiot.
Agreed, they also have great documentation. There's something to be said for documentation that is so concise, well laid out, and immediately actionable for those looking to get started quickly.
I'm in the same boat as you. Wish I had known this before my subscription renewed. There's no longer any value in paying them for this service when I can cut them out of the equation and pay the model providers directly.
I've been thinking of doing this — using one of the "pretty good but not Opus 4.6-good, YET very cheap" models for the implementation part of more basic code features, AFTER first using Opus 4.6 high for the planning stage.
Do you think this would be a decent approach?
Also, which client would I use for this? OpenCode? I don't think Claude Code supports using other models. Thoughts?
I have been doing this and the results have been fairly good.
I use claude to build requirements.md -> implementation.md -> todo.md. Then I tell opencode + openrouter to read those files and follow the todo using a cheap (many times free) model.
It works 90% of the time. The other 10% it will get stuck, in which case I revert to claude.
That has allowed me to stay on the $20/month claude subscription as opposed to the $100.
Not saying anything about the article at-hand, but assuming we were able to detect it with such certainty, I think it would greatly increase the funding, rigor, and breadth or research devoted to finding a cure or treatment that actually worked.
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