2 reasons - there's an advantage now, use it. 2nd the frontier providers, this is the "early cheap days" like when uber was initially cheap to compete vs standard cabs. they want you to become hooked and boy are we hooked.
Having a better model is the only real moat, without that inference is a commodity
The benefits are real and our willingness to pay is real, but the valuations only support one and right now even the free cheap models might win. Thusly the collapse could still happen.
They’re all stuck in a cycle of spending huge amounts of money on training just to stand still (in business terms).
In the long run, it can’t continue because it doesn’t make any sense
For my company, I'd honestly pay $4-8k/month for Claude if I had to (it would be painful, and I'd try to get cheaper options to work first). I know some enterprise Claude users are paying that much now since they have to pay for API tokens. I am certain it's at least a 2X productivity booster for our work. Compared to the cost of hiring another developer, it's well worth it.
If they stop subsidising Claude Code for the pro/max users, there will be a lot of people priced out of it, especially the casual developer. But I don't see it going away for commercial use, even with a large price increase.
Old coding is done, as a workflow in teams. It’s the top down executive pressure of being non competitive as a company, and the bottom up pressure of human laziness
Show me people handwriting code à la NASA
And I mean we as coders have been trying to do this workflow for a while, I personally would refuse to code without IntelliJ magic complete
For this workflow, there’s no going back. What’s hard to imagine is AI taking over the other workflows we predict it will; Customer service AI sucks ass for me as a customer, et cetera
That enterprise cost you're willing to pay is correlated to how much developers will work for. When driving an agent, almost anyone can do it (almost no skills required).
If devs cost $1k/m, enterprises are not going to be willing to pay $4k/m for Claude.
What I am saying is, there's an equilibrium that will be reached; the price of the human driver and the AI worker will approach each other.
Where they stabilise, I still don't know, but I'd be very surprised if, in any field (not just dev), the human gets paid multiples more than the agent they are driving, as the agents get more capable.
In the same way that only supercomputers used to have multiple processors and caches but it's now standard.