I was wondering how anyone could reach the token limit of a 200$/month Claude subscription. I never did on a 20$ one, and I'm parallelizing Claude to the absolute limit of what I can reasonably keep in mind. And I do that day and night, on week-end too with open-source. Now I'm absolutely convinced that it's by doing crap architectures and design that require 200k token of context before adding a single checkbox. If you apply good design principle and course correct the AI in real time before it commits to really stupid way to fix things (i.e. you don't ask it or let it do things that would make zero sense if you had to do it yourself), then the vibe coding cost way less and is way faster and easier to reason about.

I’m hardly a Luddite and you’re basically making my point.

You’re deliberately constraining the output so changes stay small, human-reviewable and reversible. That’s good engineering culture.

It isn’t all or nothing. I use AI heavily but that doesn’t mean I have to pretend there aren’t serious problems with how it’s being used.