Comment by pyeri

8 days ago

I'm a Senior Freelance Programmer, I can see many of my past and present clients moving towards the exact path you described. I keep warning them during meetings that Claude model isn't sustainable for long, eventually the VCs will come for their revenues and Claude will be forced to close their access to all but the most enterprisey ones with deep pockets. The mere electricity cost for that kind of high level reasoning and abstraction can't be subsidized forever. However, there are other forces which pull them towards Claude and AI workflows. Most of the clients are in a "wait and watch" mode right now, using LLM assistance for code generation but not fully depending on them.

Before LLMs came, there used to be the technical debt to deal with in a project, now there is also the added cognitive debt which is way more subtle and impactful long-term. If your source of truth isn't source code but a prompt (or even a series of prompts with branches) and the executor of prompts is a non-deterministic agent, I think you've already lost the battle there.

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pyeri

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doweneedai47  6 days ago

I fully agree with that. Well said.

You're standing on the shore, and your clients are having fun in the water. The tide is going up, and you're screaming at your clients "come back! it's not safe". And so, they show you the face. You appear to them like the boring guy who's not fun to hang out with. Eventually the tide is high, there is strong current, and they are being swept away further and further from the shore and they are panicking : "pyeri! help us! please!"

People (the non tech people, the MBA people) don't want to hear what you, the tech guy has to say. You're the not fun guy. Stay in touch until they do need you and say : you were right. That's the day you charge them a dear price for the service.

AI is still at the bait stage of rollout. They subsidize it, they want you to get hooked onto it to the point where you cannot do without it. Then only, they start to charge. I used google code assist for around 9 months. It was free. I would ask it questions from time to time, to help to fix bugs, and to avoid to spend an hour browsing SO. Now, it's around $30 per month. They are losing too much too fast atm, they have reached the stage where they have to start to charge. Another one of their strategies is : IPO. Once they (openai/anthropic) are listed on the nasdaq, you will pay whether you want it or not (via your exposure to the nasdaq/S&p500 with your etfs).

  • gnz11  6 days ago

    > Stay in touch until they do need you and say : you were right. That's the day you charge them a dear price for the service.

    That assumes OP will still be in business if that day even happens. Odds are that cheap AI access will be around for longer than freelancers can remain solvent.

linzhangrun  8 days ago

Using today's model prices as a rebuttal is a very weak argument.

Two years ago, SOTA was gpt-o1, and it was much more expensive than Fable. Now, for $4,699, you can easily run a much smarter Qwen3.6-35B locally with DGX Spark.

Think about where we are. This is an era where a new SOTA arrives every two months. It took LLMs only about 18 months to go from chain-of-thought reasoning to disproving the unit-distance conjecture. chatGPT itself is only three and a half years old.

DeepSeek V4, released two months ago, is almost as cheap as the electricity costed, has the ability to being absolutely a top-tier model in 2025 standards.

  • chb  3 days ago

    This. And the "individual with technical savvy saving his child-like clients" scenario described earlier in this thread is delusional and Dilbertian.

krembo  8 days ago

You ignore that Claude are not alone, tech progresses and reduce costs, and there are always the Chinese alternatives which are becoming sufficiently better over time.

titanomachy  7 days ago

The electricity cost per unit of machine “reasoning” is vastly less than the cost of salary for human reasoning. That’s a weak argument. You should focus on the second part… LLMs (at least today’s) don’t build simple solutions, and the complexity they introduce has a cost.

jeremyjh  8 days ago

> Claude model isn't sustainable for long, eventually the VCs will come for their revenues

This is cope. There are multiple open models that are already good enough and cheap enough at API rates to sustain this.

karakoram  7 days ago

As a Freelance Programmer, are you even getting consistent clients at decent rates? If so, how are you getting clients consistently and how do you convince businesses that you are better than AI?