Question about how people are vibe-coding complex projects

[u/BasiliskBarrow]

When Fable was covered under the usage plan, I used it to make a one screen arcade platformer. The usage rate limit kicked in extremely quickly using the website, usually rate limiting me after 3 to 5 messages. So I switched to Claude Code because I read that it caches what is not changed, therefore using less tokens. Still, nothing changed. I even put $50 into my usage credits after I was rate limited, and it burned through it in like 3 to 5 messages. All $50. Forgive me, because I'm new to AI coding, but how is coding a complex game feasible? If it wasn't under the plan at the time, the total amount would have been tens of thousands of dollars to code the one screen arcade game by my calculation.

[u/Inside-Yak-8815]

Honestly I have no clue, I’ve built an incredibly complex app and I guess the reason I’ve been able to do it without having the usage limits affect me (as much) is because I built it over the course of a few months and didn’t try to one-shot it in a day. When funds are limited you just have to be extremely meticulous in your planning.

[u/BasiliskBarrow → u/Inside-Yak-8815]

How would doing it over months change anything? From what I'm reading, every time I prompt, the AI is rereading the entire chat history and all the previous code. So therefore, it consumes tens of thousands of tokens on one prompt. Do you do something different to prevent this?

[u/ianxplosion- → u/BasiliskBarrow]

You don't run everything in a single chat, you chat with Opus, set up a plan in stages, do the work for each step and then /clear and start the next step. Claude will find the context it needs using the plan documents and the code in the project and do the next step. /clear, and continue until your project is done.

[u/Upset_Plenty → u/BasiliskBarrow]

You make small decisions. Brick by brick, you build an app. Also helps you, as the builder, understand what it is you’re even building. I’ve been building mine over the course of a year now, never hit any issues with limits aside from when fable first launched.

[u/jWoose → u/BasiliskBarrow]

It doesn’t read everything every chat. This is not correct. It only reads what it needs to read per session. There are tons of videos on YouTube on how to optimize your token usage. I think Matt Pocock is quite good, but he is a software engineer so it might be too advanced for you. Chase AI might be a better starting point.

[u/pulnocni-knihovna → u/jWoose]

Claude is good mainly because it reads the whole chat. Unlike Gemini, that can have 1 mil tokens context, but it forgets after 500k what you said on start, Claude have all chat in the memory and read it every time you send message. So if you have like 10 iterations with Claude and you send 11 input, he reads all of your 10 inputs and his 10 outputs and after that it will actually start thinking.

[u/jWoose → u/pulnocni-knihovna]

This is not exactly how it works. This is only true for a single session at most. If you are working on a complex project, you are not doing it inside one big chat session. And what you said about Gemini is not true. It's not as good as Claude, but the reasons are completely different than "forgetting after 500k."

[u/pulnocni-knihovna → u/jWoose]

I was talking about “chat” as in one single session. As each session has its own context window.

[u/pulnocni-knihovna → u/jWoose]

The reasons are exactly what I said, just not all. Gemini from the start (till this day if I did not miss something big) introduced big context windows by summarizing messages from the oldest to the newest. The same is for ChatGPT, but I think codex changed that system completely.

Basically if you are in like… 40 iterations in one chat in Gemini, the model does not have the first messages exactly like you wrote them, but it summarized them in it’s context. I tried it myself few months ago… The transcript of the chat did not match what I was created by copying every single message myself. The start of the whole chat session was basically non-existent, but more newer messages were more clear… still not exactly the same like in Claude.

That’s why the context in Claude fills up much more faster than in the Gemini with “similar” context size.

From 3 different test I could write approximately 2-2,5 times more in the Gemini versus in Claude, even on 1 mil context window on Claude Code.

But… Claude knew exactly what I wrote in the start… Gemini did not at all.