This is great and all but, who can actually afford to let these agents run on tasks all day long? Is anyone here actually using this or are these rollouts aimed at large companies?
I'm burning through so many tokens on Cursor that I've had to upgrade to Ultra recently - and i'm convinced they're tweaking the burn rate behind the scenes - usage allowance doesn't seem proportional.
Thank god the open source/local LLM world isn't far behind.
I can't even get through my Claude Max quota, and that's only 200/mo. And I code every day and use it for various other pretty-intensive tasks.
only $200/mo…$200 a month is a used car payment.
I guarantee you that price will double by 2027. Then it’ll be a new car payment!
I’m really not saying this to be snarky, I’m saying this to point out that we’re really already in the enshittification phase before the rapid growth phase has even ended. You’re paying $200 and acting like that’s a cheap SaaS product for an individual.
I pay less for Autocad products!
This whole product release is about maximizing your bill, not maximizing your productivity.
I don’t need agents to talk to each other. I need one agent to do the job right.
I pay $200/month, don’t come near the limits (yet), and if they raised the price to $1000/month for the exact same product I’d gladly pay it this afternoon (Don’t quote me on this Anthropic!)
If you’re not able to get US$thousands out of these models right now either your expectations are too high or your usage is too low, but as a small business owner and part/most-time SWE, the pricing is a rounding error on value delivered.
As a business expense to make profit, I can understand being ok with this price point.
But as an individual with no profit motive, no way.
I use these products at work, but not as much personally because of the bill. And even if I decided I wanted to pursue a for profit side project I’d have to validate it’s viability before even considering a 200$ monthly subscription
You can do it for $40 month. What I'm doing:
- $20 for Claude Pro (Claude Code) - $20 for ChatGPT Plus (Codex) - Amp Free Plan (with ads and you get about $10 of daily value)
So you get to use 3 of the top coding agents for $40 month.
We’re gonna see an economic boom any minute.
I'm curious: what concrete value have you extracted using these tools that is worth US$thousands?
That's one of 3 possible futures.
1. 1-3 LLM vendors are substantially higher quality than other vendors and none of those are open source. This is an oligarchy and the scenario you described will play out.
2. >3 LLM vendors are all high quality and suitable for the tasks. At least one of these is open source. This is the "commodity" scenario, and we'll end up paying roughly the cost of inference. This still might be hundreds per month, though.
3. Somewhere in between. We've got >3 vendors, but 1-3 of them are somewhat better than the others, so the leaders can charge more. But not as much more than they can in scenario #1.
As company owner the math is simple:
If I pay $3k/month to a developer and a $200/month tool makes them 10% more productive I will pay it without thinking.
Not saying $200/mo isn't a lot, but I think you're underestimating used car payments these days. The average US used car payment is above $500 now.
I could write an essay about how almost everything you wrote either is extremely incorrect or is extremely likely to be incorrect. I am too lazy to, though, so I will just have to wait for another commenter to do the equivalent.
If you can’t get $200 of value out of Claude Code Max, then you need to really step up your game. That’s user error.
Especially for what’s basically an experiment. Gas town didn’t really work, so there’s no guarantee this will even produce anything of value.
Many many companies can afford to hire a junior engineer for $150k/year (plus employer payroll taxes, employee benefits etc.).
Are you spending more than $150k per year on AI?
(Also, you're talking about the cost of your Cursor subscription, when the article is about Claude Code. Maybe try Claude Max instead?)
If it could do anything that a junior dev could, that’d be a valid point of comparison. But it continually, wildly performs slower and falls short every time I’ve tried.
A. You're working on some really deep thing that only world-class expects can do, like optimizing graphics engines for AAA games.
B. You're using a language that isn't in the top ~10 most popular in AI models' training sets.
C. You have an opportunity to improve your ability to use the tools effectively.
How many hours have you spent using Claude Code?
> like optimizing graphics engines for AAA games.
Claude would be worse than an expert at this, but this is a benchmarkable task. Claude can do experiments a lot quicker than a human can. The hard part would be ensure that the results aren't just gaming your benchmark.
The possibility that the performance of these tools still isn't at the level some people need it to be is not an option?
It's insulting that criticism is often met with superficial excuses and insinuation that the user lacks the required skills.
That possibility is covered by A and B.
GP said 'falls short every time I’ve tried'. Note the word 'every'.
Companies are not comparing it straight to juniors. They're more making a comparison between a Senior with the assistance of one more more juniors, vs a Senior with the assistance of AI Agents.
I feel like comparison just to a junior developer is also becoming a fairly outdated comparison. Yes, it is worse in some ways, but also VASTLY superior in others.
It’s funny so many companies making people RTO and spending all this money on offices to get “hallway” moments of innovation, while emptying those offices of the people most likely to have a new perspective.
I am way more productive with $200/month of AI than I would be with $5,000/month of junior developer. And it isn’t close.
You know those VC funded startups with just two founders… them.
I mean what you get for Claude Code Max is insane its 30x on the token price. If you don’t spend that all it’s your own fault. That must be below elecricity cost