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Comment by MeetingsBrowser | Hacker News Reader

I pay for the lowest plan. I used to struggle to hit my quota.

Now a single question consistently uses around 15% of my quota

My take is that was the plan all along.

Once people won't be able to think anymore and business expect the level of productivity witnessed before, will have no choice but cough up whatever providers bill us.

Didn't they move too soon then? People haven't forgotten how to tie their shoelaces (yet). And anyway, they'll just move to a different model; last holdout wins.

Too abruptly for sure.

They probably don't have much choice with burn rates and investors, tbh. Market is shaky, etc.

"enshittification" gets thrown around a lot, but this is the exact playbook. Look at the previous bubble's cash cow: advertising.

Online advertising is now ubiquitous, terrible, and mandatory for anyone who wants to do e-commerce. You can't run a mass-market online business without buying Adwords, Instagram Ads, etc.

AI will be ubiquitous, and then it will get worse and more expensive. But we will be unable to return to the prior status quo.

The odds of that happening are high. Trillions invested.

It occurred to me an outright rejections of these tools is brewing but can't quite materialise yet.

Trillions promised.

But why would they make the product shittier and not just more expensive? A lot of the complaints have been the model getting lost and going rogue.

Because sometimes you can make more money by reducing costs and making something shittier (especially if you do it covertly), compared to increasing prices.

I suspect more customers are lost a lot faster when you increase prices, compared to enshittifying the product. It's also a lot more directly attributable to an action, and thus easier for an executive to be blamed if they choose the former over the latter.

Why isn't there a premium, ad-free Google Search (or Facebook, or Instagram)? Because the most valuable customers (with the most money) self-select out of seeing ads. It would collapse the 2-sided market and create a race to the bottom. There is a dollar amount of advertising revenue per customer, but as John Wannamaker said - "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half".

If the AI companies made their pricing "pay as you go" without quotas, a few insane zealots (power users) would occupy all the capacity and choke everyone else out. Regardless of the cost, the AI providers would lose the ubiquity they currently enjoy, and become a niche tool for rich tech people. They would rather be a mile wide and an inch deep, doing a worse job serving millions of users, because there's a better scaling narrative for legislating and fundraising that way. Like the advertisers there are intolerable indirect effects of letting valuable "power users" spend more money to get a better experience.

And it’s working larger because the other models haven’t figured out how to provide a consistent, long running experience.

>and business expect the level of productivity witnessed before, will have no choice but cough up whatever providers bill us.

Is that bad? After all, even if they hiked to price infinity, you wouldn't worse off than if AI didn't exist because you could still code by hand. Moreover if it's really in a "business" (employment?) context, the tools should be provided by your employer, not least for compliance/security reasons. The "expectation" angle doesn't make sense either. If it's actually more efficient than coding by hand, people will eventually adopt it, word will get around and expectations will rise irrespective of whether you used it or not.

This comment reads as trying on principle to defend the use of AI.

My argument was not about AI. Rather about the practice of Anthropic and the likes.

The insidious part is the thought that if you spend your limited learning and recall on AI Tools, then you wont be able to "still code by hand" because you'll have lost the skill, then there will be a local minima to cross to get back to human level productivity. Of course you'll get PIPed before you get back to full capacity.

> if they hiked to price infinity, you wouldn't worse off than if AI didn't exist because you could still code by hand

This was addressed by the words that you perhaps mistakenly omitted from your quote:

> Once people won't be able to think anymore...

People who aren't able to think anymore, can't still code by hand. Think "Idiocracy".

>People who aren't able to think anymore,

OpenAI and Anthropic have been getting stingy with their plans and it's only it's been what, 1 year, maybe 2 since vibecoding was widely used in a professional context (ie. not just hacking together a MVP for a SaaS side hustle in a weekend)? I doubt people are going to lose their ability to think in that timespan.

I think you're 100% correct that people won't lose the ability. There's a scary thing I see as a person who works with and recruits students and fresh graduates -- they might not have spent the time to get the skills in the first place.

I'm on the Free tier using Claude exclusively for consultation (send third party codebase + ask why/where is something done). I also used to struggle to hit limits. Recently I was able hit the limit after a single prompt.

What plan are you using?

> What plan are you using?

OP wrote "I pay for the lowest plan", so that’s the $20/mo one.

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