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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 16, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Why do people use Claude? It is slow, dumb, and expensive. Maybe it's somehow magically different on the $200/month plan, but it is basically unusable for me. I am sitting at max usage limits for most of the day. I don't know what I am doing wrong. I really regret getting the subscription. It's fucking down now, too.

I try not to touch the Opus 5 model unnecessarily. I use new chats with fresh context for different features. For bigger projects, I tell Claude to delegate its work to other agents like the good little clanker it is.

Usage limits, for the most part, don't really even exist in Antigravity. I tried Codex, too, but through the API. I was not disappointed and kept upping my balance. I probably ended up spending $30 or so in API fees. I honestly should've gone with my instinct and gotten the ChatGPT subscription instead. I personally found GPT-5.6 Sol to be impressive, though obviously expensive. It was still worth it, since it literally fixed my whole project, did so in a sensible way, and kept running different automated tests to validate everything. Everything just worked perfectly once it was done.

Opus 5's code quality and thinking kinda suck, too. Gemini 3.7 Flash beat it. I had Gemini research and then implement a feature, then I tried to have Claude do the exact same thing starting from the exact same commit and using the exact same prompts. The result was just bad and unimpressive, and it seems it completely misunderstood my prompt. Or, it was just lazy and unambitious.

Fuck Claude. All my homies hate Claude.


EDIT: Deleted and reinstalled the desktop Claude app and... ALL OF MY CHATS ARE GONE. Absolutely asinine way to design an app. Why would deleting the program itself also nuke all of your chat history. That does not make any sense. No other app behaves this way. You routinely have to clean up after deleting a program on Windows because of all the stuff that's left scattered about. Definitely not renewing my subscription after this. What a shitshow. And you'd think that your chats would be stored in the cloud, but no. Because fuck you.

My job pays for Claude Max, and I get tremendous use out of it on a daily basis.

It is slow, dumb, and expensive. Maybe it's somehow magically different on the $200/month plan, but it is basically unusable for me.

What are you doing?

What are you doing?

Telling the AIs to write slightly cursed code for projects that require lateral thinking, which Claude wholly lacks. A few months back, it wouldn't believe me and would argue with me and "push back" when I told it about the architecture of a project/feature I wanted to build. It repeatedly said to me that what I wanted to do was impossible. IMPOSSIBLE. Totally impossible. It continued to be a stubborn ass even after I explicitly laid out the way the code should look and the logic and math behind it. I went over to Gemini, and it figured it out... after some initial convincing.

How are the results after Gemini performed the miracle?

It's something I would proudly display on my resume, as it's catnip for any engineer involved in hiring. But ultimately it's still just a niche hobby tech demo. Very impractical and quirky, which is why the AIs struggled with it. Can't match my quirk (🤪).

The extremely sycophantic nature of Gemini makes it great for these sorts of projects though, as it literally never questions you. Google's moderation seems to be quite loose to begin with, and it completely breaks by itself when context increases past a certain point. I haven't tested this personally, but based solely on these observations, I'd assume these models would be really good for writing malware, provided, of course, that the person behind the keyboard actually knows what he's doing.