I agree with the core assumption (to a point -- there is a point of diminishing return where pretty excellent tools are cheap), but this line is ridiculous-

"the cheapest usable tier of Claude Code is $100/mo"

Bullshit. I have the $20 plan and seldom hit the quota. I used to hit the distinct Opus quota, but now that isn't separate I just don't anymore. Even enabled the extra quota charging and have never paid a penny more.

And to be clear, to most people I'm a pretty heavy user. Like, practically it has a heavy influence on my day to day work, and is an amazing contributor to my functions.

The people who think only the $100+ tier is "usable" are often (albeit not always) usually the people doing the worthless, but "forward-thinking" nonsense, throwing millions of tokens aspirational. Like the OpenClaw nonsense is 99.99% worthless filler where people chased a productivity hack that in reality is just hobbyist silliness.

It's token shredding for almost no value as people show that they're with it. People gloating about their swarms of agents doing effectively nothing are another "I need to max out everything" people. These are the ones who yield the result that AI has no benefit to productivity, as they overdo something to such ridiculous extremes.

The same for the laughably poorly thought out MCP servers that flood a service with a quarter million tokens for negligible value. So much insanely poorly considered nonsense is in use, to the great glee of the AI companies. And, I mean, I guess I should thank these people for basically subsidizing it for the rest of us.

The rest of us are surgically applying AI precisely, to incredible effect. The cheap plans are ridiculously valuable.