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Mind sharing the bill for all that?

My company pays for the team Claude code plan which is like $200 a month for each dev. The workflows cost like 10 - 50 cents a PR

It's $150, not a huge difference but worth noting that it's not the same ast the 20x Max plan.

It will have to quintuple or more to make business sense for Anthropic. Sure, still cheaper than a full time developer, but don't expect it to stay at $200 for a long time. And then, when you explain to your boss how amazing it is, and can do all this work so easily and quickly, it's when your boss start asking the real question: what am I paying you for?

More fundamentally: assume a 10 to 30% bump in actual productivity, find a niche (editing software, CRUD frameworks, SharePoint 2.0, stock trading, betting, whatever), and assume you had Anthropics billions or openAIs billions or Microsoft’s billions or Googles billions.

Why on earth would you be hunting $20 a month subscriptions from random assed people? Peanuts.

Lockheed-Martin could be, but isn’t, opening lemonade stands outside their offices… they don’t because of how buying a Ferrari works.

They data farming your intelligence

> Why on earth would you be hunting $20 a month subscriptions from random assed people? Peanuts.

For the same reason Microsoft never has and never will chase people for pirating home Windows or Office licenses

When they hit the workforce, or even better, start a company guess which OS and office suite they'll use? Hint: It's not Linux and Openoffice.

Same with Claude's $20 package. It lets devs use it at home and then compare it to the Copilot shit their company is pushing on them. Maybe they either grumble enough to get a Claude license or they're in a position to make the call.

Cheap advertising pretty much.

Worked for me too :) I've paid my own Claude license for over a year at home, grumbled at work and we got a Claude pilot going now - and everyone who's tried it so far isn't going back to Copilot + Sonnet 4.5/GPT5.

A programmer, if we use US standards is probably $8000 per month. If you can get 30% more value out of that programmer (trust me, its WAY more then 30%), you gained $2400 of value. If you pay $200, $500, $1000 for that, its still a net positive. Ignoring the salary range of a actual senior...

LLMs do not result in bosses firing people, it results in more projects / faster completed projects, what in turn means more $$$ for a company.

All the evidence suggests that inference is quite profitable actually.

Im not sure about this. What they really need is to get rid of the free tier and widespread adoption. Inference on the $200 plan seems to be profitable right now so they just need more users to amortize training costs.

Cheaper than hiring another developer, probably. My experience: for a few dollars I was able to extensively refactor a Python codebase in half a day. This otherwise would have taken multiple days of very tedious work.

And that's what the C-suite wants to know. Prepare yourself to be replaced in the not so distant future. Hope you have a good "nest" to support yourself when you're inevitably fired.

You say this like it's some kind of ominous revelation, but that's just how capitalism works? Yeah, prepare for the future. All things are impermanent.

I suppose as long as either humans are always able to use new tools to create new jobs, or the wealth gets shared in a fully automated society, it won't be ominous. There are other scenarios.

I think we might make new jobs, but maybe not enough. I'll be pleasantly surprised if we get good at sharing wealth over the next few years. Maybe something like UBI will become so obviously necessary that it becomes politically feasible, I don't know. I suspect we'll probably limp along for awhile in mediocrity. Then we'll die. Same as it ever was. The important thing is to have fun with it.

> Yeah, prepare for the future.

Well excuse the shit out of my goddamn French, but being comfy for years and suddenly facing literal doom of my profession in a year wasn't on my bingo card.

And what do you even mean by "prepare"? Shit out a couple of mil out of my ass and invest asap?

>And what do you even mean by "prepare"?

Not the person you're responding to but... if you think it's a horse -> car change (and, to stretch the metaphor, if you think you're in the business of building stables) then preparation means train in another profession.

If you think it's a hand tools -> power tools change, learn how to use the new tools so you don't get left behind.

My opinion is it's a hand -> power tools change, and that LLMs give me the power to solve more problems for clients, and do it faster and more predictably than a client trying to achieve the same with an LLM. I hope I'm right :-)

That's a good analogy. I'm on team hand tools to power tools too.

Why do you suppose that these tools will conveniently stop improving at some point that increases your productivity but are still too much for your clients to use for themselves?

Because I've seen how difficult it is to get a client to explain to me what they need their software to do.

And so the AI will develop the skills to interview the client and determine what they really need. There are textbooks written on how to do this, it's not going to be hard to incorporate into the training.

Sharpen sticks, hoard water maybe? We were always going to die someday, I don't see how this changes things.

Well probably OP won't be affected because management is very pleased with him and his output, why would they fire him? Hire someone who can probably have better output than him for 10% more money or someone who might have the same output for 25% less pay?

You think any manager in their right mind would take risks like that?

I think the real consequences are that they probably are so pleased with how productive the team is becoming that they will not hire new people or fire the ones who aren't keeping up with the times.

It's like saying "wow, our factory just produced 50% more cars this year, time to shut down half the factory to reduce costs!"

> You think any manager in their right mind would take risks like that?

You really underestimate stupidity of your average manager. Two of our top performers left because they were underpaid and the manager (in charge of the comp) never even tried to retain them.

That's one kind of stupidity. Actually firing the golden goose is one step further

I bet they weren't as valuable as you think. This is a common issue with certain high performing line delivery employees (particularly those with technical skills, programmers, lawyers, accountants, etc), they always think they are carrying the whole team/company on their shoulders. It almost never turns out to be the case. The machine will keep grinding.

> Prepare yourself to be replaced in the not so distant future.

Ignoring that this same developer, now has access to a tool, that makes himself a team.

Going independent was always a issue because being a full stack dev, is hard. With LLMs, you have a entire team behind you for making graphics, code, documents, etc... YOU becomes the manager.

We will see probably a lot more smaller teams/single devs making bigger projects, until they grow.

The companies that think they can fire devs, are the same companies that are going to go too far, and burn bridges. Do not forget that a lot of companies are founded on devs leaving a company, and starting out on their own, taking clients with them!

I did that years ago, and it worked for a while but eventually the math does not work out because one guy can only do so much. And when you start hiring, your costs balloon. But with LLMs ... Now your a one man team, ... hiring a second person is not hiring a person to make some graphics or doing more coding. Your hiring another team.

This is what people do not realize... they look too much upon this as the established order, ignoring what those fired devs now can do!

This sounds nice, except for the fact that almost everyone else can do this, too. Or at least try to, resulting in a fast race to the bottom.

Do you really want to be a middle manager to a bunch of text boxes, churning out slop, while they drive up our power bills and slowly terraform the planet?

> except for the fact that almost everyone else can do this, too. Or at least try to, resulting in a fast race to the bottom.

Ironically, that race to the bottom is no different then we already have. Have you already worked for a company before? A lot of software is developed, BADLY. I dare to say that a lot of software that Opus 4.5 generates, is often a higher quality then what i have seen in my 25 year carrier.

The amount of companies that cheapen out, hiring juniors fresh from school, to work as coding monkies is insane. Then projects have bugs / security issues, with tons of copy/pasted code, or people not knowing a darn thing.

Is that any different then your feared future? I dare to say, that LLms like Opus are frankly better then most juniors. As a junior to do a code review for security issues. Opus literally creates extensive tests, points out issues that you expect from a mid or higher level dev. Of course, you need to know to ask! You are the manager.

> Do you really want to be a middle manager to a bunch of text boxes, churning out slop, while they drive up our power bills and slowly terraform the planet?

Frankly, yes ... If you are a real developer, do you still think development is fun after 10 years, 20 years? Doing the exact same boring work. Reimplementing the 1001 login page, the 101 contact form ... A ton of our work is in reality repeating the same crap over and over again. And if we try to bypass it, we end up tied to tied to those systems / frameworks that often become a block around our necks.

Our industry has a lot of burnout because most tasks may start small but then grow beyond our scope. Todays its ruby on rails programming, then its angular, no wait, react, no wait, Vue, no wait, the new hotness is whatever again.

> slowly terraform the planet?

Well, i am actually making something.

Can you say the same for all the power / gpu draw with bitcoin, Ethereum whatever crap mining. One is productive, a tool with insane potential and usage, the other is a virtual currency where only one is ever popular with limited usage. Yet, it burns just as much for a way more limited return of usability.

Those LLMs that you are so against, make me a ton more productive. You wan to to try out something, but never really wanted to get committed because it was weeks of programming. Well, now you as manager, can get projects done fast. Learn from them way faster then your little fingers ever did.

The same way that having motorized farming equipment was a race to the bottom for farmers? Perhaps. Turned out to be a good outcome for most involved.

Just like farmers who couldn't cope with the additional leverage their equipment provided them, devs who can't leverage this technology will have to "go to the cities".

Please do read up on how farmers are doing with this race to the bottom (it hasn't been pretty). Mega farms are a thing because small farms simply can't compete. Small farmers have gone broke. The parent comment is trying to highlight this.

If LLM's turn out the way C-Suite hopes. Let me tell you, you will be in a world of pain. Most of you won't be using LLM's to create your own businesses.

But modern tillage/petrol based farming is an unsustainable aberration. Maybe a good example for this discussion, but in the opposite direction if it is.

LOL what an argument.

Seeing the replies here it actually doesn't seem like everyone else can do this. Looks like a lot of people really suck at using LLMs to me.

I'm not saying they can all do it now... but I don't think it's much of a stretch that they can learn it quickly and cheaply.

Homey, we're going to be replacing you devs that can't stand to use LLMs lol

i've never hit a limit with my $200 a month plan

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