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The reason they are talking about building new nuclear power plants in the US isn't just for a few training runs, its for inference. At scale the AI tools are going to be extremely expensive.
Also note China produces twice as much electricity as the United States. Software development and agent demand is going to be competitive across industries. You may think, oh I can just use a few hours of this a day and I got a week of work done (happens to me some days), but you are going to end up needing to match what your competitors are doing - not what you got comfortable with. This is the recurring trap of new technology (no capitalism required.)
There is a danger to independent developers becoming reliant on models. $100-$200 is a customer acquisition cost giveaway. The state of the art models probably will end up costing hourly what a human developer costs. There is also the speed and batching part. How willing is the developer to, for example, get 50% off but maybe wait twice as long for the output. Hopefully the good dev models end up only costing $1000-$2000 a month in a year. At least that will be more accessible.
Somewhere in the future these good models will run on device and just cost the price of your hardware. Will it be the AGI models? We will find out.
I wonder how this comment will age, will look back at it in 5 or 10 years.
Probably because I am an old man, but I don’t personally vibe with full time AI assistant use, rather I will use the best models available for brief periods on specific problems.
Ironically, when I do use the best models available to me it is almost always to work on making weaker and smaller models running on Ollama more effective for my interests.
BTW, I have used neural network tech in production since 1985, and I am thrilled by the rate of progress, but worry about such externalities as energy use, environmental factors, and hurting the job market for many young people.
There are a lot of parts in the near term to dislike here, especially the consequences for privacy, adtech, energy use. I do have concerns that the greatest pitfalls in the short terms are being ignored while other uncertainties are being exaggerated. (I've been warning on deep learning model use for recommendation engines for years, and only a sliver of people seem to have picked up on that one, for example.)
On the other hand, if good enough models can run locally, humans can end up with a lot more autonomy and choice with their software and operating systems than they have today. The most powerful models might run on supercomputers and just be solving the really big science problems. There is a lot of fantastic software out there that does not improve by throwing infinite resources at it.
Another consideration is while the big tech firms are spending (what will likely approach) hundreds of billions of dollars in a race to "AGI", what matters to those same companies even more than winning is making sure that the winner isn't a winner takes all. In that case, hopefully the outcome looks more like open source.
I don’t see how that can be true, but if it is…
Either you, or I are definitely use Claude Code incorrectly.
It rears its head regardless of what sociopolitical environment you place us in.
You’re either competing to offer better products or services to customers…or you’re competing for your position in the breadline or politburo via black markets.
And, since there is no global super-state, the world economy is a market economy, so even if every state were a state-owned planned economy, North Korea style, still there would exist this type of competition between states.
Estimating productivity gains is a flame war I don’t want to start, but as a signal: if the CC Max plan goes up 10x in price, I’m still keeping my subscription.
I maintain top-tier subscription to every frontier service (~$1k/mo) and throughout the week spend multiple hours with each of Cursor, Amp, Augment, Windsurf, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, but keep on defaulting to Claude Code.
Ultimately, my not using the best tools for my personal research projects has zero effect on the world but I am still very curious what elite developers with the best tools can accomplish, and what capability I am ‘leaving on the table.’
Are you doing front end backend full stack or model development itself?
Are you destilling models for training your own?
I have never heard someone using so much subscription?
Is this for your full time job or startup?
Why not use qwen or deep seek and host it yourself?
I am impressed with what you are doing.
i found opus is significantly more capable in coding than sonnet, especcially for the task that is poorly defined, thinking mode can fulfill alot of missing detail and you just need to edit a little before let it code.
"Agentic" workflows burn through tokens like there's no tomorrow, and the new Opus model is so expensive per-token that the Max plan pays itself back in one or two days of moderate usage. When people reports their Claude Code sessions costing $100+ per day, I read that as the API price equivalent - it makes no sense to actually "pay as you go" with Claude right now.
This is arguably the cheapest option available on the market right now in terms of results per dollar, but only if you can afford the subscription itself. There's also time/value component here: on Max x5, it's quite easy to hit the usage limits of Opus (fortunately the limit is per 5 hours or so); Max x20 is only twice the price of Max x5 but gives you 4x more Opus; better model = less time spent fighting with and cleaning up after the AI. It's expensive to be poor, unfortunately.
I've yet to use anything but copilot in vscode, which is 1/2 the time helpful, and 1/2 wasting my time. For me it's almost break-even, if I don't count the frustration it causes.
I've been reading all these AI-related comment sections and none of it is convincing me there is really anything better out there. AI seems like break-even at best, but usually it's just "fighting with and cleaning up after the AI", and I'm really not interested in doing any of that. I was a lot happier when I wasn't constantly being shown bad code that I need to read and decide about, when I'm perfectly capable of writing the code myself without the hasle of AI getting in my way.
AI burnout is probably already a thing, and I'm close to that point already. I do not have hope that it will get much better than it is, as the core of the tech is essentially just a guessing game.
It is also BYOA or you can buy a subscription from Zed themselves and help them out. I currently use it with my free Copilot+ subscription (GitHub hands it out to pretty much any free/open source dev).
