Only because someone else is paying the bills. I use Claude Opus at work because my employer pays for the tokens and encourages me to do it.
At home, I use DeepSeek Flash. It's not as good, but it's maybe 0.7 quality for 0.001 cost.
GPT refused to do so (citing that it's illegal even though I own the games). Deepseek did a wonderful job for 7 cents.
At work I use Opus because, why not? But I could easily switch to a less capable model if needed.
In the. US at least it is actually illegal to download ISOs/roms of games, even if you own a physical copy. It's a stupid law and as a downloader (as opposed to the people hosting the files) your chances of getting into any kind of actual legal trouble are effectively 0, but it is still against the law.
That does raise an interesting question, what kind of laws should LLMs (attempt to) follow? It's easy enough to spoof the country in the system prompt. I wonder how ChatGPT would respond if I told it I was located in a developing country without any piracy laws.
BTW, I also use DeepSeek v4 Flash very frequently: fast and so cheap it is almost free.
The best answer would be to pull session stats from your harness and compare that against the limits. I think Anthropic publishes the limits of each plan.
If you’re using a pretty stock harness and not doing crazy multi-agent stuff with it, you’re probably fine.
My girlfriend built a whole (but simple) React app with it and only hit the limits of the $20 plan once. In fairness, she was trying to get it to clean up a bunch of 800ish line React files at once with a vague “make it look nice” prompt that she ran a few times. I think it was just churning for like half an hour straight before she burned all her credits.
It’s probably enough if you’re not on a fully agentic development strategy, it’s plenty to have it write tests and do comments and stuff, just not enough to continually have it doing giant refactoring passes.
Cursor's $20 a month plan provides a reasonable amount of Opus tokens as well.
The weights I've tried is the "DeepSeek-V4-Flash-IQ2XXS-w2Q2K-AProjQ8-SExpQ8-OutQ8-chat-v2-imatrix" ones which fits just about within 96GB VRAM. With some tuning, I've managed to get it to get up to ~60 t/s, I'm sure there is other things to do there too :)
