You have to add a couple fields or so to whatever gathers user info at account creation time. Personally I would find that non-trivial because nowadays those are usually GUIs and I haven't done any GUI stuff in ages. People who current write GUI apps for current OSes would have no problem.
Then you need to use that data in a way that lets you provide an API for apps to check the age bracket of the current user.
That part is easy, although some people will no doubt make it way more complicated than it needs to be (probably making it part of systemd or something ridiculous like that).
What I would do is create a file in some standardized location for each age bracket. These files would be protect so that ordinary users cannot open them for reading. When an account is set up, an access control list entry would be added to the appropriate files that allows that user to open the file for reading.
The API for apps to check if the user is in an age range they allow is to simply use the normal file access API to try to open the age bracket files corresponding to the age ranges they are checking for.
I just asked an LLM this exact question; it said "sure, but use cutting fluid, ensure the bit is carbide, slow the router speed down to 10-16k rpm, go slow, and clean off the flutes if they get gummed"
When I sit down and dial in on a serious project at work I easily spend $500-1000+ day of API usage. At home I just hit the limit and give up / cancel my sub.
Wish I could just go all out one weekend a month. I hardly code outside of work but sometimes there’s a project I have an itch for.
What kinds of tasks are you giving to the LLMs? I don’t think I do anything that can rack up costs like that. I can only imagine you’re using lots of instances simultaneously. I’d love to know more and ideally see the deliverables if the code is public, or even just the product.
I recently talked with a guy that’s pretty smart and is building a good product with a clear market. I understood the idea and encouraged him to ship.
Then he showed me what he considers his real work, and went off on a madman’s raving presentation of some supposedly hyper scalable revolutionary encrypted block chain dApp agentic operating system. He was building all of this using lots of agents. And I could totally see him spending $500/day on tokens. But I also couldn’t get him to explain the use case. I couldn’t imagine one myself. I’m by default suspicious of large AI bills. People usually only have a short amount of roadmap that’s well thought out and proven. Building faster means you just hit a new bottleneck in product design.
But I want to learn more and accrue more case studies of AI use in software engineering. Sometimes I hear of some really great software engineering techniques only possible thanks to AI (stuff like running 3 models in parallel optimizing a hot loop, comparing outputs with a rigorous test suite and fuzzing).
We don't spend that much money every day but here's the gist: We have a distributed system that has several components that don't meet the performance requirements of the next uplift we need to do. We need to carefully consider the tradeoffs of things like how to shard a few of the databases, how to rearchitect the ETL flow that comes off the system and is used for analysis. We think of a few approaches and then we get the coding assistants to blast through the end to end development of each approach discovering all the known unknowns and unknown unknowns along the way. Then we can load test each method, profile them, analyze them manually and with the LLM. Then we can pick the solution and take another shot at implementing it with the coding agent, but more carefully and with more oversight with all the things we learned.
We don't hit those high numbers every day. An average day is $50-100 max.
As far as home projects. Something like write a GUI desktop or phone application from scratch. The LLM has to reference a lot of code and API docs to figure out what to do and spends a lot of time thinking while debugging. It gets expensive :/
I know some people still underestimate these tools, but this is pretty adjacent to telling someone with a 20mile commute to just walk everyday instead.
I have at least walked 20 miles before in my life. I've never written anything with as much breadth in 20 years of coding until I started using these tools. I also have quite a deep backlog from trying.
may open up other opportunities due to people being more mobile. more commerce activity in general. I heavily dislike having to find parking or hiring a non waymo ride.
this prompt is actually in claude cli. it says something like implement simplest solution. dont over abstract. On my phone but I saw an article mention this in the leak analysis.
Yeah that's true. Go seems to be handling the 'fat stdlib' approach pretty well though. I really don't want Python to got the path of Rust where nothing is included.
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