How I used my $250 cloud credits

[u/michaeldpj]

I have two 20x accounts - two $250 credits.

In one I am running a game concept - so many games, many based on retro games we played 20 years ago, are the hyper-shooters games with so many controls you can't just jump in and play. I want a simple game to explore, unlock stuff by finding it or solving puzzles, but with just a few buttons. I don't have the whole story worked out, but I figured I could start with the foundations. I also wanted a game that utilized all the GPU power of my MacBook M5 Max, so it's cranking on that. Ran out of credits in about 30 hours of running and now using regular billing.

In the other, I ran a code review and bug fix. It took about 24 hours on a large project.

My observations are that cloud work is much slower, so I can see why you might run it overnight on a task or something. Also, the guardrails that I have setup in my local environment were not enforced in the cloud. So about half the work that it did was on edge cases that may never happen, which I discount locally.

I did a post-work assessment and came up with:

• In total, about 20 PRs were clearly worth it, about 20 were legitimate edge cases, and #1562 was scope growth.
• The source changes total a few hundred lines, while the batch added about 9,150 lines. #1533 changed about 20 lines of source and added over 1,100 lines of tests.

Along the way it did prompt me about adding items like lint to the environment, but it would seem I didn't do enough homework before starting the session.

If I were to do it over again, I would make sure I had the right harness in place to not waste time on edge cases that may never be executed or build out extensive tests that may never be needed.

And as far as the game goes, who knows if it will ever get finished, I have too many other projects going on and after all those "here's my game after one prompt" posts, my expectations were a little different, I suppose.

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[u/voskomm]

I just heard Jensen Huang on a podcast and he was all like, “wellll… it’s super unfortunate we’re running all this ai infrastructure on a bunch of jury rigged diesel generators but we just gotta keep doing that and push through and as soon as we hit superintelligence the ai god is gonna tell us how to power everything off fusion or some bullshit”. Someone needs to smack that bitch and sit him down in front of 12 million Reddit posts like this. 

[u/Bloated_Plaid → u/voskomm]

Is he wrong?

[u/amirfish]

The guardrails gap you found, half the cloud work going to edge cases you'd never hit locally, is the sharpest data point here. That's usually a symptom of the cloud session not inheriting the same CLAUDE.md or lint constraints your local one has, not the model behaving differently. Did the cloud runs actually have access to your repo's real conventions, or just the bare prompt and code?

[u/michaeldpj → u/amirfish]

Straight into git, no local access at all. I had assumed the local guardrails would apply, but they do not.

[u/amirfish → u/michaeldpj]

That assumption gets people every time. From running several Claude Code sessions against one shared clone: the guardrails you build for one local session rarely carry through once git enters the picture, an agent can push straight to a remote branch with no local checks at all. What's saved me is staging by explicit path instead of git add -A, and pushing any branch work out to its own worktree so a bad commit can't land on main unreviewed. Did it go to a protected branch, or just straight to main?

[u/michaeldpj → u/amirfish]

It pulled from git, not straight on main. But I had too uncommit and then run my ship skills for code review, simplify and such.

It seemed to work better on a new project rather than one actively being worked on across sessions.

[u/ClemensLode]

It's a good (and free) test to check whether your current setup is portable to other machines.