But at some point even if the product is useful if it costs twice what is getting in, won’t that be a problem ?

I don't see why tokens/$ would suddenly stop dropping. Maybe this is the first time the cost of compute will plateau, but do have any reason to think so?

There is a strong suspicion, especially of people who are skeptical of AI, that the actual price is being severely subsidized. The sense is that it’s an extreme version of growth before revenue. It is questionable if the true cost of training and inference make any of this worthwhile once Anthropic/OpenAI need to stand on their own and make money.

Imagine you open a cookie shop and you are VC funded, so you charge 5¢ for a cookie to attract people.

- Your real cost is $20/cookie. $15 for the fancy retail packaging and presentation, $5 for baking each cookie.

- You get lots of attention, strong profits and go public.

- VC funding is gone so, now instead of charging 5¢, you now need to charge $25 in order to not be in the red.

One of the reasons people think this is the shenanigans that Anthropic is currently playing, quietly tweaking the behavior of Claude Code and whatnot without really telling people. You can see lots of comments online about Claude Code randomly feeling dumber before Anthropic engineers admit they are messing with it.

Imagine you are on the $200/month Max plan. If the sustainable cost of this is several orders of magnitude higher, would enough current users pay something like $3,000/month for what we currently have?

Sure, yeah, I saw grubhub happen too... but this is compute, not cookies. It gets cheaper.

I don't even get what "skeptical of AI" means. We made AI, many companies reliably teach computers every spoken language. I perform my white collar job with a massive AI multiplier to my productivity.

I'm typing this on a machine comparable to Japan's Earth Simulator, a $350M supercomputer.

Probably asked what’s the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything

That’s non sense. Every software people pay or use as their professional tool should be carefully crafted. Would you buy a house/car/anything or value knowing that people who built it don’t care about their craft as long as you got it in your hands and pay for it ? Or maybe you produce something cheap and worthless

So all the employees of companies that work in this industry are not adults if they play ? You are targeting a specific fringe of people too broadly.

I know many people who have children and are not adults. And someone who never have kids will never be adult ?

Yes. When you don't have kids you can always quit the game/rat race one way or another if it gets too much. With kids - it is different. Kids are the only burden you can't easily shrug off in this life.

I assume you grew up in different circles than me. I have seen countless kids shrugged off growing up poor and around drug addiction. I have heard the rich shrug them off to boarding school sometimes.

So you’ve never seen parents quit and neglect their kids ? That does not exists ?

I have seen of course. But the point is - if you abandon everything in life right now while childless you are not a failure as human being. It is your right to say fuck it all at any moment. If you abandon your kids you are.

Agreed, but it proves the point that having kids does not makes you an adult

The article is useless, but the comments about people talking about their cats are priceless. Thank you OP to have ignited this thread, makes me so happy to read about other people love/observations of their cat. Definitely my all time favorite on HN

+1 after many failed attempts to buy useless cat toys, I’ve been really surprised that those are what we loves the most. He can play alone with it for hours and is absolutely crazy happy to play fetch with me. Maybe when I throw the elastic hair is kind of a bird like feature him.

It’s true there’s some magic effect from Claude code’s work. But still, often it’s not exactly the same infra and scaling than production grade. But for a customer I guess that’s perfect, they have a mean to make their own tools instead of relying on platforms to build those tools.

I Agree on the customer empowerment point.

I'd push back slightly on the production grade point. The models aren't the ceiling, the user's mental model of software is, depending on his experience/knowledge.

Someone just starting out will get working prototypes and solid MVPs, which is genuinely impressive. But as they develop real engineering intuition — how Git works, how databases behave under load, how hosting and infra fit together — that's when they start shipping production-grade things with Claude Code.

Based on what I'm seeing, the tool can handle it. The question is whether the person behind it understands what they're asking for. Anthropic, for example, mostly uses claude code to develop claude code.

That’s the exact definition our CEO gave of our job this week. That’s how he sees and expects us to work now. I feel some anxiety because that’s too much too fast. We went from « we need to fix every single bug we encounter » to « it doesn’t matter if there’s bugs as long as we ship a feature fast »

Isn't the AI sales pitch that you can do both?

The exact same prompt ? Everything depends on the prompt and it’s different tools. These days the quality and what’s build around the prompt matters as much as the code. We can’t feed generic query.