> I am at the tail end of AI adoption, so I don’t expect to say anything particularly useful or novel.

Are they really late? Has everyone started using agents and paying $200 subscriptions?

Am I the one wrong here or these expressions of "falling behind" are creating weird FOMO in the industry?

EDIT: I see the usefulness of these tools, however I can't estimate how many people use them.

>Has everyone started using agents and paying $200 subscriptions?

If anything in my small circle the promise is waning a bit, in that even the best models on the planet are still kinda shitty for big project work. I work as a game dev and have found agents to only be mildly useful to do more of what I've already laid out, I only pay for the $100 annual plan with jetbrains and that's plenty. I haven't worked at a big business in a while, but my ex-coworkers are basically the same. a friend only uses chat now because the agents were "entirely useless" for what he was doing.

I'm sure someone is getting use out of them making the 10 billionth node.js express API, but not anyone I know.

Definitely FOMO. I have tried it once or twice and saw absolutely zero value in it. I will stick to writing the code by hand, even if it's "boring" parts. If I have to sit down and review it anyway, I can also go and write it myself.

Especially considering that these 200$ subscriptions are just the start because those companies are still mostly operating at a loss.

It's either going to be higher fees or Ads pushed into the responses. Last I need is my code sprinkled with Ads.

> Are they really late? Has everyone started using agents and paying $200 subscriptions?

The $20/month subscriptions go a long way if you're using the LLM as an assistant. Having a developer in the loop to direct, review, and write some of the code is much more token efficient than trying to brute force it by having the LLM try things and rewrite until it looks like what you want.

If you jump to the other end of the spectrum and want to be in the loop as little as possible, the $100/$200 subscriptions start to become necessary.

My primary LLM use case is as a hyper-advanced search. I send the agent off to find specific parts of a big codebase I'm looking for and summarize how it's connected. I can hit the $20/month windowed limits from time to time on big codebases, but usually it's sufficient.

I can't figure out if I'm at the tail end of adoption, or the leading edge of disillusionment. I guess being able to say where you are in relation to the herd, depends on knowing where the herd is and which way it's headed. Which I don't know. All I know is, it seems to take longer to write the prompt, wait for the output, and then verify/correct the output, iteratively mind you, than to just write the goddamn code. And said process, in addition to being equal or longer, is also boring as fuck the entire time, and deeply annoying about half the time. Nobody is pressuring me to use it, but if this is the future, then I'm ready to change to a different career where I actually enjoy the work.

Regarding the $200 subscription. For Claude Code with Opus (and also Sonnet) you need that, yes.

I had ChatGPT Codex GPT5.2 high reasoning running on my side project for multiple hours the last nights. It created a server deployment for QA and PROD + client builds. It waited for the builds to complete, got the logs from Github Actions and fixed problems. Only after 4 days of this (around 2-4 hours) active coding I reached the weekly limit for the ChatGPT Plus Plan (23€). Far better value so far.

To be fully honest, it fucked up one flyway script. I have to fix this now my self :D. Will write a note in the Agent.md to never alter existing scripts. But the work otherwise was quite solid and now my server is properly deployed. If I would switch between High reasoning for Planing and Middle reasoning for coding, I would get even more usage.

I've paid, but I am usually quick to adopt/trial things like this.

I think for me it's a case of fear of being left behind rather than missing out.

I've been a developer for over 20 years, and the last six months has blown me away with how different everything feels.

This isn't like JQuery hitting the scene, PHP going OO or one of the many "this is a game changer" experiences if I've had in my career before.

This is something else entirely.

> Are they really late? Has everyone started using agents and paying $200 subscriptions?

No, most programmers I know outside of my own work (friends, family, and old college pals) don't use AI at all. They just don't care.

I personally use Cursor at work and enjoy it quite a bit, but I think the author is maybe at the tail end of _their circle's_ adoption, but not the industry's.

I do not pay for any AI nor does my employer pay for it on my behalf. It will stay this way for as long as I can make that work while remaining employed.

I have a really simple app that I asked various models to build, but it requires interacting with an existing website.

(“Scrape kindle highlights from the kindle webpage, store it in a database, and serve it daily through an email digest”).

No success so far in getting it to do so without a lot of handholding and manually updating the web scraping logic.

It’s become something of a litmus test for me.

So, maybe there is some FOMO but in my experience it’s a lot of snake oil. Also at work, I manage a team of engineers and like 2 out of 12 clearly submit AI generated code. Others stopped using it, or just do a lot more wrangling of the output.

For the past 20 years the population of the internet has been increasingly sorted into filter bubbles, designed by media corporations which are incentivized to use dark patterns and addictive design to hijack the human brain by weaponizing its own emotions against and creating the illusion of popular consensus. To suggest that someone who has been vibecoding for only a few months is at the tail end of mass adoption is to reveal that one's brain has been pickled by exposure to Twitter. These tools are still extremely undercooked; insert the "meet potential man" meme here.

Is it FOMO if for $100 a month you can build things that takes months, and then refine them and polish them, test them, and have them more stable than most non-AI code has been for the last decade plus? I blame Marketing Driven development for why software has gone downhill. Look at Windows as a great example. "We can fix that later" is a lie, but not with a coding agent. You can fix it now.

A bulk of developers are probably on claude $20 or cursor waiting for their company to pay up.

When fortune 500, 100 and 50 organizations are buying AI coding tools at scale (I know from personal exp), then I would say you're late. So yes. Late stage adoption for this wave.