It's so unfortunate they don't let you use the subscription with other harnesses anymore - since even if I used OpenCode they'd still get a bunch of useful data from the API calls, meanwhile I could stretch their tier limits way further.
Your subscription is not subsidised, it is just closer to the actual cost of the model…
200$/month is a lot of money on Luna/DS4 flash, like really a lot and the results are much better than clowning on bloated CC.
It's absurd how you have more and more organizations encoding their processes on LLMs and "engineers" (charlatan coders) don't even bother optimizing the tool they use most.
I won't argue with the cost effectiveness, but the results are very much not better. Opus and Fable are in a different league than DS4 Flash. Even GPT Terra, which I really like overall, sometimes gets stuck in weird loops and starts to do stupid stuff once its context window fills up. Whereas I can more or less trust the big models to just Do The Thing™ on the first try.
With that said, you get way more value out of a GPT subscription than you do from Claude, partly because of the ability to use more efficient harnesses.
I’m not sure if they let you skip the cache write cost on the first turn. That would imply cross-user caching infrastructure or special casing the default system prompt to give you a discount. Maybe? Away from the computer but you could try a “hello” in a fresh session and see what was billed.
for coding agents 'shell' is often all you need (just make sure the environment has the necessary tools)