Just spitballing.

Unlikely that they all decided to do this within weeks of each other. Still, like you said, you were spit-balling, not asserting :-)

The fuzziness is intentional. It gives them wiggle room and obscures how much "value" you actually get from $200, a 5-hour block, or a week. That keeps the tension manageable between subscription pricing and pay-per-token API pricing, especially for larger businesses on enterprise plans who want transparent $-per-MTok rates.

If they were fully transparent, like "your $200 sub gets you up to $2,000 of equivalent API usage," it would be a constant fight. People would track pennies and scream any time 5-hour blocks got throttled during peak hours. Businesses would push harder for pay-per-token discounts seeing that juicy $200 sub value.

That said: competition will soon kick in.

I had my hopes up to switch to local but my first few passes didn’t pan out with that so far. But I’m optimistic it’ll land soon.

I think I need to lower my ambitions too. I got my hopes up since AI can do everything but how long it takes to do it right can really drag on

This isn't your problem; this is management's problem for cutting headcount, or not caring about the things that people wanted.

As it isn't your problem, paint it bright pink and move on.

Dangerous too of course. So many times I’ve had subtle unexpected side effects. But it’s all about pinning thins down well and that’s what we’re all still figuring out well

Of course it is. I started a (commercial) product in Jan, on track for in-field testing at the end of April.

Of course, it's not my f/time job, so I've only been working on it a/hours, but, with the exception of two functions, everything else is hand-coded.

I rubber-ducked with AI, but they never wrote the product for me (other than those two functions which I felt too lazy to copy from an existing project and fixup to work in the new project).

Based on what, exactly?

It's very easy to claim some software would've taken you months to make, but this is ridiculous. Estimating project duration is well known to be impossible in this field. A few years ago you'd get laughed out the room for making such predictions.

> I’ve only got so much savings left to live on.

Respectfully, what are you doing here?

Yeah sure, the Apple dream. But supposing AI did in fact make you this legendary 100x developer, so it would to everyone else including those with significantly more resources. You'd still be run out of the market by those with bigger budgets or more marketing, and end up penniless all the same.

I would strongly recommend you not put all your proverbial eggs in this basket.

I’m not ready to unveil the thing I alluded to, it’s important to me that it’s good and polished. But I’ve done quite well so far developing in Swift, Rust, Go, and coming up with marketing and design — things I definitely couldn’t do by hand without a lot more time and effort.

https://poolometer.com/ Is one of the things I’m almost ready to call ready. So much domain expertise or tedious math involved — I simply wouldn’t have bothered on my own, pre-AI

I agree it’s a huge existential risk that everyone is also amazing. So far that’s not true. I get hung up on a lot of little quirks, like getting Dolby Vision to play properly on Apple Silicon without Vulcan. Something I accomplished after about 2 weeks of relentless determination.

To be clear I’m just trying to answer your questions honestly. I understand the situation. It’s almost to my benefit the harder it is for non Software Engineers. But in our current reality, when I’m not launched yet, it’s more stress

This is what I was alluding to. AI did not let you write software you couldn't otherwise make, or let you write it faster. You skipped doing the research because AI gave you plausible results, but without doing the research yourself you cannot be sure of it's accuracy.

That isn't faster software development, it's reckless software development, and nothing really stopped you from doing it before other than your own recognition that pulling numbers out of your ass is a bad idea.

> I agree it’s a huge existential risk that everyone is also amazing. So far that’s not true. I get hung up on a lot of little quirks, like getting Dolby Vision to play properly on Apple Silicon without Vulcan. Something I accomplished after about 2 weeks of relentless determination.

That would be "doing the research", and as you have observed, is the slow part then and now.

This confuses me - did you leave your job to cosplay as an EM, using LLMs to build your products? If not, then your savings don't matter.

/s

In that sense your analogy is kinda good. I totally agree the current situation is like getting my solo start up funded and subsidized … but with only like 4 months runway now that the prices are skyrocketing, vs ~2+ for a typical YC venture

IOW, you are no further behind nor further ahead than your competitors compared to 1 week ago, 1 month ago, 1 year ago and 1 decade ago.

Everyone has the same tools you have. The only advantage you get is if you make your own tools (I did that, and pre-AI, was able to modify my LoB WebApps at a rate of 1x new API endpoint, tested and pushed to production, every 15m).

They announced 2x tokens with months of notice. This announced this with no notice.

Me as an individual making a go solo is not the same as thousands of funded businesses having free credits, subsidized plans and bottomless AI budgets.

For a short period this was a massive equalizer. Now it’s a tool for those who can afford it. That’s a big shift.

—

Why is it that a person cannot express their own circumstances or opinions on this site without it turning into an argument? It’s so deflating.

Ultimately, we need to know the true cost of this technology to evaluate how effectively or ineffectively it can displace the workforce that existed before it.

With the hidden reasoning tokens and tool calls, I have no idea how many tokens I typically use per message. I would guess maybe a quarter of that, which would make the new pricing cheaper.

Then I realized I was an idiot and this was magic.

But it now seems more like an introductory offer to use the API, as opposed to an alternative product / way to use their API product.

I thought it would get increasingly expensive, like say the $200 plan becomes $400.

Switching these plans to API metering doesn’t feel like it’s a separate product anymore?

Does that just not matter in modern society? I’m an asshole for expecting the product I pay for on day 1 to be the same on day 8 and 29 of a 30-days subscription?

I can also imagine that with SF living expenses that there are a lot of people without a big safety net

I don’t really mean for this to be related to any one person. The general population doesn’t have a choice but to sign terms and get the severance , in general, in America

> Some of the content moderators were earning $28,800 a year, the technology news site The Verge found last year.

In this particular case, the legal costs are probably pretty ruinous.

So it’s actually kind of a real thing

Having said that, a successful car infotainment system attack on android auto or apple carplay could, of course, compromise your phone.

So it's up to you whether you decide to cope with that possibility by breaking the law and navigating with a handheld device, or simply declining to do banking on your phone, since successful car exploits mean the attack surface against your phone is much larger than you might presume.

I was responding to a comment about the security implications of letting the infotainment system interact with the vehicle controls, and I referenced an incident where someone compromised a car via that.

I have no idea how CarPlay would compromise your phone given apples sandbox but whomever finds it is gonna have a multimillion dollar payday since iOS jailbreaks are quite valuable.

> Paying with your phone just seems like one of those separation of concerns problem.

Followed by:

> You could then separate the audio system from your car and drive around with a boombox

The first discusses behaviors of end-users. The second was a lame attempt to take the mickey of that, which is why my response was that clearly indicated that, to my knowledge there are zero security implications of playing your music on your car.

This remains true.

You are discussing design flaws, not user behavior flaws, which is why I pointed out that the design flaws you bring up, in addition to doing you bodily harm, could conceivably also be part of an exploit chain that validates the original poster's concern about using his phone for banking.

But I still sincerely doubt that the choice of playing Beethoven or Iron Maiden either directly places you at risk, or makes a difference to the ease of exploiting any design flaws in your vehicle.

It’s so blatant and so disgusting.. and yet the realization has no effect. Just like when the church pedophiles were exposed (literally next door) it had no effect whatsoever on their congregation.

Human patterns are disappointing.

They haven't pushed back hard enough against Citizen's United, the obvious creeping threat of the Federalists takeover of the judicial pipeline into the Supreme Court; the criminal conviction of a POTUS was left to slide, and the list goes on.

Things like properly independant election oversight, district boundary setting (no party partisan gerry mandering), and a host of other boring details matter to keeping a democracy clean and fair.