I guarantee you that price will double by 2027. Then it’ll be a new car payment!
I’m really not saying this to be snarky, I’m saying this to point out that we’re really already in the enshittification phase before the rapid growth phase has even ended. You’re paying $200 and acting like that’s a cheap SaaS product for an individual.
I pay less for Autocad products!
This whole product release is about maximizing your bill, not maximizing your productivity.
I don’t need agents to talk to each other. I need one agent to do the job right.
If I pay $3k/month to a developer and a $200/month tool makes them 10% more productive I will pay it without thinking.
If you’re not able to get US$thousands out of these models right now either your expectations are too high or your usage is too low, but as a small business owner and part/most-time SWE, the pricing is a rounding error on value delivered.
But as an individual with no profit motive, no way.
I use these products at work, but not as much personally because of the bill. And even if I decided I wanted to pursue a for profit side project I’d have to validate it’s viability before even considering a 200$ monthly subscription
- $20 for Claude Pro (Claude Code) - $20 for ChatGPT Plus (Codex) - Amp Free Plan (with ads and you get about $10 of daily value)
So you get to use 3 of the top coding agents for $40 month.
1. 1-3 LLM vendors are substantially higher quality than other vendors and none of those are open source. This is an oligarchy and the scenario you described will play out.
2. >3 LLM vendors are all high quality and suitable for the tasks. At least one of these is open source. This is the "commodity" scenario, and we'll end up paying roughly the cost of inference. This still might be hundreds per month, though.
3. Somewhere in between. We've got >3 vendors, but 1-3 of them are somewhat better than the others, so the leaders can charge more. But not as much more than they can in scenario #1.
Are you spending more than $150k per year on AI?
(Also, you're talking about the cost of your Cursor subscription, when the article is about Claude Code. Maybe try Claude Max instead?)
But it continually, wildly performs slower and falls short every time I’ve tried.
A. You're working on some really deep thing that only world-class expects can do, like optimizing graphics engines for AAA games.
B. You're using a language that isn't in the top ~10 most popular in AI models' training sets.
C. You have an opportunity to improve your ability to use the tools effectively.
How many hours have you spent using Claude Code?
Claude would be worse than an expert at this, but this is a benchmarkable task. Claude can do experiments a lot quicker than a human can. The hard part would be ensure that the results aren't just gaming your benchmark.
It's insulting that criticism is often met with superficial excuses and insinuation that the user lacks the required skills.
GP said 'falls short every time I’ve tried'. Note the word 'every'.
I feel like comparison just to a junior developer is also becoming a fairly outdated comparison. Yes, it is worse in some ways, but also VASTLY superior in others.