I'm also interested in how to better control how my child uses the Linux computer, particularly how to restrict which programs and sites they use without stifling their creativity and discovery.
"You are a three time Michelin star chef. Make me a salad that will convince me salads are tasty! Do not ask questions, just make the salad. Do not give me the salad's background story, just make the salad and feed it to me."
That's a good quote, but it suggests that unhappy people are those who overthink and have unrealistic expectations, whereas truly happy people have expectations that match their reality. so in the end, maybe smart people are those who are better at setting their expectations compared to others (maybe more ambitious type A folk)
> whereas truly happy people have expectations that match their reality
By your hypothesis people who are poor, at the bottom of society, and told that they have no chance in life are the most happy ones.
Additionally, it imples that a great way to make people happy is to brainwash them all the time that they have no chance in life, and additionally suppress them so that their expectations match their reality.
This whole idea feels deeply wrong and dystopian to me.
Yes, it feels wrong and dystopian but I think there is a hint of truth there? We're all happier when we're brainwashed by mindless feeds on our phones. Then, once we snap out of it, we're supremely unhappy when we realize that what's in our feeds is not our reality.
I started with Claude Code, realized it was too much money for every message, then switched to Gemini CLI, then Qwen. Probably Claude Code is better, but I don't need it since I can solve my problems without it.
I've found the regular Claude Pro subscription quite enough for coding tasks when you anyway have a bunch of other things like code reviews to do in addition to coding, and won't spend the whole day running it.
Yeah I was using openrouter for Claude code and burned through $30 in credits to do things that if I had just used the openrouter chat for it would have been like $1.50, I decided it was better for now to do the extra “secretary work” of manual entry and context management of the chat and pain of attaching files. It was pretty disappointing because at first I had assumed it would not be much different in price at all.
This is an interesting way to look at it because you can kind of quantify the tradeoff in terms of the value of your time. A simple analysis would be something like, if you value your time at $60/hour, then spending an additional $30 in credits becomes a good choice if it saves you more than a half-hour of work.
Try what I've done: use the Claude Code tool but point your ANTHROPIC_URL at a DeepSeek API membership. It's like 1/10th the cost, and about 2/3rds the intelligence.
Also there is a fixed price Claude Code plan for GLM 4.6 from z.ai, I pay for the cheapest ($6/mo) as an alternate/fallback for Claude Code and Codex. I've been surprised by how similar in capabilities all three of them are, definitely not seeing a big CLI agent moat...
GLM is maybe slightly weaker on average but on the other hand it's also solved problems where both CC and Codex got stuck in endless failure loops so for the price it's nice to have in my back pocket. I also see some tool use failures sometimes that it always works around which I'm guessing are due to slight differences with Claude.
Gemini and it's tooling is absolute shit. The LLM itself is barely usable and needs so much supervision you might as well do the work yourself. Then couple that with an awful cli and vscode interface and you'll find that it's just a complete waste of time.
Compared to the anthropic offering is night and day. Claude gets on with the job and makes me way more productive.
It's probably a mix of what you're working on and how you're using the tool. If you can't get it done for free or cheaply, it makes sense to pay. I first design the architecture in my mind, then use Grok 4 fast (free) for single-shot generation of main files. This forces me to think first, and read the generated code to double-check. Then, the CLI is mostly for editing, clerical work, testing, etc. That said, I do try to avoid coding altogether if the CLI + MCP servers + MD files can solve the problem.
Which model were you using? In my experience Gemini 2.5 Pro is just as good as Claude Sonnet 4 and 4.5. It's literally what I use as a fallback to wrap something up if I hit the 5 hour limit on Claude and want to just push past some incomplete work.
I'm just going to throw this out there. I get good results from a truly trash model like gpt-oss-20b (quantized at 4bits). The reason I can literally use this model is because I know my shit and have spent time learning how much instruction each model I use needs.
Would be curious what you're actually having issues with if you're willing to share.
I share the same opinion on Gemini cli. Other than for simplest tasks it is just not usable, it gets stuck in loops, ignores instructions, fails to edit files. Plus it just has a plenty of bugs in the cli that you occasionally hit.
I wish I could use it rather than pay an extra subscription for Claude Code, but it is just in a different league (at least as recently as couple of weeks ago)
Which model are you using though? When I run out of Gemini 2.5 Pro and it falls back to the Flash model, the Flash model is absolute trash for sure. I have to prompt it like I do local models. Gemini 2.5 Pro has shown me good results though. Nothing like "ignores instructions" has really occurred for me with the Pro model.
That's weird. I can prompt 2.5 Pro and Claude Sonnet 4.5 about the same for most typescript problems and they end up doing about the same. I get different results with Terraform though, I think Gemini 2.5 Pro does better on some Google Cloud stuff, but only on the specifics.
Is just strange to me that my experience seems to be a polar opposite of yours.
I don't know. The last problem I tried was a complex one -- migration of some scientific code from CPU to GPU. Gemini was useless there, but Claude proposed realistic solutions and was able to explore and test those.
The type of stuff I tend to do is much more complex than a simple website. I really can't rely on AI as heavily for stuff that I really enjoy tinkering with. There's just not enough data for them to train on to truly solve distributed system problems.
Most surgeons don't use anything they learn in medical school or residency either. It's usually their last 2 - 4 years (depending on whether they did a fellowship) that is useful in their day to day job. E.g. an eye surgeon doesn't need to know how to read an ECG
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