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raincoleyesterday at 6:05 PM5 repliesview on HN

> the day when LLM-assisted coding is commoditized

Like yesterday? LLM-assisted coding is $100/mo. It looks very commoditized when most houses in developed world pay more for electricity than that.

My definition of LLM-assisted coding is that you fully understand every change and every single line of the code. Otherwise it's vibe coding. And I believe if one is honest to this principle, it's very hard to deplete the quota of the $100 tier.


Replies

windexh8eryesterday at 6:42 PM

> Like yesterday? LLM-assisted coding is $100/mo. It looks very commoditized when most houses in developed world pay more for electricity than that.

But, it's not $100/mo. I think the best showcase of where AI is at is on the generative video side. Look at players like Higgsfield. Check out their pricing and then go look at Reddit for actual experiences. With video generation the results are very easy to see. With code generation the results are less clear for many users. Especially when things "just work".

Again, it's not $100/month for Anthropic to serve most uses. These costs are still being subsidized and as more expensive plans roll out with access to "better" models and "more* tokens and context the true cost per user is slowly starting to be exposed. I routinely hit limits with Anthropic that I hadn't been for the same (and even less) utilization. I dumped the Pro Max account recently because the value wasn't there anymore. I am convinced that Opus 3 was Anthropic's pinnacle at this point and while the SotA models of today are good they're tuned to push people towards paying for overages at a significantly faster consumption rate than a right sized plan for usage.

The reality is that nobody can afford to continue to offer these models at the current price points and be profitable at any time in the near future. And it's becoming more and more clear that Google is in a great position to let Anthropic and OAI duke it out with other people's money while they have the cash, infrastructure and reach to play the waiting game of keeping up but not having to worry about all of the constraints their competitors do.

But I'd argue that nothing has been commoditized as we have no clue what LLMs cost at scale and it seems that nobody wants to talk about that publicly.

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sidrag22yesterday at 6:28 PM

> fully understand every change and every single line of the code.

im probably just not being charitable enough to what you mean, but thats an absurd bar that almost nobody conforms to even if its fully handwritten. nothing would get done if they did. But again, my emphasis is on that im probably just not being charitable to what you mean.

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rectangyesterday at 7:32 PM

Commoditization will be complete for my purposes when an LLM trained on a legitimately licensed corpus can achieve roughly what Opus 4.5+ or the highest powered GPTs can today.

I anticipate a Napster-style reckoning at some point when there's a successful high-profile copyright suit around obviously derivative output. It will probably happen in video or imagery first.

fsckboyyesterday at 8:19 PM

>LLM-assisted coding is $100/mo. It looks very commoditized when most houses in developed world pay more for electricity than that.

this is a small nit, but you still have to pay your electric bill, the $100/mo is on top of that. if you're doing cost accounting you don't want to neglect any costs. Just because you can afford to lease a car, doesn't mean you can afford to lease a 2nd car.

BowBunyesterday at 7:27 PM

In industry, the cost is more than 100/mo for engineers. With increased adoption and what I know now, I expect full time devs to rack up $500-$2000 usage bills if they're going full parallel agentic dev. Personal usage for projects and non-production software is not a benchmark IMO

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