FWIW neither hoard nor ration imply anything about permanence of the thing to me. Whether you were rationed bread or you hoarded bread, the bread isn't going to be usable forever. At the same time whether you were rationed sugar or hoarded sugar, the sugar isn't going to expire (with good storage).

Rationed/hoarded do imply, to me, something different about how the quantity came to be though. Rationed being given or setting aside a fixed amount, hoarded being that you stockpiled/amassed it. Saying "you hoarded your rations" (whether they will expire) does feel more on the money than "you ration your rations" from that perspective.

I hope this doesn't come off too "well aktually", I've just been thinking about how I still realize different meanings/origins of common words later in life and the odd things that trigger me to think about it differently for the first time. A recent one for me was that "whoever" has the (fairly obvious) etymology of who+ever https://www.etymonline.com/word/whoever vs something like balloon, which has a comparatively more complex history https://www.etymonline.com/word/balloon

Rationing implies an ability to measure: this amount per day. But measuring the remaining amount is exactly what Claude Code API does not provide.

So, back to hoarding.

Rationing is precisely what we want to do: I have x usage this week; let me determine precisely how much I can use without going over. Hoarding implies a less reasoned path of “I never know when I might run out so I must use as little as possible, save as much as I can.” One can hoard gasoline but it still expires past a point.

Which is a huge problem, because you literally have no idea what you're paying for.

One day a few of hours of prompting is fine, another you'll hit your weekly limit and you're out for seven days.

While still paying your subscription.

I can't think of any other product or service which operates on this basis - where you're charged a set fee, but the access you get varies from hour to hour entirely at the provider's whim. And if you hit a limit which is a moving target you can't even check you're locked out of the service.

It's ridiculous. Begging for a law suit, tbh.

One thing that has worked for me when I have a long list of requirements / standards I want an LLM agent to stick to while executing a series of 5 instructions is to add extra steps at the end of the instructions like "6. check if any of the code standards are not met - if not, fix them and return to step 5" / "7. verify that no forbidden patterns from <list of things like no-op unit tests, n+1 query patterns, etc> exist in added code - if you find any, fix them and return to step 5" etc.

Often they're better at recognizing failures to stick to the rules and fixing the problems than they are at consistently following the rules in a single shot.

This does mean that often having an LLM agents so a thing works but is slower than just doing it myself. Still, I can sometimes kick off a workflow before joining a meeting, so maybe the hours I've spent playing with these tools will eventually pay for themselves in improved future productivity.

There are things it’s great at and things it deceives you with. In many things I needed it to check something for me I knew was a problem, o3 kept insisting it were possible due to reasons a,b,c, and thankfully gave me links. I knew it used to be a problem so surprised I followed the links only to read black on white it still wasn’t. So I explained to o3 that it’s wrong. Two messages later we were back at square one. One week later it didn’t update its knowledge. Months later it’s still the same.

But at things I have no idea about like medicine it feels very convincing. Am I in hazard?

People don’t understand Dunning-Kruger. People are prone to biases and fallacies. Likely all LLMs are inept at objectivity.

My instructions to LLMs are always strictness, no false claims, Bayesian likelihoods on every claim. Some modes ignore the instructions voluntarily, while others stick strictly to them. In the end it doesn’t matter when they insist on 99% confidence on refuted fantasies.

> Reality is probably that there’s a backlog item to implement a view, but it’s hard to prioritize over core features.

It's even harder to prioritize when the feature you pay to develop probably costs you money.

I hear OpenAI and Anthropic are making tools that are supposedly pretty good at helping with creating a view from a backlog.

Back to the conspiracy ^^

The dark pattern isn't the payment pattern, that's fine. The dark pattern is hiding how much you're using, thereby tricking the human lizard brain into irrationally fearing they are running out.

The human brain is stupid and remarkably exploitable. Just a teensy little bit of information hiding can illicit strange and self-destructive behavior from people.

You aren't cut off until you're cut off, then it's over completely. That's scary, because there's no recourse. So people are going to try to avoid that as much as possible. Since they don't know how much they're using, they're naturally going to err on the side of caution - paying for more than they need.

> prevent people from gaming the system

If I sit down for dinner at an all-you-can-eat buffet, I get to decide how much I’m having for dinner. I don’t mind if they don’t let me take leftovers, as it is already understood that they mean as much as I can eat in one sitting.

If they don’t want folks to take advantage of an advertised offer, then they should change their sales pitch. It’s explicitly not gaming any system to use what you’re paying for in full. That’s your right and privilege as that’s the bill of goods you bought and were sold.

Besides the click mazes to unsubscribe I’m struggling to think of a darker pattern than having usage limits but not showing usage.

The dark pattern isn’t the usage limit. It’s the lack of information about current and remaining usage.

The dark pattern is not telling users how much they've used so they can't plan or ration.

Yes it is, in the way of "I'm gonna work on X thing that is now much easier thanks to chatGPT" and then never work on it due lack of time or motivation or something else.

What makes you think it’s any different?

Sorry, yes, plus, not pro.