I think it depends a lot on how you value your time. I'm personally willing to spend hundreds or thousands per month happily if it saves me enough hours. I'd estimate that if I were to do consulting, I'd likely be charging in the $150-250 per hour range, so by my math, it's pretty easy to justify any tools that save me even a few hours per month.

Or, increasingly, how the company values your time. If Claude Code can make a $100K/year dev 10% more productive, it's worth it to the employer to pay anything under $1600/month for it (assuming fully loaded cost of the employee to the business is twice salary).

ok but in what way a terminal is a bettter UI than an IDE? I am trying all of them on a weekly basis and windsurf UX seems miles ahead/ more efficient than a terminal. that is also what OAI believes or else they wouldnt try to buy it

Are you still working 40 hours a week? If so, what's the difference?

You get the same results for cheaper by using a different tool (Windsurf's better imho).

How do you price this in? If you’re charging by the hour, paying out of pocket to reduce your hours seems self-defeating unless you raise your rates enough to cover both the costs and the lost hours. I can’t imagine too many clients would accept “I’m very expensive per hour because I’m fast, because I get AI to do most of it.”

> if it saves me enough hours

You're being paid to type? I want your job.