What would the average software engineer pay for a AI coding subscription, as compared to not having any at all? Running a survey on that question would give some interesting results.
Simple queries like: "Find a good compression library that meets the following requirements: ..." and then "write a working example that takes this data, compresses it and writes it to output buffer" are worth multiple hours I would otherwise need to spend on it.
If I wanted to ship commercial software again I would pay much more.
For a few months I used Gemini Pro, there was a period when it was better than OpenAI's model but they did something and now it's worse even though it answers faster so I cancelled my Google One subscription.
I tried Claude Code over a few weekends, it definitely can do tiny projects quickly but I work in an industry where I need to understand every line of code and basically own my projects so it's not useful at all. Also, doing anything remotely complex involves so many twists I find the net benefit negative. Also because the normal side-effects of doing something is learning, and here I feel like my skills devolve.
I also occasionally use Cerebras for quick queries, it's ultrafast.
I also do a lot of ML so use Vast.ai, Simplepod, Runpod and others - sometimes I rent GPUs for a weekend, sometimes for a couple of months, I'm very happy with the results.
So, what did you learn from that project??
I learned how andible, terraform, and docker approach dev ops and infra.
I would not be able to hand cook anything with these tools but understanding the syntax was a non goal (nor what interests me).