> divorced from any kind of fundamentals
Anthropic ARR went $1B -> $4B in the first half of this year. They're getting my $200 a month and it's easily the best money I spend. There's definitely something there.
> divorced from any kind of fundamentals
Anthropic ARR went $1B -> $4B in the first half of this year. They're getting my $200 a month and it's easily the best money I spend. There's definitely something there.
"Sooner or later the bubble's gonna burst" and "There's definitely something there" aren't mutually exclusive - in fact they often go together.
It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my age" by bringing up the .com boom/bust, but this feels exactly the same. The late 90s/early 00s were the dawn of the consumer Internet, and all of that tech vastly changed global society and brought you companies like Google and Amazon. It also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other companies chronicled in "Fucked Company".
You mention Anthropic, which I think is in a good a position as any to be one of the winners. I'm much less convinced about tons of the others. Look at Cursor - they were a first moving leader, but I know tons of people (myself included) who have cancelled their subscription because there are now better options.
> It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my age"
Please don't say stuff like that.
As a 20-something who was in diapers during the dot-com boom, I really appreciate your insight. Thanks for sticking around on HN!
what're you finding better than cursor now?
Claude Code with Pro, Max100, or Max200 subscriptions. Works with any IDE including none.
For the time being, nothing comes close, at least for me.
Can you please share your Claude usage workflow?
I use Github copilot and often tend to be frustrated. It messes up old things while making new. I use Claude 4 model in GH CP.
I use github copilot chat right now. First I use ask mode to ask it a question about the state of the codebase outlining my current understanding of the condition of the code. "I'm trying to x, I think the code currently does y." I include a few source files that I am talking about. I correct any misconceptions about the plan the llm may have and suggest stylistic changes to the code. Then once the plan seems correct, I switch to agent mode and ask it to implement the change on the codebase.
Then I'll look through the changes and decide if it is correct. Sometimes can just run the code to decide if it is correct. Any compilation errors are pasted right back in to the chat in agent mode.
Once the feature is done, commit the changes. Repeat for features.
Does it remember context from chat mode and when you switch to agent mode?
Cline is absolutely fantastic when you combine it with Sonnet 4. Always use plan mode first and always have it write tests first (have it do TDD). It changed me from a skeptic to a believer and now I use it full time.
How much is it costing you?
I use Roo Code (Cline fork) and spend roughly $15-30/mo by subscribing to Github Copilot Pro for $10/mo for unlimited use of GPT-4.1 via the VS Code LM API, and a handful of premium credits a month (I use Gemini 2.5 Pro for the most part).
Once I max out the premium credits I pay-as-you-go for Gemini 2.5 Pro via OpenRouter, but always try to one shot with GPT 4.1 first for regular tasks, or if I am certain it's asking too much, use 2.5 Pro to create a Plan.md and then switch to 4.1 to implement it which works 90% of the time for me (web dev, nothing too demanding).
With the different configurable modes Roo Code adds to Cline I've set up the model defaults so it's zero effort switching between them, and have been playing around with custom rules so Roo could best guess whether it should one shot with 4.1 or create a plan with 2.5 Pro first but haven't nailed it down yet.
As much as you theoretically want to spend, since it's pay-per-use.
I spend $200/month by using Sonnet 4. Could be higher if you want to use Opus.
Devin is light years ahead of Cursor. It’s not even the same category!
I stopped writing code by hand almost entirely and my output (measured in landed PRs) has been 10x
And when I write code myself then it’s gnarly stuff and I want AI to get out of my way…so I just use Webstorm
I genuinely don't understand what value Cursor itself brings. It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right? As far as I can tell there's like four actual AI firms in the world and everyone else is trying to whitelabel. It reminds me of the hosting industry in the early 2000s.
> I genuinely don't understand what value Cursor itself brings. It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right? As far as I can tell there's like four actual AI firms in the world and everyone else is trying to whitelabel. It reminds me of the hosting industry in the early 2000s.
Yes, there's (maybe?) four, but they're at the very bottom of the value chain.
Things built on top of them will be higher up the value chain and (in theory anyway) command a larger margin, hence a VC rush into betting on which company actually makes it up the value chain.
I mean, the only successes we see now are with coding agents. Nothing else has made it up the value chain except coding agents. Everything else (such as art and literature generation) is still on the bottom rung of the value chain.
That, by definition alone, is where the smallest margins are!
Amazing how folks make comments without even trying it and especially making a comment similar to how Dropbox is simply rsync, right?
It is a lot less trivial than people like yourself make it out to be to get an effective tool chain and especially do it efficiently.
> I genuinely don't understand what value Cursor itself brings. It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right?
By similar token Windows is mostly a wrapper around Intel and AMD and now Qualcomm CPUs. Cursor/Windsurf add a lot of useful functionality. So much so so that Microsoft GitHub Copilot is losing marketshare to these guys.
It's a very well done wrapper that improves your coding productivity a lot.
The problem is that they have no moat and the underlying provider can easily cut them out.
I think you underestimate the difficulty in getting the tool chain running efficiently in the IDE. It's a significant moat and I suspect their spend is too attractive to cut them off from an API especially when most of the model providers are not exactly competing fully in this space yet or at least not with the same enthusiasm.
> and the underlying provider can easily cut them out
what? Do you think providers (or their other customers) don’t care about the business implications of a decision like this? All so that cursor can bring their significant customer base to a nearly-indistinguishable competitor?
Not really, it's pretty hard to get the editor and code editing via AI working as well as they did.
Not really much a of stuck bubble this time, though. Besides Nvidia and a handful of other HW companies, at least. Almost all of the very high valuations are for private companies and usually the amount of actual money involved in is relatively low.
Feels nothing like the same. The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets.
Cursor has a $500mm ARR your anecdote might be meaningful in the medium turn but so far growth as not slowed down.
> The .com bubble was largely companies with no business
Ah, yes, companies like Amazon.com, eBay, PayPal, Expedia, and Google. Never heard of those losers again. Not to mention those crazy kids at Kozmo foolishly thinking that people would want to have stuff delivered same-day.
The two lessons you should learn from the .com bubble are that the right idea won’t save you from bad execution, and that boom markets–especially when investors are hungry for big returns–can stay inflated longer than you think. You can be early to market, have a big share, and still end up like Netscape because Microsoft decided to take the money from under the couch cushions and destroy your revenue stream. That seems especially relevant for AI as long as model costs are high and nobody has a moat: even if you’re right on the market, if someone else can train users to expect subsidized low prices long enough you’ll run out of runway.
You’re right that many .com companies lacked fundamentals but you’re cherry-picking survivors. For every Amazon, there were dozens of Pets.coms. The current AI wave does feel different in terms of revenue traction (e.g., Cursor’s $500M ARR), but the broader lesson still applies: hype cycles don’t discriminate between good and bad execution in the short term.
Cursor’s growth is impressive, but sustained dominance isn’t guaranteed. Distribution, margins, and defensibility still matter and we haven’t seen how durable any of that is once incentives tighten and infra costs stop being subsidized.
> The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets.
There also were companies like Sun and Cisco who had real, roaring business and lots of revenue that depended on loose start-up purse-strings, and VC exuberance...
Sun and Cisco both survived the .com bust, but were never the same, nor did theu ever reach their high-water marks again. They were shovel-sellers, much like Amazon and Nvidia in 2025.
Or yahoo- they were the premier sellers of ad space online (like google today) and made a lot of money from over-funded tech companies overpaying for online advertising during the boom years.
I’ve always dwelled over $5 a month subscriptions for iPhone apps due to subscription fatigue. I find myself signing up for $200 AI subscriptions without a moments hesitation.
I personally find gemini 2.5 pro and o4.1 mini to handle complexity better than claude code. i was a power user of claude code for a couple months but its bias to action repeatedly led me down the wrong path. what am i missing?
I'm finding myself agreeing with you... After also being a Max plan power user.
Now I just find myself exasperated at its choices and constant forgetfulness.
What do you do with $200/mo subscription to Anthropic? I’d consider myself a power user and I’ve never come close to a rate limit on the $20 subscription.
Depends a lot on the way people use them.
If you discusses a plan with CC well upfront, covering all integration points where things might go off rail, perhaps checkpoint the plan in a file then start a fresh CC session for coding, then CC is usually going to one shot a 2k-LoC feature uninterrupted, which is very token efficient.
If the plan is not crystal clear, people end up arguing with CC over this and that. Token usage will be bad.
Anecdotally, usage rises precipitously when you are building a system from scratch with unlimited ai access.
If you're using Claude Code with any regularity then the $200/m plan is better than a Costco membership in value.
I hope both of you know that you're in the extreme minority, right?
Are there available numbers to support this? Software engineering in the U.S. is well-compensated. $200/mo is a small amount to pay if it makes a big difference in productivity.
Which raises the question: If the productivity gains are realized by the employer, is the employer not paying this subscription?
My day job in talks to do that. I'm partly responsible for that decision, and i'm using my personal $200/m plan to test the idea.
My assessment so far is that it is well worth it, but only if you're invested in using the tool correctly. It can cause as much harm as it can increase productivity and i'm quite fearful of how we'll handle this at day-job.
I also think it's worth saying that imo, this is a very different fear than what drives "butts in seats" arguments. Ie i'm not worried that $Company will not get their value out of the Engineer and instead the bot will do the work for them. I'm concerned that Engineer will use the tool poorly and cause more work for reviewers having to deal with high LOC.
Reviews are difficult and "AI" provides a quick path to slop. I've found my $200 well worth it, but the #1 difficulty i've had is not getting features to work, but in getting the output to be scalable and maintainable code.
Sidenote, one of the things i've found most productive is deterministic tooling wrapping the LLM. Eg robust linters like Rust Clippy set to automatically run after Claude Code (via hooks) helps bend the LLM away from many bad patterns. It's far from perfect of course, but it's the thing i think we need most atm. Determinism around the spaghetti-chaos-monkeys.
Yes, but that doesn't mean they aren't finding real value
The challenge with the bubble/not bubble framing is the question of long term value.
If the labs stopped spending money today, they would recoup their costs. Quickly.
There are possible risks (could prices go to zero because of a loss leader?), but I think anthropic and OpenAI are both sufficiently differentiated that they would be profitable/extremely successful companies by all accounts if they stopped spending today.
So the question is: at what point does any of this stop being true?
> I think anthropic and OpenAI are both sufficiently differentiated that they would be profitable/extremely successful companies by all accounts if they stopped spending today.
Maybe. But that would probably be temporary. The market is sufficiently dynamic that any advantages they have right now, probably isn't stable defensible longer term. Hence the need to keep spending. But what do I know? I'm not a VC.
A very productive minority.
Are there studies to show those paying $200/month to openai/claude are more productive?
Anecdotally, I can take on and complete the side projects I've always wanted to do but didn't due to the large amounts of yak shaving or unfamiliarity with parts of the stack. It's the difference between "hey wouldn't it be cool to have a Monte Carlo simulator for retirement planning with multidimensional search for the safe withdrawal rate depending on savings rate, age of retirement, and other assumptions" and doing it in an afternoon with some prompts.
For curiosity, how complex are these side projects? My experience is that Claude Code can absolutely nail simple apps. But as the complexity increases it seems to lose its ability to work through things without having to burn tokens on constantly reminding it of the patterns it needs to follow. At the very least it diminishes the enjoyment of it.
Simple apps are the majority of use-cases though - to me this feels like what programming/using a computer should have been all along: if I want to do something I’m curious about I just try with Claude whereas in the past I’d mostly be too lazy/tired to program after hours in my free time (even though my programming ability exceed Claude’s).
I work at an Amazon subsidiary so I kinda have unlimited gpu budgets. I agree with siblings, I'm working on 5 side projects I have wanted to do as a framework lead for 7 years. I do them in my meetings. None of them are taking production traffic from customers, they're all nice to haves for developers. These tools have dropped the costs of building these tools massively. It's yet to be seen if they'll also make maintaining them the same, or spinning back up on them. But given AI built several of them in a few hours I'm less worried about that cost than I was a year ago (and not building them).
It's subjective, but the high monthly fee would suggest so. At the very least, they're getting an experience that those without are not.
Have we seen any examples of any of these companies turning a profit yet even at $200+/mo? My understanding is that most, if not all, are still deeply in the red. Please feel free to correct me (not sarcastic - being genuine).
If that is the case at some point the music is going to stop and they will either perish or they will have to crank up their subscription costs.
I am absolutely benefitting from them subsidizing my usage to give me Claude Code at $200/month. However, even if they 10x the price its still going to be worth it for me personally.
I'm curious, how are you accounting this? Does the productivity improvement from Claude's product let you get your work done faster, which buys you more free time? Does it earn you additional income, presumably to the tune of somewhere north of $2k/month?
I totally get that but that’s not really what I asked/am driving at. Though I certainly question how many people are willing to spend $2k/mo on this. I think it’s pretty hard for most folks to justify basically a mortgage for an AI tool.
My napkin math is that I can now accomplish 10x more in a day than I could even one year ago, which means I don't need to hire nearly as many engineers, and I still come out ahead.
I use claude code exclusively for the initial version of all new features, then I review and iterate. With the Max plan I can have many of these loops going concurrently in git worktrees. I even built a little script to make the workflow better: http://github.com/jarredkenny/cf
> My napkin math is that I can now accomplish 10x more in a day than I could even one year ago, which means I don't need to hire nearly as many engineers, and I still come out ahead.
The only answer that matters is the one to the question "how much more are you making per month from your $200/m spend?"
Again I understand and I don’t doubt you’re getting insane value out of it but if they believed people would spend $2000 a month for it they would be charging $2000 a month, not 1/10th of that, which is undoubtedly not generating a profit.
As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet. They are driven by speculation and investment and they need to figure out real quick how they’re going to survive when that money dries up. People are not going to fork out 24k a year for these tools. I don’t think they’ll spend even $10k. People scoff at paying $70+ for internet, a thing we all use basically all the time.
I have found it rather odd that they have targeted individual consumers for the most part. These all seem like enterprise solutions that need to charge large sums and target large companies tbh. My guess is a lot of them think it will get cheaper and easier to provide the same level of service and that they won’t have to make such dramatic increases in their pricing. Time will tell, but I’m skeptical
The point is that if a minority is prepared to pay $200 per month, then what is the majority prepared to pay? I also don’t think this is such an extreme priority, I also know multiple people in real life with these kinds of selections.
>if a minority is prepared to pay $200 per month, then what is the majority prepared to pay?
Nothing. Most people will not pay for a chat bot unless forced to by cramming it into software that they already have to use
It's a generic chat LLM product, but ChatGPT now has over 20 million paid subscribers. https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-mi...
Forget chat bots, most people will not pay for Software, period.
This is _especially_ true for developers in general, which is very ironic considering how our livelihood is dependent on Software.
Yeah, cause we want to be in control of software, understandably. It's hard to charge for software users have full control of - except for donations. That's #1 reason for me to not use any gen AI at the moment - I'm keeping an eye on when (if) open-weight models become useful on consumer hardware though.
> Forget chat bots, most people will not pay for Software, period.
Apple says their App Store did $53B in "digital goods and services" the US alone last year. Thats not 100% software, but its definitely more than 0%
A fool and his money are soon parted.
I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic subscription. (Rough estimate of how much I would have paid someone else to create the things I've (co)created with Claude Code so far.) If this is a bubble, I just hope I can finish all the projects I want to finish before it pops (or before they raise their prices to $9K/month because they read this comment.)
and people are still saying vibe coding is overrated? nonsense: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated
> I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic subscription.
Are those things created by Claude actually making you that much in real money every month? Because the amount of money it would cost to pay someone to create something, and the value that something brings to you once it's made are largely unrelated.
They are tools I want/need for my business (like creating software libraries for various things). My $10K number is how much I would have paid a contractor in the past to code it for me.
> I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic subscription. (Rough estimate of how much I would have paid someone else to create the things I've (co)created with Claude Code so far.)
I know it's hard to place a value on how much a utility saves a business, but honestly this math is like the piracy math and we didn't buy it back then either.
Some teenager downloading 20k songs does not mean that they saved $20k[1], nor does it mean that the record labels lost $20k.
In your case, the relevant question is "how much did your revenue increase by after you started 10x your utility code?"
[1] Assuming the songs are sold on the market for $1 each.
Or so you think..
[1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
[2] https://futurism.com/companies-fixing-ai-replacement-mistake...
Your first link is (in my opinion) highly biased in the samples they choose, they hired maintainers from open-source repos (people with multi years of experience, on their specific repo).
So indeed, IF you are in that case: Many years on the same project with multiple years experience then it is not usefull, otherwise it might be. This means it might be usefull for junior and for experienced devs who are switching projects. It is a tool like any other, indeed if you have a workflow that you optimized through years of usage it won't help.
Exactly. I think the study is a good reminder that we really have to be careful about the productivity gains attributed to AI. Main takeaway imo, despite limitations from the study, is AI is not a panacea, it can increase productivity, but only if used 'well' and with the good workflows in place, and in the right context.
> This means it might be usefull for junior and for experienced devs who are switching projects.
In other words: it might be useful for people who don't understand the generated code well enough to know that it's incorrect or unmaintainable.
> Or so you think.. > [1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
You are welcomed to your point of view, but for me while one agent is finding an obscure bug, I have another agent optimising or refactoring, while I am working on something else. Its hard to believe I am deluded in thinking I am spending more time on a task.
I think the research does highlight that training is important. I don't throws devs agents and expect them to be productive.
I mean, hacker news is still the same aren't they using AI to completely make this website more of whatever it was before ????
growing ARR is easy when you are selling dollars for cents. people hyping ARR as an meaningful investment indicator are a dead giveaway that we are in fact in a bubble.
For sure, but then again - Nvidia $4T?! I can't shake the feeling though that with Nvidia we're looking at another Sun type of situation from _the bubble_. Remember the dot in dot com?
> They're getting my $200 a month and it's easily the best money I spend
Can you explain? I don't see how $200 makes that much difference than what I get from paying $20/month with OpenAI? What's the use case?
Why are you paying for that? Are you employed as a dev and paying out of your pocket or are you a hobbyist or ?
The big question is to what extent they hit a plateau and are commoditized. What happens when there is a fully open stack that gets Claude Code level results but at a fraction of the cost? Not saying that will happen, but that seems to be the scenario for a bubble bursting.
I pay $0 and that's already enough for me. Genuinely, what are you getting for your $200? I cannot fathom paying that much for what seems like I get basically for free anyway.
They're still gonna be an estimated $3 billion in the hole though. Jury still out of there is really "something there".
Genuinely curious for the value add with Claude code here. Some perspective and/or data is appreciated.
Unless they are paying annually, the next big thing could see those $200 a month premium users gone.
Agree. But I think Anthropic is the outlier. Maybe ElevenLabs, too.