Comment by nostrademons
12 hours ago
They're not that expensive for anyone that has the tech skills to actually make good use out of them. I've been paying around with Claude Code, using API credits rather than the monthly fee. It costs about $5 per one-hour session. If you're going to be doing this professionally it's worth springing for the $100/month membership to avoid hitting credit limits, but if you just want to try it out, you can do so without breaking the bank.
A bigger question for me is "Does this actually increase my productivity?" The jury is still out on that - I've found that you really need to babysit the algorithm and apply your CS knowledge, and you also have to be very clear about what you're going to tell it later, don't let it make bad assumptions, and in many cases spell out the algorithm in detail. But it seems to be very good at looking up API details, writing the actual code, and debugging (if you guide it properly), all things that take a non-trivial amount of tedium in everyday programming.
12-year-old me wasn’t putting my tech skills to good use enough to pay $5 every time I sat down at the computer. I was making things though, and the internet was full of tutorials, chat rooms, and other people you could learn from. I think it would be sad if the same curious kid today was told “just pay $5 and ask Claude” when pestering someone in IRC about how to write a guestbook in Perl.
12-year-old me wasn't either, but he was noodling around on a computer that cost $2500 (more like $5500 in today's dollars). I think our parents loved us very much and must have had some means to afford the capital cost of a computer back then.
I don't see my 7-year-old paying $5 for each hour he wants to program (and no way in hell would I give him my credit card), but I could easily envision paying $20/month for a Claude subscription and letting him use it. We pay more than that for Netflix & Disney+.
> noodling around on a computer that cost $2500 (more like $5500 in today's dollars)
Wow! 12-year-old me was noodling around on a computer that my dad brought home from work because it would have otherwise ended up in landfill. We had very little money for computers back then, and I was thrilled when my parents gave me a budget to buy parts to build my own from scratch when I was about to go off to college (I'd saved up a bit myself, but not nearly enough).
I think your experience is pretty privileged, and not at all common.
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12-year-old me was mostly procrastinating but sometimes fired up Pascal which required me to insert a floppy disk in my 486 compaq machine for it to work. the machine was a donation from my aunt, could only run DOS.
However chatgpt or gemini free tier is more than enough for a kid to figure out how python works and build some simple software. While I have the Gemini subscription I only got it because my family drive storage was nearly full. I could've probably got by with ChatGPT free to just stop using stackoverflow.
10-year-old me was programming on a salvaged 386 that my dad got from a friend after the company they worked at went bankrupt, and left the machine as trash. Instead of Christmas gifts I asked for programming books and pitched in some of the birthday money my grandparents would give me (about US$ 2 every birthday).
Not everyone was privileged, some of us were just lucky.
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I'm extremely privileged and I had a quarter of what you did growing up. Your experience and your kids' is not typical.
12-year-old me had (or rather, my family had) a Celeron 333 MHz and a Pentium III 550 MHz, both from Gateway, because that was the sole awesome perk my dad got from working there: literally free computers, with a required number of years of employment to pay them off. In 2000, the P3 was still pretty hot shit. I dual-booted them with every Linux distro under the sun. Since we had dial-up, the only way I had those distros was from 4-H [0], which at the time in Nebraska had a partnership with University of Nebraska to do tech instruction; once a quarter, we’d drive down to a campus (usually UNL) and spend a weekend learning something (LAMP stack, hardware troubleshooting, etc.), and having a LAN party at night. Also we had free access to their (at the time) screamingly fast internet, so I would download distros and packages to try out later.
My online upbringing was very much of the RTFM variety, and I am convinced that was and is a good method to learn. It’s not like the grumpy graybeards were cruel, they just didn’t want to waste their time answering the same “how do I…” questions from noobs. If you explained what you were experiencing, what you had read, and what you had tried, they were more than happy to help out. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable approach.
[0]: https://4-h.org/
I think you said it. $100/mo and you're not even sure if it'll increase your productivity. Why on earth would I pay that? Do I want to flush $100 down the toilet and waste several days of my life to find out?
You don't have to pay $100 to find out, you can do that for ~$5-20 by directly buying API credits.
I don't know for sure whether it's worth it yet. Further experimentation is needed, as well as giving it an honest shot and trying to learn the nuances of the tool. But the way I look at it - if this actually is a future career path, the net present value of its payoff is measured in the millions of dollars. It's worth spending ~$20 and a few nights of my time to figure that out, because the odds can be pretty damn low and still have the expected value pencil out. It's sorta like spending $200 on 1/4 of a Bitcoin in 2013 because I was curious about the technology - I fully expected it to be throwing money down the toilet, but it ended up being quite worth it. (I wish I'd had the same mindset when I could've bought into the Ethereum ICO at a penny or so an ETH.)
Are you spending every $100 absolutely efficiently? How do you know?
Can I have a hundred dollars? I assure you giving it to me is efficient
I have the tech skills to use them. In my 30s and I could not spend $5 on a one hour coding session even if it 10xed my productivity. 1-2 hours would literally break the bank for me