Reading Steve Yegge's article on how he uses AI to program, and one thing that stands out starkly to me: he's spending about $2800 a month in tokens by buying multiple Claude Max accounts.
There's a somewhat un-remarked-upon aspect of the hacking experience, culture, lifestyle, what have you... The tools are cheap. Yes, the computer itself is a base cost to get involved, but we've driven the price of having a computer into the ground by ubiquity. And once you have one, traditionally... The world is your oyster. Outside of some esoteric spaces, if you want to program something, the barrier to entry is knowledge, not money, and that matters, both to the things people do and the self-image of the hacker. Even commercial tools frequently have cheaper open source counterparts, even if they're crummier.
An approach that requires $3,000 a month isn't that, and if that becomes mainstream for programming that will change the flavor of the experience.
In the short run, this makes me more excited to see what can be done with models that can fit on a graphics card, even if we aren't orchestrating then to code while we sleep.
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