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What would the average software engineer pay for a AI coding subscription, as compared to not having any at all? Running a survey on that question would give so

by chis 9mo ago

What would the average software engineer pay for a AI coding subscription, as compared to not having any at all? Running a survey on that question would give some interesting results.

thewebguyd 9mo ago
I may be a bit of an anomaly since I don't really do personal projects outside of work, but if I'm spending my own money then $0. If the company is buying it for me, whatever they are willing to pay but anything more than a couple hundred/month I'd rather they just pay me more instead or hire extra people.
thorncorona 9mo ago
I pay $20/m for cursor. It allowed me to revamp my home lab in a weekend.
- PenguinCoder 9mo ago
  > It allowed me to revamp my home lab in a weekend. So, what did you learn from that project??
  - thorncorona 9mo ago
    I previously hand baked everything. I learned how andible, terraform, and docker approach dev ops and infra. I would not be able to hand cook anything with these tools but understanding the syntax was a non goal (nor what interests me).
dvfjsdhgfv 9mo ago
I pay $20 for ChatGPT, I ask it to criticize my code and ideas. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it says bullshit. For a few months I used Gemini Pro, there was a period when it was better than OpenAI's model but they did something and now it's worse even though it answers faster so I cancelled my Google One subscription. I tried Claude Code over a few weekends, it definitely can do tiny projects quickly but I work in an industry where I need to understand every line of code and basically own my projects so it's not useful at all. Also, doing anything remotely complex involves so many twists I find the net benefit negative. Also because the normal side-effects of doing something is learning, and here I feel like my skills devolve. I also occasionally use Cerebras for quick queries, it's ultrafast. I also do a lot of ML so use Vast.ai, Simplepod, Runpod and others - sometimes I rent GPUs for a weekend, sometimes for a couple of months, I'm very happy with the results.
bluecalm 9mo ago
I would pay at least 300$/month just for hobby projects. The tools are absolutely amazing at things I am the worst at: getting a good overview on a new field/library/docs, writing boilerplate and first working examples, dealing with dependencies and configurations etc. I would pay that even if they never improve and never help to write any actual business logic or algorithms. Simple queries like: "Find a good compression library that meets the following requirements: ..." and then "write a working example that takes this data, compresses it and writes it to output buffer" are worth multiple hours I would otherwise need to spend on it. If I wanted to ship commercial software again I would pay much more.

by chis 9mo ago

What would the average software engineer pay for a AI coding subscription, as compared to not having any at all? Running a survey on that question would give some interesting results.

thewebguyd 9mo ago

I may be a bit of an anomaly since I don't really do personal projects outside of work, but if I'm spending my own money then $0. If the company is buying it for me, whatever they are willing to pay but anything more than a couple hundred/month I'd rather they just pay me more instead or hire extra people.

thorncorona 9mo ago

I pay $20/m for cursor. It allowed me to revamp my home lab in a weekend.

PenguinCoder 9mo ago
> It allowed me to revamp my home lab in a weekend. So, what did you learn from that project??
- thorncorona 9mo ago
  I previously hand baked everything. I learned how andible, terraform, and docker approach dev ops and infra. I would not be able to hand cook anything with these tools but understanding the syntax was a non goal (nor what interests me).

dvfjsdhgfv 9mo ago

I pay $20 for ChatGPT, I ask it to criticize my code and ideas. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it says bullshit. For a few months I used Gemini Pro, there was a period when it was better than OpenAI's model but they did something and now it's worse even though it answers faster so I cancelled my Google One subscription. I tried Claude Code over a few weekends, it definitely can do tiny projects quickly but I work in an industry where I need to understand every line of code and basically own my projects so it's not useful at all. Also, doing anything remotely complex involves so many twists I find the net benefit negative. Also because the normal side-effects of doing something is learning, and here I feel like my skills devolve. I also occasionally use Cerebras for quick queries, it's ultrafast. I also do a lot of ML so use Vast.ai, Simplepod, Runpod and others - sometimes I rent GPUs for a weekend, sometimes for a couple of months, I'm very happy with the results.

bluecalm 9mo ago

I would pay at least 300$/month just for hobby projects. The tools are absolutely amazing at things I am the worst at: getting a good overview on a new field/library/docs, writing boilerplate and first working examples, dealing with dependencies and configurations etc. I would pay that even if they never improve and never help to write any actual business logic or algorithms. Simple queries like: "Find a good compression library that meets the following requirements: ..." and then "write a working example that takes this data, compresses it and writes it to output buffer" are worth multiple hours I would otherwise need to spend on it. If I wanted to ship commercial software again I would pay much more.