> I use it at home via the $20/m subscription and am piloting it at work via AWS Bedrock. When used with Bedrock APIs, at the end of every session it shows you the dollar amount spent which is a bit disconcerting. I hope the fine-grained metering of inference is a temporary situation otherwise I think it will have a chilling/discouraging effect on software developers, leading to less experimentation and fewer rewrites, overall lower quality.

I’m legitimately surprised at your feeling on this. I might not want the granular cost put in my face constantly but I do like the ability to see how much my queries cost when I am experimenting with prompt setup for agents. Occasionally I find wording things one way or the other has a significantly cheaper cost.

Why do you think it will lead to a chilling effect instead of the normal effect of engineers ruthlessly innovating costs down now that there is a measurable target?

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mwigdahl 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve seen it firsthand at work, where my developers are shy about spending even a single digit number of dollars on Claude Code, even when it saves them 10 times that much in opportunity cost. It’s got to be some kind of psychological loss aversion effect.

	▲	threecheese 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Years of being hammered to reduce reduce reduce in monthly cloud spend certainly makes us cost-averse. In reality you are completely correct wrt the real value, and leadership will always see this (hopefully), but I still don’t want to hear my name spoken in our monthly budget review.

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jasonthorsness 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it’s easy to spend _time_ when the reward is intangible or unlikely, like an evening writing toy applications to learn something new or prototyping some off-the-wall change in a service that might have an interesting performance impact. If development becomes metered in both time and to-the-penny dollars, I at least will have to fight the attitude that the rewards also need to be more concrete and probable.