> off work trees and running all the agents that I could afford,
I still think that we, programmers, having to pay money in order to write code is a travesti. And I'm not talking about paying the license for the odd text editor or even for an operating system, I'm talking about day-to-day operations. I'm surprised that there isn't a bigger push-back against this idea.
What is strange about paying for tools that improve productivity? Unless you consider your own time worthless you should always be open to spending more to gain more.
No stock backed company will be paying developers more regardless of much more productive these tools make us. You'll be lucky if they pay for the proper Claude Max plan themselves considering most wouldn't even spring for IntelliJ.
I wasn't thinking about this from the perspective of an IC in a company, more from the perspective of self employment or side projects. But its not any different for a larger business: An IC should not pay for their own tools, but an engineering manager who won't is a fool.
Are the jobs out there actually paying people more?
Your own time is worthless if you’re not spending it doing something that makes more money. You don’t make more money increasing your productivity for work when you’re expected to work the same number of hours.
I've spent a fair amount of time contracting -- this issue is even more relevant here. While I wasn't spending very much on AI tools, what I did spent was worth every penny... for the company I was supporting :).
Fortunately, there was enough work to be done so productivity increases didn't decrease my billable hours. Even if it did, I still would have done it. If it helps me help others, then it's good for my reputation. Thats hard to put a price on, but absolutely worth what I paid in this case.
Dw, there's quite a lot of push back against AI in some of the communities I hang around in. It's just rarely seldom visible here on HN.
It's usually not about the price, but more about the fact that a few megacorps and countries "own" the ability to work this way. This leads to some very real risks that I'm pretty sure will materialize at some point in time, including but not limited to:
- Geopolitical pressure - if some ass-hat of a president hypothetically were to decide "nuh uh - we don't like Spain, they're not being nice to us!", they could forbid AI companies to deliver their services to that specific country.
- Price hikes - if you can deliver "$100 worth of value" per hour, but "$1000 worth of value" per hour with the help of AI, then provider companies could still charge up to $899 per hour of usage and it'd still make "business sense" for you to use them since you're still creating more value with them than without them.
- Reduction in quality - I believe people who were senior developers _before_ starting to use AI assisted coding are still usually capable of producing high quality output. However every single person I know who "started coding" with tools like Claude Code produce horrible horrible software, esp. from a security p.o.v. Most of them just build "internal tools" for themselves, and I highly encourage that. However others have pursued developing and selling more ambitious software...just to get bitten by the fact that it's much more to software development than getting semi-correct output from an AI agent.
- A massive workload on some open source projects. We've all heard about projects closing down their bug bounty programs, declining AI generated PRs etc.
- The loss of the joy - some people enjoy it, some people don't.
We're definitely still in the early days of AI assisted / AI driven coding, and no one really knows how it'll develop...but don't mistake the bubble that is HN for universal positivity and acclaim of AI in the coding space :).
China did users a solid and Qwen is a thing, so the scenario where Anthropic/OpenAI/Google collude and segment the market to ratchet prices in unison just isn’t possible. Amodei talking about value based pricing is a dream unless they buy legislation to outlaw competitors. Altman might have beat them to that punch with this admin, though. Most of us are operating on 10-40% margins. Usually on the low end when there aren’t legal barriers. The 80-99% margins or rent extraction rights SaaS people expect is just out of touch. The revenue the big 3 already pull in now has a lot more to do with branding and fear-mongering than product quality.
My old work machine used power quite aggressively - I was happy to pay for that (and turn it off at night!). This seems even more directly valuable.
It's silly, who wouldn't answer yes to the question "would you like to finish your task faster?". The real trick is to produce more but by putting less effort than before.
> who wouldn't answer yes to the question "would you like to finish your task faster?"
People who enjoy the process of completing the task?
Maybe we'd see "coding gyms" like how white collar workers have gyms for the physical exercise they're not getting from their work.
codeforces and topcoder have existed for years
I salaried employees who are paid by time, and are paying their own Anthropic bills.
Initially there is perhaps a mitigating advantage of briefly impressing ourselves or others with output, but that will quickly fade into the new normal.
Net result: employee paying significant money to produce more, but capturing none of that value.
If you finish faster, you'll be given another task. You're not freeing yourself sooner or spending less effort, you're working the same number of hours for the same pay. Your reward is not joining the ranks of those laid off.
If you are paid hourly and not per task than what is the point in finishing your task faster?