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Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent

155 points by GavinAnderegg 1y ago

cmrdporcupine 1y ago
I get a lot of value out of Claude Max at $100 USD/month. I use it almost exclusively for my personal open source projects. For work, I'm more cautious. I worry, with an article like this floating around, and with this as the competition, and with the economics of all this stuff generally... major price increases are on the horizon. Businesses (some) can afford this, after all it's still just a portion of the costs of a SWE salary (tho $1000/m is getting up there). But open source developers cannot. I worry about this trend, and when the other shoe will drop on Anthropic's products, at least.
- mring33621 1y ago
  Those market forces will push the thriftier devs to find better ways to use the lesser models. And they will probably share their improvements! I'm very bullish on the future of smaller, locally-run models, myself.
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    I have not invested time on locally-run, I'm curious if they could even get close to approaching the value of Sonnet4 or Opus. That said, I suspect a lot of the value in Claude Code is hand-rolled fined-tuned heuristics built into the tool itself, not coming from the LLM. It does a lot of management of TODO lists, backtracking through failed paths, etc which look more like old-school symbolic AI than something the LLM is doing on its own. Replicating that will also be required.
- csomar 1y ago
  If it weren't for the Chinese, the prices would have been x10.
- barrkel 1y ago
  Where do you see the major price increases coming from? The underlying inference is not super expensive. All the tricks they're pulling to make it smarter certainly multiply the price, but the price being charged almost certainly covers the cost. Basic inference on tuned base models is extremely cheap. But certainly it looks like Anthropic > OpenAI > Google in terms of inference cost structure. Prices will only come up if there's a profit opportunity; if one of the vendors has a clear edge and gains substantial pricing power. I don't think that's clear at this point. This article is already equivocating between o3 and Opus.
- stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y ago
  Just a matter of time before AI coding becomes commodity and prices drop. 2027
lvl155 1y ago
Is $200/month a lot of money when you can multiply your productivity? It depends but the most valuable currency in life is time. For some, spending thousands a month would be worth it.
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  As I said elsewhere... $200/month etc is potentially not a lot for an employer to pay (though I've worked for some recently who balk at just stocking a snacks tray or drink fridge...). But $200/month is unbearable for open source / free software developers.
  - morkalork 1y ago
    It's wild when a company has another department and will shell out $200/month per-head for some amalgamation of Salesforce and other SaaS tools for customer service agents.
    - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
      I suspect there's some accounting magic where salaries and software licenses are in one box and "Diet Coke in the fridge" is in another, and the latter is an unbearable cost but the former "OK" But yeah, doesn't explain non-payment for AI tools. Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay for it.
      - dontlikeyoueith 1y ago
        > Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay for it. That seems like the worst of all worlds from their perspective. By not paying for it they introduce a massive security concern.
    - jermaustin1 1y ago
      At a previous job, my department was getting slashed because marketing was moving over to using Salesforce instead of custom software written in-house. Everything was going swimmingly, until the integration vendor for Salesforce just kept billing, and billing and billing. Last I checked no one is still there who was there originally, except the vendor. And the vendor was charging around $90k/mo for integration services and custom development in 2017 when my team was let go. My team was around $10k/mo including rent for our cubicles. That was another weird practice I've never seen elsewhere, to pay rent, we had to charge the other departments for our services. They turned IT and infrastructure into a business, and expected it to turn a profit, which pissed off all the departments who had to start paying for their projects, so they started outsourcing all development work to vendors, killing our income stream, which required multiple rounds of layoffs until only management was left.
rogerkirkness 1y ago
Early stage founder here. You have no idea how worth it $200/month is as a multiple on what compensation is required to fund good engineers. Absolutely the highest ROI thing I have done in the life of the company so far.
- lvl155 1y ago
  At this point, question is when does Amazon tell Anthropic to stop because it’s gotta be running up a huge bill. I don’t think they can continue offering the $200 plan for too long even with Amazon’s deep pocket.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Inference is cheap to run though, and how many people do you think are getting their $200 worth of it?
    - anonzzzies 1y ago
      I don't know, I have to figure out another way to count money I guess, but that $200 gives me a lot of worth, far more than 200. I guess if you like sleeping and do other stuff than drive Claude Code all the time, you might have a different feeling. For us it works well.
      - fragmede 1y ago
        My question wasn't if the $200 was worth it to the buyer. Renting an H100 for a month is gonna cost around $1000 ($1.33+/hr). Pretend the use isn't bursty (but really it is). If you could get 6 people on one, the company is making money selling inference.
        lvl155 1y ago
        Let me know when you can run Opus on H100.
bicepjai 1y ago
I can see how pricing at 100 to 200$ per month per employee could make sense for companies, it’s a clear value proposition at that scale. But for personal projects and open source work, it feels out of reach. I’d really like to see more accessible pricing tiers for individuals and hobbyists. Pay per token models don’t work for me either; earlier this year, I racked up almost $1,000 in a month just experimenting with personal projects, and that experience has made me wary of using these tools since. Sources
- dist-epoch 1y ago
  Github Copilot has unlimited GPT-4.1 for $10/month.
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    is GPT-4.1 decent for coding?
  - adhamsalama 1y ago
    And you can use it as an API, so you can plug it as an OpenAI compatible LLM provider into any 3rd party tool that uses AI, for free. That's the only reason I subscribed to GitHub Copilot. Currently using it for Aider.
    - ianandrich 1y ago
      Say more. Is the API access unlimited? What models are available?
      - adhamsalama 1y ago
        It's unlimited for the models that have unlimited use in GitHub Copilot, gpt-4.1.
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  I’ve seen some people describe getting pretty good value out of the Claude $20 plan with Claude Code?
feintruled 1y ago
Interesting. Though it seems they are themselves building Agentic AI tooling. It's vibe coding all the way down - when's something real going to pop out the bottom?
- bunjeejumpn 1y ago
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- z3c0 1y ago
  An LLM salesman assuring us that $1000/mo is a reasonable cost for LLMs feels a bit like a conflict of interests, especially when the article doesn't go into much detail about the code quality. If anything, their assertion that one should stick to boring tech and "have empathy for the model" just reaffirms that anybody doing anything remotely innovative or cutting-edge shouldn't bother too much with coding agents.
butlike 1y ago
I love how paying for prompts stuck. Like, if someone's going to do your homework for you, they should get compensated.
deadbabe 1y ago
I find it kind of boggling that employers spend $200/month to make employees lives easier, for no real gain. That’s right. Productivity does go up, but most of these employees aren’t really contributing directly to revenue. There is no code to dollar pipeline. Finishing work faster means some roadmap items move quicker, but they just move quicker toward true bottlenecks that can’t really be resolved quickly with AI. So the engineers sit around doing nothing for longer periods of time waiting to be unblocked. Deadlines aren’t being estimated tighter, they are still as long as ever. Enjoy this time while it lasts. Someday employers might realize they need to hire less and just cram more work into individual engineers schedules, because AI should supposedly make work much easier.
- teiferer 1y ago
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- jajko 1y ago
  Coding an actual solution is what, 5-10% of the overall project time? I dont talk about some SV megacorps where better code can directly affect slightly revenue or valuation and thus more time is spend coding and debugging, I talk about basically all other businesses that somehow need developers. Even if I would be 10x faster project managers would barely notice that. And I would lose a lot of creative fun that good coding tends to bring. Also debugging, 0 help there its all on you and your mind and experience. Llms are so far banned in my banking megacorp and I aint complaining.
- jayd16 1y ago
  There's been pretty widespread layoffs in tech for a few years now.
- francisofascii 1y ago
  > Someday employers might realize they need to hire less and just cram more work into individual engineers schedules We are already past that point. The high water mark for Devs was ironically in late 2020 during Covid, before RTO when we were in high demand.
tabs_or_spaces 1y ago
Since this is a business problem. * It's not clear on how much revenue or new customers is generated by using a coding agent * It's not clear on how things are going on production. There's only talks about development in the article I feel ai coding agents will give you the edge. Just this article doesn't talk about revenue or PnL side of things, just perceived costs saved from not employing an engineer.
- v5v3 1y ago
  Yes. A company needs measurable ROI and isn't going to spend $200 a month per seat on Claude. It will instead sign a deal with Microsoft for ai that is 'good enough' and limit expensive ai to some. Or being in the big consultancys as usual to do the projects.
suninsight 1y ago
So what we do at NonBioS.ai is to use a cheaper model to do routine tasks, but switch to a higher thinking model seamlessly if the agent get stuck. Its most cost efficient, and we take that switching cost away from the engineer. But broadly agree to the argument of the post - just spending more might still be worth it.
hoistbypetard 1y ago
> literally changing failing tests into skipped tests to resolve “the tests are failing.” Wow. It really is like a ridiculous, over-confident, *very* junior developer.
throwaway984393 1y ago
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jasonthorsness 1y ago
I really hope we can avoid metered stuff for the long-term. One of the best aspects of software development is the low capital barrier to entry, and the cost of the AI tools right now is threatening that. I'm fortunate in that my own use of the AI tools I'm personally paying for is squished into my off-time on nights and weekends, so I get buy with a $20/month Claude subscription :).
- SomewhatLikely 1y ago
  It's pretty damn capital intensive to be a productive farmer today. That said, AI will likely, hopefully, get cheaper over time.
quonn 1y ago
Charging $200/month is economically only possible if there is not a true market for LLMs or some sort of monopoly power. Currently there is no evidence that this will be the case. There are already multiple competitors and the barrier to entry is relatively low (compared to e.g. the car industry or other manufacturing industries), there are no network effects (like for social networks) and no need to get the product 100% right (like compatibility to Photoshop or Office) and the prices for training will drop further. Furthermore $200 is not free (like Google). Can anyone name one single widely-used digital product that does _not_ have to be precisely correct/compatible/identical to The Original and that everyone _does_ pay $200/month for? Therefore, should prices that users pay get anywhere even close to that number, there will naturally be opportunities for competitors to bring prices down to a reasonable level.
- chis 1y ago
  I think you forgot to consider the cost of providing the inference.
  - quonn 1y ago
    Well, that could be an additional problem. My point was not that AI will necessarily be cheaper to run than $200, but that there is not much profit to be made. Of course the cost of inference will form a lower bound on the price as well.
- lvl155 1y ago
  Barrier to entry is actually very very high. Just because we have “open source” models doesn’t mean anyone can enter. And the gap is widening now. I see Anthropic/OpenAI as clear leaders. Opus 4 and its derivative products are irreplaceable for coders since Spring 2025. Once you figure it out and have your revelation, it will be impossible to go back. This is an iPhone moment right now and the network effect will be incredible.
  - mathiaspoint 1y ago
    It's all text and it's all your text. There's zero network effect.
jbentley1 1y ago
My Claude Code usage would have been $24k last month if I didn't have a max plan, at least according to Claude-Monitor. I've been using a tool I developed (https://github.com/stravu/crystal https://github.com/stravu/crystal) to run several sessions in parallel. Sometimes I will run the same prompt multiple times and pick the winner, or sometimes I'll be working on multiple features at once, reviewing and testing one while waiting on the others. Basically, with the right tooling you can burn tokens incredibly fast while still receiving a ton of value from them.
- unshavedyak 1y ago
  Max $100 or $200? I'm on $100 and i'm shocked how much usage i get out of Sonnet, while Opus feels like no usage at all. I barely even bother with Opus since most things i want to do just runout super quick.
  - borgel 1y ago
    Interesting, I'm fairly new to using these tools and am starting with Claude Code but at the $20 level. Do you have any advice for when I would benefit from stepping up to $100? I'm not sure what gets better (besides higher usage limits).
    - vlade11115 1y ago
      I recently switched from Pro to $100 Max, and the only difference I've found so far is higher usage limits. Antropic tends to give shiny new features to Max users first, but as of now, there is nothing Max-only. For me, it's a good deal nonetheless, as even $100 Max limits are huge. While on Pro, I hit the limits each day that I used Claude Code. Now I rarely see the warning, but I never actually hit the limit.
    - unshavedyak 1y ago
      No clue as i've not used Claude Code on Pro to get an idea of usage limits. But, if you get value out of Claude Code and ever run into limits, Max is quite generous for Sonnet imo. I have zero concern about Sonnet usage atm, so it's definitely valuable there. Usage for Opus is my only "complaint", but i've used it so little i don't even know if it's that much better than Sonnet. As it is, even with more generous Opus limits i'd probably want a more advanced Claude Code behavior - where it uses Opus to plan and orchestrate, and Sonnet would do the grunt work for cheaper tokens. But i'm not aware of that as a feature atm. Regardless, i'm quite pleased with Claude Code on $100 Max. If it was a bit smarter i might even upgrade to $200, but atm it's too dumb to give it more autonomy and that's what i'd need for $200. Opus might be good enough there, but $100 Opus limits are so low i've not even gotten enough experience with it to know if it's good enough for $200
nickjj 1y ago
Serious question, how do you justify paying for any of this without feeling like it's a waste? I occasionally use ChatGPT (free version without logging in) and the amount of times it's really wrong is very high. Often times it takes a lot of prompting and feeding it information from third party sources for it to realize it has incorrect information and then it corrects itself. All of these prompts would be using money on a paid plan right? I also used Cursor (free trial on their paid plan) for a bit and I didn't find much of a difference. I would say whatever back-end it was using was possibly worse. The code it wrote was busted and over engineered. I want to like AI and in some cases it helps gain insight on something but I feel like literally 90% of my time is it prodiving me information that straight up doesn't work and eventually it might work but to get there is a lot of time and effort.
- benbayard 1y ago
  I'd try out cursor with either o3 or Claude 4 Opus. The free version of ChatGPT and Claude in Cursor are much better. That's also what this article claims and is true in my experience.
- chis 1y ago
  I can't believe people are still writing comments like this lol how can it be
  - zzzeek 1y ago
    I think it's a serious question because something really big is being missed here. There seem to be very different types of developers out there and/or working on very different kinds of codebases. Hypothetically, maybe you have devs or specific contexts where the dev can just write the code really fast where having to explain it to a bot is more time consuming, vs. devs /contexts where lots of googling and guessing goes on and it's easier to get the AI to just show you how to do it. I'm actually employer mandated to continue to try/use AI bots / agents to help with coding tasks. I'm sort of getting them to help me but I'm still really not being blown away and still tending to prefer not to bother with them with things I'm frequently iterating on, they are more useful when I have to learn some totally new platform/API. Why is that? do we think there's something wrong with me?
chis 1y ago
Has anyone else done this and felt the same? Every now and then I try to reevaluate all the models. So far it still feels like Claude is in the lead just because it will predictably do what I want when given a mid-sized problem. Meanwhile o3 will sometimes one-shot a masterpiece, sometimes go down the complete wrong path. This might also just be a feature of the change in problem size - perhaps the larger problems that necessitate o3 are also too open-ended and would require much more planning up front. But at that point it's actually more natural to just iterate with sonnet and stay in the driver's seat a bit. Plus sonnet runs 5x faster.
mococa 1y ago
I just pay $20/month on ChatGPT and spend the entire day coding with its help, no need to pay for tokens, no need to integrate it on your IDE.
iamleppert 1y ago
"Now we don't need to hire a founding engineer! Yippee!" I wonder all these people who are building companies that are built on prompts (not even a person) from other companies. The minute there is a rug pull (and there WILL be one), what are you going to do? You'll be in even worse shape because in this case there won't be someone who can help you figure out your next move, there won't be an old team, there will just be NO team. Is this the future?
- ARandumGuy 1y ago
  Any cost/benefit analysis of whether to use AI has to factor in the fact that AI companies aren't even close to making a profit, and are primarily funded by investment money. At some point, either the cost to operate these AI models needs to go down, or the prices will go up. And from my perspective, the latter seems a lot more likely.
  - v5v3 1y ago
    They are not making money as they are all competing to push the models further and this R&D spending on salaries and cloud/hardware costs. Unless models get better people are not going to pay more.
  - immibis 1y ago
    Not really. If they're running at a loss, their loss is your gain. Business is much more short-term than developers imagine it to be for some reason. You don't have to always use an infinitely sustainable strategy - you can change strategies once the more profitable unsustainable strategy stops sustaining.
- hluska 1y ago
  It get even darker - I was around in the 1990s and a lot of people who ran head on into that generation’s problems used those lessons to build huge startups in the 2000s. If we have outsourced a lot of learning, what do we do when we fail? Or how we compound on success?
- xianshou 1y ago
  Rug pulls from foundation labs are one thing, and I agree with the dangers of relying on future breakthroughs, but the open-source state of the art is already pretty amazing. Given the broad availability of open-weight models within under 6 months of SotA (DeepSeek, Qwen, previously Llama) and strong open-source tooling such as Roo and Codex, why would you expect AI-driven engineering to regress to a worse state than what we have today? If every AI company vanished tomorrow, we'd still have powerful automation and years of efficiency gains left from consolidation of tools and standards, all runnable on a single MacBook.
v5v3 1y ago
No need to use the most expensive models for every query? Use it for the ones the cheaper models don't do well.
- logifail 1y ago
  Q: Can you tell in advance whether your query is one that's worth paying more for a better answer?
  - v5v3 1y ago
    Most programmers are not asking ai to re-write the whole app or convert C to Rust. You wouldn't gain anything from asking the most expensive model to adjust some css.
georgeecollins 1y ago
I am blown away that you can get a founding engineer for $10k / month. I guess that is not counting stock options, in which case it makes sense. But I think if you include options the opportunity cost is much higher. IMO great engineers are worth a lot, no shade.
andrewstuart 1y ago
I must be holding OpenAI wrong. Everyone time I try it I find it to be useless compared to Claude or Gemini.
mathiaspoint 1y ago
I can't imagine using something like this and not self hosting. Moving around in your editor costs money? That would completely crush my velocity.
pshirshov 1y ago
> Use boring technology: LLMs do much better with well-documented and well-understood dependencies than obscure, novel, or magical ones. Now is not the time to let Steve load in a Haskell-to-WebAssembly pipeline. If we all go that way, there might be no new haskells and webassemblies in the future.
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  I think there certainly will, it will just mean that only people who can function independently of the AI will have access to them a few years before everyone else.
- emrehan 1y ago
  LLMs can read documentations for a language and use it as well as human engineers. "given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content" Source: Gemini 1.5's paper from March 2024 https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_v1_5_report.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_...
suralind 1y ago
How does GitHub Copilot stack against API access directly from OpenAI, etc.? Is it faster to use API keys than Copilot?
alwillis 1y ago
After reading many of the comments in this thread, I suspect many (not all) issues come from lack of planning and poor prompting. For anything moderately complex, use Claude's plan mode; you get to approve the plan before turning it loose. The planning phase is where you want to use a more sophisticated model or use extended thinking mode. Once you have a great plan, you can use a less sophisticated model to execute it. Even if you're a great programmer, you may suck at prompting. There's an art and a science to prompting; perhaps learn about it? [1] Don't forget; in addition to telling Claude or any other model what to do, you can also tell them what not to do in the CLAUDE.md or equivalent file. [1]: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/extended-thinking-tips https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-...
nico 1y ago
The article reads almost like an ad for o3 and spending a lot of money on LLM APIs In my experience, o4-mini-high is good enough, even just through the chat interface Cursor et al can be more comfy because they have access to the files directly. But when working on a sufficiently large/old/complex code base, the main limitation is the human in the loop and managing context, so things end up evening out. Not only that, but a lot of times it’s just easier/better to manually feed things to ChatGPT/Claude - that way you get to more carefully curate and understand the tasks and the changes I still haven’t seen any convincing real life scenario with larger in-production code bases in which agents are able to autonomously write most of the code If anyone has a video/demo, would love to see it
- cma 1y ago
  It's faster than me at drilling through all the layers of abstractions in large codebases to answer questions about how something is implemented and where the actual calculation or functionality gets done, so with that alone it's much more useful than web chat interfaces.
  - nico 1y ago
    Yes, when initially starting out the task/feature. But also most likely the agent won’t be able to fully do it on its own, and at that point the agent is not necessarily that much more useful than the chat Also, local agents miss context all the time, at which point you need to manually start adding/managing the context anyway And, if you are regularly working on the codebase, at some point you’ll probably have better in-brain initial context than the agent
  - jpc0 1y ago
    I know it is difficult to run software locally in some instances but at this point I feel it is probably quicker to implement tracing or improving the local development flow. A breakpoint in a debugger is much much quicker than feeding the AI all the context needed and then confirming it didn’t miss some flow in some highly abstract code
scrubs 1y ago
The one thing AI hates and doesn't want you to know about AI: Having typing skills >= 120 wpm will triple your efficacy.
tomjuggler 1y ago
I believe this story, but being from a third world country it's not feasible to spend anywhere near that much. Also, as others have mentioned I am wary of "rug-pulls" when it comes to proprietary models and services. That is why I am all-in on Deepseek currently, with Aider (and Roo for MCP integration). When the main api is lagging I just switch to the same model with a different provider on OpenRouter. Theoretically I could host my own if I got that busy. Solo developer doing small jobs but I code every day and $10 per month would be a busy month for me. I still read every line of code though..

155 points by GavinAnderegg 1y ago

I get a lot of value out of Claude Max at $100 USD/month. I use it almost exclusively for my personal open source projects. For work, I'm more cautious. I worry, with an article like this floating around, and with this as the competition, and with the economics of all this stuff generally... major price increases are on the horizon. Businesses (some) can afford this, after all it's still just a portion of the costs of a SWE salary (tho $1000/m is getting up there). But open source developers cannot. I worry about this trend, and when the other shoe will drop on Anthropic's products, at least.

mring33621 1y ago
Those market forces will push the thriftier devs to find better ways to use the lesser models. And they will probably share their improvements! I'm very bullish on the future of smaller, locally-run models, myself.
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  I have not invested time on locally-run, I'm curious if they could even get close to approaching the value of Sonnet4 or Opus. That said, I suspect a lot of the value in Claude Code is hand-rolled fined-tuned heuristics built into the tool itself, not coming from the LLM. It does a lot of management of TODO lists, backtracking through failed paths, etc which look more like old-school symbolic AI than something the LLM is doing on its own. Replicating that will also be required.
csomar 1y ago
If it weren't for the Chinese, the prices would have been x10.
barrkel 1y ago
Where do you see the major price increases coming from? The underlying inference is not super expensive. All the tricks they're pulling to make it smarter certainly multiply the price, but the price being charged almost certainly covers the cost. Basic inference on tuned base models is extremely cheap. But certainly it looks like Anthropic > OpenAI > Google in terms of inference cost structure. Prices will only come up if there's a profit opportunity; if one of the vendors has a clear edge and gains substantial pricing power. I don't think that's clear at this point. This article is already equivocating between o3 and Opus.
stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y ago
Just a matter of time before AI coding becomes commodity and prices drop. 2027

lvl155 1y ago

Is $200/month a lot of money when you can multiply your productivity? It depends but the most valuable currency in life is time. For some, spending thousands a month would be worth it.

cmrdporcupine 1y ago
As I said elsewhere... $200/month etc is potentially not a lot for an employer to pay (though I've worked for some recently who balk at just stocking a snacks tray or drink fridge...). But $200/month is unbearable for open source / free software developers.
- morkalork 1y ago
  It's wild when a company has another department and will shell out $200/month per-head for some amalgamation of Salesforce and other SaaS tools for customer service agents.
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    I suspect there's some accounting magic where salaries and software licenses are in one box and "Diet Coke in the fridge" is in another, and the latter is an unbearable cost but the former "OK" But yeah, doesn't explain non-payment for AI tools. Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay for it.
    - dontlikeyoueith 1y ago
      > Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay for it. That seems like the worst of all worlds from their perspective. By not paying for it they introduce a massive security concern.
  - jermaustin1 1y ago
    At a previous job, my department was getting slashed because marketing was moving over to using Salesforce instead of custom software written in-house. Everything was going swimmingly, until the integration vendor for Salesforce just kept billing, and billing and billing. Last I checked no one is still there who was there originally, except the vendor. And the vendor was charging around $90k/mo for integration services and custom development in 2017 when my team was let go. My team was around $10k/mo including rent for our cubicles. That was another weird practice I've never seen elsewhere, to pay rent, we had to charge the other departments for our services. They turned IT and infrastructure into a business, and expected it to turn a profit, which pissed off all the departments who had to start paying for their projects, so they started outsourcing all development work to vendors, killing our income stream, which required multiple rounds of layoffs until only management was left.

rogerkirkness 1y ago

Early stage founder here. You have no idea how worth it $200/month is as a multiple on what compensation is required to fund good engineers. Absolutely the highest ROI thing I have done in the life of the company so far.

lvl155 1y ago
At this point, question is when does Amazon tell Anthropic to stop because it’s gotta be running up a huge bill. I don’t think they can continue offering the $200 plan for too long even with Amazon’s deep pocket.
- fragmede 1y ago
  Inference is cheap to run though, and how many people do you think are getting their $200 worth of it?
  - anonzzzies 1y ago
    I don't know, I have to figure out another way to count money I guess, but that $200 gives me a lot of worth, far more than 200. I guess if you like sleeping and do other stuff than drive Claude Code all the time, you might have a different feeling. For us it works well.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      My question wasn't if the $200 was worth it to the buyer. Renting an H100 for a month is gonna cost around $1000 ($1.33+/hr). Pretend the use isn't bursty (but really it is). If you could get 6 people on one, the company is making money selling inference.
      - lvl155 1y ago
        Let me know when you can run Opus on H100.

bicepjai 1y ago

I can see how pricing at 100 to 200$ per month per employee could make sense for companies, it’s a clear value proposition at that scale. But for personal projects and open source work, it feels out of reach. I’d really like to see more accessible pricing tiers for individuals and hobbyists. Pay per token models don’t work for me either; earlier this year, I racked up almost $1,000 in a month just experimenting with personal projects, and that experience has made me wary of using these tools since. Sources

dist-epoch 1y ago
Github Copilot has unlimited GPT-4.1 for $10/month.
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  is GPT-4.1 decent for coding?
- adhamsalama 1y ago
  And you can use it as an API, so you can plug it as an OpenAI compatible LLM provider into any 3rd party tool that uses AI, for free. That's the only reason I subscribed to GitHub Copilot. Currently using it for Aider.
  - ianandrich 1y ago
    Say more. Is the API access unlimited? What models are available?
    - adhamsalama 1y ago
      It's unlimited for the models that have unlimited use in GitHub Copilot, gpt-4.1.
indigodaddy 1y ago
I’ve seen some people describe getting pretty good value out of the Claude $20 plan with Claude Code?

feintruled 1y ago

Interesting. Though it seems they are themselves building Agentic AI tooling. It's vibe coding all the way down - when's something real going to pop out the bottom?

bunjeejumpn 1y ago
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z3c0 1y ago
An LLM salesman assuring us that $1000/mo is a reasonable cost for LLMs feels a bit like a conflict of interests, especially when the article doesn't go into much detail about the code quality. If anything, their assertion that one should stick to boring tech and "have empathy for the model" just reaffirms that anybody doing anything remotely innovative or cutting-edge shouldn't bother too much with coding agents.

butlike 1y ago

I love how paying for prompts stuck. Like, if someone's going to do your homework for you, they should get compensated.

deadbabe 1y ago

I find it kind of boggling that employers spend $200/month to make employees lives easier, for no real gain. That’s right. Productivity does go up, but most of these employees aren’t really contributing directly to revenue. There is no code to dollar pipeline. Finishing work faster means some roadmap items move quicker, but they just move quicker toward true bottlenecks that can’t really be resolved quickly with AI. So the engineers sit around doing nothing for longer periods of time waiting to be unblocked. Deadlines aren’t being estimated tighter, they are still as long as ever. Enjoy this time while it lasts. Someday employers might realize they need to hire less and just cram more work into individual engineers schedules, because AI should supposedly make work much easier.

teiferer 1y ago
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jajko 1y ago
Coding an actual solution is what, 5-10% of the overall project time? I dont talk about some SV megacorps where better code can directly affect slightly revenue or valuation and thus more time is spend coding and debugging, I talk about basically all other businesses that somehow need developers. Even if I would be 10x faster project managers would barely notice that. And I would lose a lot of creative fun that good coding tends to bring. Also debugging, 0 help there its all on you and your mind and experience. Llms are so far banned in my banking megacorp and I aint complaining.
jayd16 1y ago
There's been pretty widespread layoffs in tech for a few years now.
francisofascii 1y ago
> Someday employers might realize they need to hire less and just cram more work into individual engineers schedules We are already past that point. The high water mark for Devs was ironically in late 2020 during Covid, before RTO when we were in high demand.

tabs_or_spaces 1y ago

Since this is a business problem. * It's not clear on how much revenue or new customers is generated by using a coding agent * It's not clear on how things are going on production. There's only talks about development in the article I feel ai coding agents will give you the edge. Just this article doesn't talk about revenue or PnL side of things, just perceived costs saved from not employing an engineer.

v5v3 1y ago
Yes. A company needs measurable ROI and isn't going to spend $200 a month per seat on Claude. It will instead sign a deal with Microsoft for ai that is 'good enough' and limit expensive ai to some. Or being in the big consultancys as usual to do the projects.

suninsight 1y ago

So what we do at NonBioS.ai is to use a cheaper model to do routine tasks, but switch to a higher thinking model seamlessly if the agent get stuck. Its most cost efficient, and we take that switching cost away from the engineer. But broadly agree to the argument of the post - just spending more might still be worth it.

hoistbypetard 1y ago

> literally changing failing tests into skipped tests to resolve “the tests are failing.” Wow. It really is like a ridiculous, over-confident, *very* junior developer.

throwaway984393 1y ago

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jasonthorsness 1y ago

I really hope we can avoid metered stuff for the long-term. One of the best aspects of software development is the low capital barrier to entry, and the cost of the AI tools right now is threatening that. I'm fortunate in that my own use of the AI tools I'm personally paying for is squished into my off-time on nights and weekends, so I get buy with a $20/month Claude subscription :).

SomewhatLikely 1y ago
It's pretty damn capital intensive to be a productive farmer today. That said, AI will likely, hopefully, get cheaper over time.

quonn 1y ago

Charging $200/month is economically only possible if there is not a true market for LLMs or some sort of monopoly power. Currently there is no evidence that this will be the case. There are already multiple competitors and the barrier to entry is relatively low (compared to e.g. the car industry or other manufacturing industries), there are no network effects (like for social networks) and no need to get the product 100% right (like compatibility to Photoshop or Office) and the prices for training will drop further. Furthermore $200 is not free (like Google). Can anyone name one single widely-used digital product that does _not_ have to be precisely correct/compatible/identical to The Original and that everyone _does_ pay $200/month for? Therefore, should prices that users pay get anywhere even close to that number, there will naturally be opportunities for competitors to bring prices down to a reasonable level.

chis 1y ago
I think you forgot to consider the cost of providing the inference.
- quonn 1y ago
  Well, that could be an additional problem. My point was not that AI will necessarily be cheaper to run than $200, but that there is not much profit to be made. Of course the cost of inference will form a lower bound on the price as well.
lvl155 1y ago
Barrier to entry is actually very very high. Just because we have “open source” models doesn’t mean anyone can enter. And the gap is widening now. I see Anthropic/OpenAI as clear leaders. Opus 4 and its derivative products are irreplaceable for coders since Spring 2025. Once you figure it out and have your revelation, it will be impossible to go back. This is an iPhone moment right now and the network effect will be incredible.
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  It's all text and it's all your text. There's zero network effect.

jbentley1 1y ago

My Claude Code usage would have been $24k last month if I didn't have a max plan, at least according to Claude-Monitor. I've been using a tool I developed (https://github.com/stravu/crystal https://github.com/stravu/crystal) to run several sessions in parallel. Sometimes I will run the same prompt multiple times and pick the winner, or sometimes I'll be working on multiple features at once, reviewing and testing one while waiting on the others. Basically, with the right tooling you can burn tokens incredibly fast while still receiving a ton of value from them.

unshavedyak 1y ago
Max $100 or $200? I'm on $100 and i'm shocked how much usage i get out of Sonnet, while Opus feels like no usage at all. I barely even bother with Opus since most things i want to do just runout super quick.
- borgel 1y ago
  Interesting, I'm fairly new to using these tools and am starting with Claude Code but at the $20 level. Do you have any advice for when I would benefit from stepping up to $100? I'm not sure what gets better (besides higher usage limits).
  - vlade11115 1y ago
    I recently switched from Pro to $100 Max, and the only difference I've found so far is higher usage limits. Antropic tends to give shiny new features to Max users first, but as of now, there is nothing Max-only. For me, it's a good deal nonetheless, as even $100 Max limits are huge. While on Pro, I hit the limits each day that I used Claude Code. Now I rarely see the warning, but I never actually hit the limit.
  - unshavedyak 1y ago
    No clue as i've not used Claude Code on Pro to get an idea of usage limits. But, if you get value out of Claude Code and ever run into limits, Max is quite generous for Sonnet imo. I have zero concern about Sonnet usage atm, so it's definitely valuable there. Usage for Opus is my only "complaint", but i've used it so little i don't even know if it's that much better than Sonnet. As it is, even with more generous Opus limits i'd probably want a more advanced Claude Code behavior - where it uses Opus to plan and orchestrate, and Sonnet would do the grunt work for cheaper tokens. But i'm not aware of that as a feature atm. Regardless, i'm quite pleased with Claude Code on $100 Max. If it was a bit smarter i might even upgrade to $200, but atm it's too dumb to give it more autonomy and that's what i'd need for $200. Opus might be good enough there, but $100 Opus limits are so low i've not even gotten enough experience with it to know if it's good enough for $200

nickjj 1y ago

Serious question, how do you justify paying for any of this without feeling like it's a waste? I occasionally use ChatGPT (free version without logging in) and the amount of times it's really wrong is very high. Often times it takes a lot of prompting and feeding it information from third party sources for it to realize it has incorrect information and then it corrects itself. All of these prompts would be using money on a paid plan right? I also used Cursor (free trial on their paid plan) for a bit and I didn't find much of a difference. I would say whatever back-end it was using was possibly worse. The code it wrote was busted and over engineered. I want to like AI and in some cases it helps gain insight on something but I feel like literally 90% of my time is it prodiving me information that straight up doesn't work and eventually it might work but to get there is a lot of time and effort.

benbayard 1y ago
I'd try out cursor with either o3 or Claude 4 Opus. The free version of ChatGPT and Claude in Cursor are much better. That's also what this article claims and is true in my experience.
chis 1y ago
I can't believe people are still writing comments like this lol how can it be
- zzzeek 1y ago
  I think it's a serious question because something really big is being missed here. There seem to be very different types of developers out there and/or working on very different kinds of codebases. Hypothetically, maybe you have devs or specific contexts where the dev can just write the code really fast where having to explain it to a bot is more time consuming, vs. devs /contexts where lots of googling and guessing goes on and it's easier to get the AI to just show you how to do it. I'm actually employer mandated to continue to try/use AI bots / agents to help with coding tasks. I'm sort of getting them to help me but I'm still really not being blown away and still tending to prefer not to bother with them with things I'm frequently iterating on, they are more useful when I have to learn some totally new platform/API. Why is that? do we think there's something wrong with me?

chis 1y ago

Has anyone else done this and felt the same? Every now and then I try to reevaluate all the models. So far it still feels like Claude is in the lead just because it will predictably do what I want when given a mid-sized problem. Meanwhile o3 will sometimes one-shot a masterpiece, sometimes go down the complete wrong path. This might also just be a feature of the change in problem size - perhaps the larger problems that necessitate o3 are also too open-ended and would require much more planning up front. But at that point it's actually more natural to just iterate with sonnet and stay in the driver's seat a bit. Plus sonnet runs 5x faster.

mococa 1y ago

I just pay $20/month on ChatGPT and spend the entire day coding with its help, no need to pay for tokens, no need to integrate it on your IDE.

iamleppert 1y ago

"Now we don't need to hire a founding engineer! Yippee!" I wonder all these people who are building companies that are built on prompts (not even a person) from other companies. The minute there is a rug pull (and there WILL be one), what are you going to do? You'll be in even worse shape because in this case there won't be someone who can help you figure out your next move, there won't be an old team, there will just be NO team. Is this the future?

ARandumGuy 1y ago
Any cost/benefit analysis of whether to use AI has to factor in the fact that AI companies aren't even close to making a profit, and are primarily funded by investment money. At some point, either the cost to operate these AI models needs to go down, or the prices will go up. And from my perspective, the latter seems a lot more likely.
- v5v3 1y ago
  They are not making money as they are all competing to push the models further and this R&D spending on salaries and cloud/hardware costs. Unless models get better people are not going to pay more.
- immibis 1y ago
  Not really. If they're running at a loss, their loss is your gain. Business is much more short-term than developers imagine it to be for some reason. You don't have to always use an infinitely sustainable strategy - you can change strategies once the more profitable unsustainable strategy stops sustaining.
hluska 1y ago
It get even darker - I was around in the 1990s and a lot of people who ran head on into that generation’s problems used those lessons to build huge startups in the 2000s. If we have outsourced a lot of learning, what do we do when we fail? Or how we compound on success?
xianshou 1y ago
Rug pulls from foundation labs are one thing, and I agree with the dangers of relying on future breakthroughs, but the open-source state of the art is already pretty amazing. Given the broad availability of open-weight models within under 6 months of SotA (DeepSeek, Qwen, previously Llama) and strong open-source tooling such as Roo and Codex, why would you expect AI-driven engineering to regress to a worse state than what we have today? If every AI company vanished tomorrow, we'd still have powerful automation and years of efficiency gains left from consolidation of tools and standards, all runnable on a single MacBook.

v5v3 1y ago

No need to use the most expensive models for every query? Use it for the ones the cheaper models don't do well.

logifail 1y ago
Q: Can you tell in advance whether your query is one that's worth paying more for a better answer?
- v5v3 1y ago
  Most programmers are not asking ai to re-write the whole app or convert C to Rust. You wouldn't gain anything from asking the most expensive model to adjust some css.

georgeecollins 1y ago

I am blown away that you can get a founding engineer for $10k / month. I guess that is not counting stock options, in which case it makes sense. But I think if you include options the opportunity cost is much higher. IMO great engineers are worth a lot, no shade.

andrewstuart 1y ago

I must be holding OpenAI wrong. Everyone time I try it I find it to be useless compared to Claude or Gemini.

mathiaspoint 1y ago

I can't imagine using something like this and not self hosting. Moving around in your editor costs money? That would completely crush my velocity.

pshirshov 1y ago

> Use boring technology: LLMs do much better with well-documented and well-understood dependencies than obscure, novel, or magical ones. Now is not the time to let Steve load in a Haskell-to-WebAssembly pipeline. If we all go that way, there might be no new haskells and webassemblies in the future.

mathiaspoint 1y ago
I think there certainly will, it will just mean that only people who can function independently of the AI will have access to them a few years before everyone else.
emrehan 1y ago
LLMs can read documentations for a language and use it as well as human engineers. "given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content" Source: Gemini 1.5's paper from March 2024 https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_v1_5_report.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_...

suralind 1y ago

How does GitHub Copilot stack against API access directly from OpenAI, etc.? Is it faster to use API keys than Copilot?

alwillis 1y ago

After reading many of the comments in this thread, I suspect many (not all) issues come from lack of planning and poor prompting. For anything moderately complex, use Claude's plan mode; you get to approve the plan before turning it loose. The planning phase is where you want to use a more sophisticated model or use extended thinking mode. Once you have a great plan, you can use a less sophisticated model to execute it. Even if you're a great programmer, you may suck at prompting. There's an art and a science to prompting; perhaps learn about it? [1] Don't forget; in addition to telling Claude or any other model what to do, you can also tell them what not to do in the CLAUDE.md or equivalent file. [1]: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/extended-thinking-tips https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-...

nico 1y ago

The article reads almost like an ad for o3 and spending a lot of money on LLM APIs In my experience, o4-mini-high is good enough, even just through the chat interface Cursor et al can be more comfy because they have access to the files directly. But when working on a sufficiently large/old/complex code base, the main limitation is the human in the loop and managing context, so things end up evening out. Not only that, but a lot of times it’s just easier/better to manually feed things to ChatGPT/Claude - that way you get to more carefully curate and understand the tasks and the changes I still haven’t seen any convincing real life scenario with larger in-production code bases in which agents are able to autonomously write most of the code If anyone has a video/demo, would love to see it

cma 1y ago
It's faster than me at drilling through all the layers of abstractions in large codebases to answer questions about how something is implemented and where the actual calculation or functionality gets done, so with that alone it's much more useful than web chat interfaces.
- nico 1y ago
  Yes, when initially starting out the task/feature. But also most likely the agent won’t be able to fully do it on its own, and at that point the agent is not necessarily that much more useful than the chat Also, local agents miss context all the time, at which point you need to manually start adding/managing the context anyway And, if you are regularly working on the codebase, at some point you’ll probably have better in-brain initial context than the agent
- jpc0 1y ago
  I know it is difficult to run software locally in some instances but at this point I feel it is probably quicker to implement tracing or improving the local development flow. A breakpoint in a debugger is much much quicker than feeding the AI all the context needed and then confirming it didn’t miss some flow in some highly abstract code

scrubs 1y ago

The one thing AI hates and doesn't want you to know about AI: Having typing skills >= 120 wpm will triple your efficacy.

tomjuggler 1y ago

I believe this story, but being from a third world country it's not feasible to spend anywhere near that much. Also, as others have mentioned I am wary of "rug-pulls" when it comes to proprietary models and services. That is why I am all-in on Deepseek currently, with Aider (and Roo for MCP integration). When the main api is lagging I just switch to the same model with a different provider on OpenRouter. Theoretically I could host my own if I got that busy. Solo developer doing small jobs but I code every day and $10 per month would be a busy month for me. I still read every line of code though..