But aren't you developing bad habits and learning patterns that won't work long term? Or do you think things will get cheap enough that you will be able to keep going with your current patterns post-subsidies?

Compared to what a lot of companies spend on software for chip and electronics design (we're talking about $10k-200k/seat per year), AI coding assistants have a long way to go in cost before companies won't be willing to pay for them. Companies pay a fortune for software when it enables their engineers to be productive.

For my company, I'd honestly pay $4-8k/month for Claude if I had to (it would be painful, and I'd try to get cheaper options to work first). I know some enterprise Claude users are paying that much now since they have to pay for API tokens. I am certain it's at least a 2X productivity booster for our work. Compared to the cost of hiring another developer, it's well worth it.

If they stop subsidising Claude Code for the pro/max users, there will be a lot of people priced out of it, especially the casual developer. But I don't see it going away for commercial use, even with a large price increase.

No one involved in this is thinking about the long term

> But aren't you developing bad habits and learning patterns that won't work long term?

2 reasons - there's an advantage now, use it. 2nd the frontier providers, this is the "early cheap days" like when uber was initially cheap to compete vs standard cabs. they want you to become hooked and boy are we hooked.

I expect by that point we'll have local models that can do a decent job, I would guess give it a decade and we'll be running custom accelerators that are smarter than current frontier models.

In the same way that only supercomputers used to have multiple processors and caches but it's now standard.

I use the frontier openai/anthropic models at work but exclusively open weight models (on cloud/hosted inference) for personal stuff and I think about it like this; 1) I don't see any reason GLM and DeepSeek won't eventually be as good as Claude, it's just a matter of time and 2) the open models are well and truly capable enough for most of what I'd want to do. I don't need nor want an LLM chewing away on a horrible enterprise spaghetti codebase, my employers can pay for that privilege.

Long term, we will see what happens and adapt. At worst we all go back coding by hand. Meanwhile what can I do, tell my customers that I'm raising my fee because I have to pay for token? The Claude Pro $20 plan is good enough for me and even in auto mode I never had to wait for the 5 hours reset.