Have you tried OpenRouter and the DeepSeek-like models? If you try to optimize a little you could probably slash those costs.

I send a ton of requests and even reaching $10 for the month would take more calls than I have capacity to review and use. And as I said, that's for a ton of requests.

I'm paying $20 a month using opus 5.5 and having a blast.

It's easier to enjoy it if you don't see how the sausage is made.

I am definitely not having a blast at work with LLMs. Everyone in the team has become simple rubber-stampers for whatever the AI puts out. There are mountains of documentation which gives a false sense of understanding of how things work, but the code repository itself could have been written in Brainfuck and it would make almost no difference. And we keep getting told by management that this is fine. We've become simple janitors in the slop hall.

Yeah, I feel bad about those situations.

It's essentially trying to turn programming into a micro-transaction based pay to play / pay to win outcome, a concept that was gaming related for decades.

Can you expand on that? I couldn't find sources

I think the fear, threat, and valuation, of the frontier labs is that they will cross some line and have models that are infinitely smarter and more capable than everyone else. If that should happen, your deepseek account would be meaningless.

But I also think that premise is bullshit and not gonna happen.

10% of a software engineer salary is a lot of money. That's just ridiculous.

Like the other commentor said, its just going to be a net negative, because whatever productivity increase you supposedly do get, you will see exactly 0 of that translated into salary increase.

Have you tried to negotiate a 10% pay raise because “you can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5”? I’d wager you’re more likely to get a “the fuck do we need you for then” than that pay raise.

Let’s see the moved mountains I’m sitting here waiting to see any improvement in software

Even if you believe this surely it should be paid for by the employer not the individual.

I swap between Fable and GLM 5.X and both work fine. Fable tends to do stuff that I didn't want it to do, and claude is probably a bit more capable as a harness (though I haven't spent the effort configuring pi properly yet so that's probably on me). Otherwise it's hard to spot the difference.

I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude on cost.

People generally don't have 10% of their income to just give away on a whim.

Additionally, if I'm 10% more productive I don't get a 10% pay increase.

> You can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5.

Mountains that were made out of molehills, an ever-growing heap of bullshit.