Stop over-thinking AI subscriptions
steipete.me
steipete.me
I wish I could get some examples of this. I remember asking seniors for help on problems and they could help in minutes what would take me hours. And, likewise, I’ve had people ask me for a minute of help to stop them being blocked for days.
It surprised me that people would block for days and I wonder what that looked like. Do they just stare at the screen, walk around, play candy crush?
I’m trying to figure out if the author is a junior, average, or senior programmer and what they get stuck on would be something that a good programmer learns how to debug around. So you can finally get a good ROI on being a good programmer by comparing the time to what an AI would cost.
I similarly get confused about normal blocking. I genuinely don’t understand it. I get procrastination. I go for runs during work. But rarely is something genuinely so much that it’ll take hours of programming.
Edit: of course some tasks take multiple days. But visible progress is almost always achieved on the scale of hours not days.
If you want it to be human readable you can use iXBRL which is embedded in HTML.
One reason to use LLMs is to understand when and how to use them properly. They're like an instrument you have to learn. Once you do that, they're like a bicycle for your mind.
Here ya go, fixed your analogy
or wait... https://github.com/elder-plinius/CL4R1T4S nah, they are very much the same when it comes to prompting
Is the argument that by using these AI subscriptions, you have free time that didn't have before and now you work less hours? Or that the extra productivity you get from that AI subscription allows you to charge more per hour? or maybe that you can do more projects simultaneously, and therefore get more $ per day?
Otherwise I don't get how the AI subscription "pays for itself".
That's why anyone suggesting AI won't take your jobs is delusional. We will need significantly less developer time.
I think there will be more work for developers, but it will be harder to slack off.
Maybe I'll program my oven to cook the pizza at a slightly lower temperature, but crisp the living carbon out of it for the final 90 seconds. Just like I'm doing manually now, but less prone to errors because I ignored the pizza while browsing HN and can smell it bur.......
My pizza!
Paying programmers by the hour always seemed weird for me because of the productivity spikes. I prefer paying by the job or just buying a weekly block that assumes someone works full time on my project.
I would be annoyed with a consultant who billed me for 4 hours when it was 30 minutes of work and an estimated savings from using AI.
What I hate is that I will not pay more than 20-50$ per month for side projects and that gap annoys me.
If a task takes you five hours to do without AI and 1 hour with AI charged at 100$, in the without-AI case you're making 500$, in the with-AI case you're making 100$ - price_of_AI, right?
Otherwise your example assumes you're charging someone 5 hours of work when in reality it took you 1 hour and then you spent an additional 4 hours watching TV.
In any case this thinking exercise made me realize that maybe it's more about staying competitive against other peers than about "AI paying for itself". If you're really charging for hours of work, then it is really a competitive advantage against people not using AI.
Assuming an AI-enhanced contractor can do the same amount of work than a non-AI-enhanced contractor in fewer hours, then I'd assume they would get more contracts, because the overall project is cheaper for whoever is hiring them. Does that really lead to you making more money, though? No idea honestly. Probably not? I just can't see how using AI "pays for itself". At best you're making now less money than before, because you're required to pay for the AI subscription if you want to stay competitive.
I'm a big fan of two-tier systems where the 90% case is taken on by something cheap, and renting the premium tier. Works for cars, server hosting, dining ...
For investigating concepts, can AI for this at all? Subscriptions will be a better approach.
Local models are underutilized in comparison to the promise they have. Imagine browser-agnostic universal AdBlock and that's just the surface.
If I worked on a codebase I couldn’t send to the hosted tools I’d go this route in a heartbeat.
Even assuming you generate 100 tok/second, 24 hr, that's only 8 mil tokens. About $5 for Gemini 2.5 Flash or $50 for 2.5 Pro. But you will not be able to run it 24/7 locally - sleep, thinking between prompts, etc
Even at continuous usage (24 hr/day), it's still cheaper to just pay Google for Gemini 2.5 Flash tokens for half a year.
And this is NOT taking into account that mistral/devstral/qwen3 are vastly inferior models.
How can Google be so cheap? TPUs, batching multiple requests, economy of scale, loss-leader, ...
Running stuff locally makes sense for fun, as backup for loss of connectivity, if you want to try uncensored models, but it doesn't make sense economically.
I think if you’re comparing it to Claude max it’s ok, but the payback period on GitHub copilot for example is almost 7 years.
This is probably the easiest problem to solve, isn't it? Most tools offer a n API endpoint setup that you can use locally and also expose on a local network easily.
I would appreciate a less "just take my money" and more "here are features various tools offer for particular price, I chose x over y cos z". Would sound more informed.
Would also like to see a reason on not using open source tools and locking yourself out of various further ai-integration opportunities because $200/mo service doesn't support em.
I still haven't managed to make the mcp proxy server reliable enough, but looks promising. If it works, the model would have pretty direct access to the codebase, although any tool call is requires a new chat box.
I guess aider in copy-paste mode would be another solution for cheapskates like myself (not a dev and I barely do any programming, but I like to tinker).