There is no doubt that when used in the right way an AI coding assistant can be very helpful, but using it in the right way does not result in the fantastic productivity-increasing factors claimed by some. TFA describes a way of using AI that seems right and it also describes the temptations of using AI wrong, which must be resisted.
More important is whether the productivity improvement is worth a subscription price. Nothing that I have seen until now convinces me about this.
On the other hand, I believe that running locally a good open-weights coding assistant, so that you do not have to worry about token price or about exceeding subscription limits in a critical moment, is very worthwhile.
Unfortunately, thieves like Altman have ensured that running locally has become much more difficult than last year, due to the huge increases in the prices of DRAM and of SSDs. In January I have been forced to replace an old mini-PC, but I was forced to put in the new mini-PC only 32 GB of DDR5, the same as in the 7-year old replaced mini-PC. If I had made the upgrade a few months earlier, I would have put in it 96 GB, which would have made it much more useful. Fortunately, I also have older computers with 64 GB or 128 GB DRAM, where bigger LLMs may be run.
This is one thing I also wonder about. If it's a really good programming helper, making 20% of your job 5x faster, then you can compute the value. Say for a $250K SWE this looks like $40k/year roughly. You don't want to hand 100% of that value to the LLM providers or you've just broken even, so then maybe it is worth $200/mo.
For now, there is a lot of unpredictability in the future cost of AI, whenever you do not host it yourself.
If you pay per token, it is extremely hard to predict how many tokens you will need. If you have an apparently fixed subscription, it is very hard to predict whether you will not hit limits in the most inconvenient moment, after which you will have to wait for a day or so for the limits to be reset.
Recently, there have been a lot of stories where the AI providers seem to try to reduce continuously the limits allowed by a subscription. There is also a lot of incertitude about future raises of the subscription prices, as the most important providers appear to use prices below their expenses, for now.
Therefore, while I agree with you that when something provides definite benefits you should be able to assess whether paying for it provides a net gain for you, I do not believe that using an externally-hosted AI coding assistant qualifies for such an assessment, at least not for now.
After I have written the above, that the future cost of externally-hosted AI coding assistants is unpredictable, what I have written was confirmed by an OpenAI press release that the existing Codex users will be migrated during the following weeks towards token-based pricing rates.
Such events will not affect you if you use an open-weights assistant running on your own HW, when you do not have to care about token usage.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/11/google-has-given-anthropic...
They don't care. They want software engineers replaced by any means necessary. They know generative AI isn't a big business, that is why they slowwalk it themselves.
Replacement won't work of course, that is why marketing blog posts are needed.