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Comment by logicx24 | Hacker News Reader

I can't even get through my Claude Max quota, and that's only 200/mo. And I code every day and use it for various other pretty-intensive tasks.

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only $200/mo…$200 a month is a used car payment.

I guarantee you that price will double by 2027. Then it’ll be a new car payment!

I’m really not saying this to be snarky, I’m saying this to point out that we’re really already in the enshittification phase before the rapid growth phase has even ended. You’re paying $200 and acting like that’s a cheap SaaS product for an individual.

I pay less for Autocad products!

This whole product release is about maximizing your bill, not maximizing your productivity.

I don’t need agents to talk to each other. I need one agent to do the job right.

I could write an essay about how almost everything you wrote either is extremely incorrect or is extremely likely to be incorrect. I am too lazy to, though, so I will just have to wait for another commenter to do the equivalent.

Why not make your AI tool do it for you?

Because, while I have been a huge AI optimist for decades, I generally don't like their current writing output. And even if I did, it would feel like plagiarism unless I prepended it with "an AI responded with this:", which would make me seem lazy. (Though I did already just admit I am very lazy in my first post, so perhaps that is what I will do going forward once they become better writers.)

I pay $200/month, don’t come near the limits (yet), and if they raised the price to $1000/month for the exact same product I’d gladly pay it this afternoon (Don’t quote me on this Anthropic!)

If you’re not able to get US$thousands out of these models right now either your expectations are too high or your usage is too low, but as a small business owner and part/most-time SWE, the pricing is a rounding error on value delivered.

We’re gonna see an economic boom any minute.

As a business expense to make profit, I can understand being ok with this price point.

But as an individual with no profit motive, no way.

I use these products at work, but not as much personally because of the bill. And even if I decided I wanted to pursue a for profit side project I’d have to validate it’s viability before even considering a 200$ monthly subscription

You can do it for $40 month. What I'm doing:

- $20 for Claude Pro (Claude Code) - $20 for ChatGPT Plus (Codex) - Amp Free Plan (with ads and you get about $10 of daily value)

So you get to use 3 of the top coding agents for $40 month.

Some tools are not meant for individuals. That 100k software defined radio isn’t meant for you either.

I'm paying $100 per month even though I don't write code professionally. It is purely personal use. I've used the subscription to have Claude create a bunch of custom apps that I use in my daily life.

This did require some amount of effort on my part, to test and iterate and so on, but much less than if I needed to write all the code myself. And, because these programs are for personal use, I don't need to review all the code, I don't have security concerns and so on.

$100 every month for a service that writes me custom applications... I don't know, maybe I'm being stupid with my money, but at the moment it feels well worth the price.

I'm curious: what concrete value have you extracted using these tools that is worth US$thousands?

"Rounding error" lol, you can hire an actual full time human in India for $1000/month.

wouldn’t hire one for $15/month…

with the US salaries for SWEs $1000/month is not a rounding error for all but definitely for some. say you make $100/hr and CC saves you say 30hrs / month? not rounding error but no brainer. if you make $200+/hr it starts to become a rounding error. I have multiple max accounts at my disposal and at this point would for sure pay $1000/month for max plan. it comes down to simple math

Will they be better than Opus though?

Not saying $200/mo isn't a lot, but I think you're underestimating used car payments these days. The average US used car payment is above $500 now.

If you can’t get $200 of value out of Claude Code Max, then you need to really step up your game. That’s user error.

As company owner the math is simple:

If I pay $3k/month to a developer and a $200/month tool makes them 10% more productive I will pay it without thinking.

That's one of 3 possible futures.

1. 1-3 LLM vendors are substantially higher quality than other vendors and none of those are open source. This is an oligarchy and the scenario you described will play out.

2. >3 LLM vendors are all high quality and suitable for the tasks. At least one of these is open source. This is the "commodity" scenario, and we'll end up paying roughly the cost of inference. This still might be hundreds per month, though.

3. Somewhere in between. We've got >3 vendors, but 1-3 of them are somewhat better than the others, so the leaders can charge more. But not as much more than they can in scenario #1.

It's clear what's gonna play out. Chinese open source labs are slowly closing the gap, and as American frontier labs hit diminishing return on various tasks, the Chinese models are going to be good enough for the vast majority of use cases. This is going to strip American labs ability to do monopoly plays, and force them into open behavior.

The only place frontier labs will be able to profit take is niche models for specific purposes where they can control who has access to traces tightly. Any general pupose LLM with highly available traces is gonna get distilled down instantly.

$200/month is peanuts when you are a business paying your employees $200k/year. I think LLMs make me at least 10% more effective and therefore the cost to my employer is very worth it. Lots of trades have much more expensive tools (including cars).

> I think LLMs make me at least 10% more effective

I know this was last year but...

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

I don’t need external research to validate or invalidate my own experience.

I think it depends on the tasks you use it for. Bootstrapping or translating projects between languages is amazing. New feature development? Questionable.

New feature development in web and mobile apps is absolutely 10% more productive with these tools, and anyone who says otherwise is coping. That's a large fraction of software development.

They're hoping they still have a moat.

I don’t write frontend stuff, but sometimes need to fix a frontend bug.

Yesterday I fed claude very surgical instructions on how the bug happens, and what I want to happen instead, and it oneshot the fix. I had a solution in about 5 minutes, whereas it would have taken me at least an hour, but most likely more time to get to that point.

Literally an hour or two of my day was saved yesterday. I am salaried at around $250/hour, so in that one interaction AI saved my employer $250-500 in wages.

AI allows me to be a T shaped developer, I have over a decade of deep experience in infrastructure, but know fuck all about front end stuff. But having access to AI allows me as an individual who generally knows how computers work to fix a simple problem which is not in my domain.

Maybe this is a gray area, but that's kind of my experience with it too. I understand what I want to happen, but don't understand the language and it produces a language specific result that is close enough, maybe even one-shot, for me to use. I categorize this under translation.

It also depends upon how you manage it

My process, which probably wouldn't work with concurrent agents because I'm keeping an eye on it, is basically:

- "Read these files and write some documentation on how they work - put the documentation in the docs folder" (putting relevant files into the context and giving it something to refer to later on)

- "We need to make change X, give me some options on how to do it" (making it plan based on that context)

- "I like option 2 - but we also need to take account of Y - look at these other files and give me some more options" (make sure it hasn't missed anything important)

- "Revised option 4 is great - write a detailed to-do list in the docs/tasks folder" (I choose the actual design, instead of blindly accepting what it proposes)

- I read the to-do list and get it rewritten if there's anything I'm not happy with

- I clear the context window

- "Read the document in the docs folder and then this to-do list in the docs/tasks folder - then start on phase 1"

- I watch what it's doing and stop if it goes off on one (rare, because the context window should be almost empty)

- Once done, I give the git diffs a quick review - mainly the tests to make sure it's checking the right things

- Then I give it feedback and ask it to fix the bits I'm not happy with

- Finally commit, clear context and repeat until all phases are done

Most of the time this works really well.

Yesterday I gave it a deep task, that touched many aspects of the app. This was a Rails app with a comprehensive test suite - so it had lots of example code to read, plus it could give itself definite end points (they often don't know when to stop). I estimated it would take me 3-4 days for me complete the feature by hand. It made a right mess of the UI but it completed the task in about 6 hours, and I spent another 2 hours tidying it up and making it consistent with the visuals elsewhere (the logic and back-end code was fine).

So either my original estimate is way off, or it has saved me a good amount of time there.

When you say "it" completed the task in 6 hours, do you mean with you in the loop or running autonomously for hours after a certain point?

One of the outcomes of that study is that your own productivity estimate might not match up with reality.

Maybe for the developers who weren't very productive to begin with, and got even lazier now.

The flat earther argument.

“The research is wrong.”

I proposed a logically consistent perspective where both my experience and the study are true at the same time? What is your response to that other than comparing me to a flat earther? Do you have something useful to contribute?

I wasn't even responding to you.

Sorry

Yes, the research is wrong. And in science, it's not taboo to call that out.

It's outdated, doesn't differentiate between people trying to incorporate it in their current workflow and the people who apply themselves to entirely new ones. It doesn't represent me in any way and I am releasing features to my platform daily now, instead of weekly. So I can wholeheartedly disagree with its conclusion.

The earth is either flat of it isn't. It's easy to proof it's not flat. It's not easy to conclude that the results of a study in a field that changes daily represents all people working in it, including the ones who did not participate.

If it is so self-evident that the research is wrong, that means there should be some research that supports the opposite conclusion then? Maybe you can link it?

No.

The reason we don’t see any other research is because it’s neigh impossible to study a moving field. Especially at this pace.

If you have any ideas on how to measure objectively while this landscape changes daily, please share them with us. Maybe a researcher will jump on this bandwagon and proof you right.

Good excuse.

Honestly, that is a “skill issue” as the kids these days say. When used properly and with skill, agents can increase your productivity. Like any tool, use it wrong and your life will be worse off. The logically consistent view if you want to believe this study and my experience is that the average person is hindered by using AI because they do not have the skills, but there are people out there who gain a net benefit.

It drives me nuts that people take the mean of AI code generation results and use that to make claims about what AI code generation is possible of. It's like using the mean basketball player to argue that people like LeBron and Jordan don't exist.

No, we just want to point out not everybody utilizing agents ends up like LeBron or Jordan - most are Brian Scalabrine.

For sure. I like having discussions with nuanced takes, these are tools with strengths and weaknesses and being a good tool user includes knowing when not to pick it up.

It’s a skill issue, which means you can’t fire any of your highly skilled employees, which means it has the same value as any other business organization tool like Jira or Microsoft Excel, approximately $10-20 per user per month.

Autodesk Fusion for manufacturing costs less than Claude Max and you literally can’t do your job without it.

So Autodesk takes you from 0 to 100% productivity for under $200 a month and companies are expected to pay $200+ to gain an extra 10-20%?

That math isn’t how it works with any other business logic tools.

> I’m saying this to point out that we’re really already in the enshittification phase before the rapid growth phase has even ended. You’re paying $200 and acting like that’s a cheap SaaS product for an individual.

Traditional SaaS products don't write code for me. They also cost much less to run.

I'm having a lot of trouble seeing this as enshittification. I'm not saying it won't happen some day, but I don't think we're there. $200 per month is a lot, but it depends on what you're getting. In this case, I'm getting a service that writes code for me on demand.

Traditional SaaS products literally “write code” for you (they implement business logic). See: Zapier, Excel.

The enshittification is that the costs are going up faster than inflation and companies like OpenAI are talking about adding advertisements.

https://www.fintechweekly.com/magazine/articles/cursor-prici...

https://hostbor.com/claude-ai-max-plan-explained/

We can see especially in the case of Claude AI Max that while it sounds like you’re getting better value than the cheaper plans, the company is now encouraging less efficient use of the tool (having multiple agents talking to each other, rather than improving models so that one agent is doing work correctly).

> Traditional SaaS products literally “write code” for you (they implement business logic). See: Zapier, Excel.

Eh, I'd call those a sort of programming language. The user is still writing code, albeit in a "friendlier" manner. You can't just ask for what you want in English.

> The enshittification is that the costs are going up faster than inflation and companies like OpenAI are talking about adding advertisements.

In 1980, IT would have cost $0 at most companies. It's okay for costs to go up if you're getting a service you were not getting before.

In 1980, the costs associated with what we today call IT were not $0, they were just spread around in administrative clerical duties performed by a lot of humans.

Okay, but I think the analogy still works with that framing. These AI products can do tasks that would previously have been performed by a larger number of humans.

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