Hey folks, I am a part time user for personal coding projects(senior swe), for occasional but intense usage would you recommend a monthly subscription or api key usage? I believe all tooling like claude code or editors would work with both kinds? Correct me if I am wrong.

Hi all,

Recently I've been getting into Claude API since I don't make the most out of subscriptions, and so having not set-up my own UI to use it at, I've been messing around with Anthropic's provided console.

I've noticed it seems to have quite a few features which seem to cater towards making the absolute most out of your prompts, stuff like:

• Generate a prompt button ; you describe your task and it writes a prompt to use.

• Marking variables ; by marking variables like {{variable}}, they become reusable placeholder values.

Further in the work bench, there's:

• Examples ; they claim adding high-quality examples to this section greatly improve performance.

• Tools ; let's you implement code functions it can call when needed.

• Message pair ; let's you add an assistant and user message pair to the conversation.

Now I know most people using the API in things like LibreChat etc likely also have some of these features, but regarding stuff like the examples or prompt generation - are these good to use? Or are we still better off using a super-detailed prompt to generate further prompts for tasks?

In other words does the Console have any unique value, or are we still far better off using some of the popular open source UI's that are available?

Thanks.

Ive searched this subreddit for answers and I’ve also asked Google, Copilot, and free Claude. I’m sure the answers are out there, so please forgive me that I can’t find them.

Hence I ask for your help. What’s the easiest way for a programming noob to use the Claude API? All I want initially is to ask questions via the API, similar to the subscription version. I want to use the API vs subscription because maybe it’ll be cheaper and I also just want experience with it.

I signed up for an account and have purchased API tokens. I have an API key. But I’m struggling finding concise directions on how to use it.

I’m familiar with the $20/month subscription and want to become familiar with the API as well.