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Comment by sodapopcan | Hacker News Reader

I do not pay for any AI nor does my employer pay for it on my behalf. It will stay this way for as long as I can make that work while remaining employed.

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Are you a programmer?

The $20/mo I pay is quite affordable given the ROI.

I could see jumping between various free models.

I am. I use Deepseek and free-tier ChatJippity and as a sometimes-better search.

EDIT: I also wasn't going to say it but it's not about the money for me, I just don't want to support any of these companies. I'm happy waste their resources for my benefit but I don't lean on it too often.

Well that's your problem, you are using Deepseek.

Its not even SOTA open source anymore, let alone competitive with GPT/Gemini/Grok.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Wasn't my point.

But this matters for your usage of LLMs.

I couldnt use GPT3 for coding and deepseek is at GPT3 + COT levels.

You're a little too focused on my dig about it being a "sometimes better search" which is fair.

I'm not going to be sending money every month to billion dollars companies who capitulate to a goon threatening to annex my country. I accept whatever consequences that has on my programming career.

Okay so you have some cognitive bias that is ruining your ability to make good decisions. Yikes.

Hush, child.

With the $20/month claude subscription I frequently run into the session limit in after-work hobby projects. If the majority of your dayjob is actual programming (and not people management, requirements engineering, qa, etc, which is admittedly the reality of many "developer" jobs) the $200/month version seems almost required to have a productive coding assistant

How are you using it? I'm curious if you hit the limit so quickly because you're running it with Claude Code and so it's loading your whole project into its context, making tons of iterations, etc., or if you're using the chat and just asking focused questions and having it build out small functions or validate code quality of a file, and still hitting the limit with that.

Not because I think either way is better, just because personally I work well with AI in the latter capacity and have been considering subscribing to Claude, but don't know how limiting the usage limits are.

The $20/month will go fast if you're trying to drive the LLM to do all the coding.

It also goes very fast if you don't actively manage your context by clearing it frequently for new tasks and keeping key information in a document to reference each session. Claude will eat through context way too fast if you just let it go.

For true vibecoding-style dev where you just prompt the LLM over and over until things are done, I agree that $100 or $200 plans would be necessary though.

Thats like being proud of not using google or stackoverflow and only reading manuals, or using notepad instead of an IDE (or editor with language server support).

A 10$ GitHub Copilot or 20$ ChatGPT/Claude subscription get you a long way.

And if the employer isn't willing to spend this little money to improve their workers productivity they're pretty dumb.

There are valid concerns like privacy and oss licences. But lack of value or gain in productivity isn't one of them.

What kind of work do you do?

I'm a developer.

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