Its even more maddening for me because my whole team is paying direct API pricing for the privilege of this experience! Just charge me the cost and let me tune this thing, sheesh!

That's why they put the cute animal in your terminal.

I find that GPT 5.4 is okay at it. It does think harder for harder problems and still answers quickly for simpler ones, IME.

Is knowing how hard a problem is, before doing it, solved in humans?

It makes me think of this parallel: often in combinatorial optimization ,estimating if it is hard to find a solution to a problem costs you as much as solving it.

With a small bounded compute budget, you're going to sometimes make mistakes with your router/thinking switch. Same with speculative decoding, branch predictors etc.

Maybe it is an unsolved problem, but either way I am confused why Anthropic is pushing adaptive thinking so hard, making it the only option on their latest models. To combat how unreliable it is, they set thinking effort to "high" by default in the API. In Claude Code, they now set it to "xhigh" by default. The fact that you cannot even inspect the thinking blocks to try and understand its behavior doesn't help. I know they throw around instructions how to enable thinking blocks, or blocks with thinking summaries, or whatever (I am too confused by now, what it is that they allow us to see), but nothing worked for me so far.

[dead]

Me too, but it was obviously wildly unsustainable. I was telling friends at xmas to enjoy all the subsidized and free compute funded by VC dollars while they can because it'll be gone soon.

With the fully-loaded cost of even an entry-level 1st year developer over $100k, coding agents are still a good value if they increase that entry-level dev's net usable output by 10%. Even at >$500/mo it's still cheaper than the health care contribution for that employee. And, as of today, even coding-AI-skeptics agree SoTA coding agents can deliver at least 10% greater productivity on average for an entry-level developer (after some adaptation). If we're talking about Jeff Dean/Sanjay Ghemawat-level coders, then opinions vary wildly.

Even if coding agents didn't burn astronomical amounts of scarce compute, it was always clear the leading companies would stop incinerating capital buying market share and start pushing costs up to capture the majority of the value being delivered. As a recently retired guy, vibe-coding was a fun casual hobby for a few months but now that the VC-funded party is winding down, I'll just move on to the next hobby on the stack. As the costs-to-actual-value double and then double again, it'll be interesting to see how many of the $25/mo and free-tier usage converts to >$2500/yr long-term customers. I suspect some CFO's spreadsheets are over-optimistic regarding conversion/retention ARPU as price-to-value escalates.

so it's also a skinner box

Whoops haha. Surely that can't be how black boxes normally work right?

And now it isn't. Pray they don't alter the deal any further.

its a drug. that is how it works. they ration it before the new stuff. seeing legends of programming shilling it pains me the most. so far there are a few decent non insane public people talking about it :Mitchel Hashimoto, Jeremy Howard, Casei Muratori. hell even DHH drank the coolaid while most of his interviews in the past years was how he went away from AWS and reduced the bill from 3 million to 1millions by basically loosing 9s, resiliency and availability. but it seems he is fine with loosing what makes his business work(programming) to a company that sells Overpowered stack overflow slot machines.

the issue is the return is amorphous and unstructured

there's no contract. you send a bunch of text in (context etc) and it gives you some freeform text out.

> It’s the official communication that sucks. It’s one thing for the product to be a black box if you can trust the company.

A company providing a black box offering is telling you very clearly not to place too much trust in them because it's harder to nail them down when they shift the implementation from under one's feet. It's one of my biggest gripes about frontier models: you have no verifiable way to know how the models you're using change from day to day because they very intentionally do not want you to know that. The black box is a feature for them.