  People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing?

Believe it or not, I still know many devs who do not use any agents. They're still using free ChatGPT copy and paste.

I'm going to guess that many people on HN are also on the "free ChatGPT isn't that good at programming" train.

▲ dataflow 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Which one would you recommend as the best right now? Claude Code?

	▲	redhed 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have been having a lot of success with Cursor. I like being able to switch between Anthropic and OpenAI models. Claude Code does gives way more tokens/$ than Cursor right now though.

▲ salawat 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not everyone has the capability to rent out data center tier hardware to just do their job. These things require so much damn compute you need some serious heft to actually daisy chain enough stages either in parallel or deep to get enough tokens/sec for the experience to go ham. If you're making bags o' coke money, and deciding to fund Altman's, Zuckernut's or Amazon/Google's/Microsoft's datacenter build out, that's on you. Rest of us are just trying to get by on bits and bobs we've kept limping over the years. If opencode is anything to judge the vibecoded scene by, I'm fairly sure at some point the vibe crowd will learn the lesson of isolating the most expensive computation ever from the hot loop, then maybe find one day all they needed was maybe something to let the model build a context, and a text editor.

Til then wtf_are_these_abstractions.jpg

	▲	ijk 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is my current problem: I can get work to pay for a Claude Max subscription, but for personal use or to learn how to use it that's a big price tag. I worry that we're returning to an era of renting core development tools. After the huge benefits from free and open source tools, that's a bitter pill to swallow.

▲ throwaw12 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> They're still using free ChatGPT copy and paste

Probably that's the reason why some people are sure their job is still safe.

Nature of job is changing rapidly

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aurareturn 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I totally get tech CEOs who threaten to fire their devs who do not embrace AI tools.

I'm not a tech CEO but people who are anti-LLM for programming have no place on my team.

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salawat 18 hours ago | parent [-]

And you are paying for their tokens on top of their salary, right? Right?

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aurareturn 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can do a lot with just $20 Codex CLI subscription. Tokens are cheap compared to the $20k we're paying for a dev each month.

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ido 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even the $200 claude max monthly subscription is peanuts compared to salary cost.

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monksy 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Tell that to the company that I was just at that cut Intelij licenses as cost cutting measures.

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aurareturn 16 hours ago | parent [-]

If they really want to cut cost, fire the worst dev on the team and use that money to give everyone a Codex subscription.

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KronisLV 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Or better yet, fire the managers or bean counters that think decreasing everyone’s productivity is good for long term savings.

I’m reminded of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

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mikkupikku 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Fire the middle management, HR, and etc that have been enthusiastically using AI to do their jobs for the past two or three years already. 90% of them can be replaced by an agent with access to an email account.

	▲	thewebguyd 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Tbh, if companies want to use AI to lay off and cut costs, that's exactly where they should be doing it, not engineering. How much bloat and bureaucracy bottleneck is sitting in middle management whose favorite past time is wasting everyone's time on meetings that could have been an email? HR? Not the execs, but the HR drones that do nothing but answer employee questions about policy, could have already been replaced with not even an AI, just an old school chatbot, a long time ago. Instead of cutting engineers, cut the non-tech jobs, flatten the structure.

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hdgvhicv 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Amazes me that people pay 20k a month for a dev rather than paying 2k a month for one in Poland or 1k a month for one from India

There’s obviously a benefit of paying higher rates for US programmers, but does that benefit change when llms are thrown into the mix

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apercu 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My experience with outsourcing over 20+ years (Russia, Romania, India, South America) is that you just move money around when you do it.

It takes more planning, more specification, more coordination, more QA. The quality is almost always worse, and remediation takes forever. So your BA, QA and PM time goes way up and absorbs any cost savings.

YMMV.

	▲	thewebguyd 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sounds like an LLM, tbh. Using Claude also takes more planning, more explicit specification, prompting, more manual review, more QA.

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aurareturn 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Makes no sense because LLMs makes it far less worth it to outsource developers.

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forgotlastlogin 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

2k in Poland you say...

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baq 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly, the $20 codex is so good value it’s irresponsible to not give it to everyone. Claude code $20 is otoh pointless, the limits are good enough for 10 mins of work twice per business day.

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onion2k 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Every business that's taking AI seriously is giving their team enterprise accounts to AI services. Otherwise you have no control over where your code, data, company info, etc is going.

Someone deciding to drop a spreadsheet of customer data into their personal AI account to increase their productivity would be catastrophic for business, so you need rules. And rules means paying for enterprise AI tooling.

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mikkupikku 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Bring your own tools" is not exactly novel in the workplace. Maybe so for office workers, but not more generally. Anyway, these particular tools are cheap enough that it hardly even matters who is expected to pay for them.

The $20 a month tier in particular is a trivial expense, on par with businesses that expect their workers to wear steel toed shoes. Some may give workers a little stipend to buy those boots, some not. Either way, it doesn't really matter.

	▲	thewebguyd 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Just because it's not novel, doesn't mean it's right. I also don't agree with, for example, many mechanics being forced to buy their own tools (especially what little they get paid). I don't do tech outside of 9-5, so either my employer pays for it all, or I don't use it. Simple as that. Thankfully, they do pay for it, but I couldn't imagine working somewhere that says "You need to use AI" and then not providing it on their dime. Quite frankly it should be regulation that if a W2 employee needs something to perform their job duties, the employer must provide it.