Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent

Is $200/month a lot of money when you can multiply your productivity? It depends but the most valuable currency in life is time. For some, spending thousands a month would be worth it.

As I said elsewhere... $200/month etc is potentially not a lot for an employer to pay (though I've worked for some recently who balk at just stocking a snacks tray or drink fridge...).

But $200/month is unbearable for open source / free software developers.

My butt needs to be in this chair 8 hours a day. Whether it takes me 20 hours to do a task or 2 doesn't really matter.

This is why communism doesnt work lmao

It's wild when a company has another department and will shell out $200/month per-head for some amalgamation of Salesforce and other SaaS tools for customer service agents.

I suspect there's some accounting magic where salaries and software licenses are in one box and "Diet Coke in the fridge" is in another, and the latter is an unbearable cost but the former "OK"

But yeah, doesn't explain non-payment for AI tools.

Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay for it.

maybe the issue is capitalism where even if your productivity multiplies x100

your salary stays x1

and your work hours stay x1

I am literally describing my life in a capitalist society....

Communism is an ideal but never a reality. What you see in reality is at best an attempt at communism which is quickly derailed by corruption and greed. I mean, it's great to have ideals, but you should also recognize when those ideals are completely impractical given the human condition.

By the way, this also applies to the "Free market" ideal...

But aren't you supposed to be incentivized to work harder by having equity?

Quite literally not.

Capitalism encourages you to put your butt in your own seat and reap the rewards of your efforts.

Of course it also provides you the decision making to keep your butt in someone else’s seat if the risk vs. reward of going your own isn’t worth it.

And then it allows your employer to put another butt in your seat if you don’t adopt efficiency patterns.

So: capitalism is compatible with communism as an option, but it’s generally a suboptimal option for one or both parties.

Importantly, problems with the ideal shouldn't preclude good actions that take us in a direction.

There being problems with absolute libertarian free markets doesn't mean all policies that evoke the free market ideal must be disregarded, nor does the problems with communism mean that all communist actions must be ignored.

We can see a problem with an ideal, but still wish to replicate the good parts.

Equity is a lottery ticket. Is sacrificing my happiness or life balance in the near term worth the gamble that A) my company will be successful, and B) that my equity won’t have been diluted to worthlessness by the time that happens? At higher levels of seniority/importamce/influence this might make sense, but for most people I seriously doubt it does, especially early in their careers.

> Is $200/month a lot of money when you can multiply your productivity?

My read was the article takes it as a given that $200/m is worth it.

The question in the article seems more: is an extra $800/m to move from Claude Code to an agent using o3 worth it?

Sure. The issue for me is when people intentionally mislabel something to make it look worse.

For example, mislabelling socialism as communism. The police department, fire department, and roads are all socialist programs. Only a moron would call this communism and yet for some reason universal healthcare...

There's also this nonsense when someone says "That's the free market at work", and I'm like, if we really lived in a free market then you'd be drinking DuPont's poison right now.

Using the words "Communism" and "Free market" just show a (often intentional) misunderstanding of the nuance of how things actually work in our society.

The communism label must be the most cited straw man in all of history at this point.

That's your problem, or your company or your country.

Here in EU, if not stated in your work agreement, it's pretty common people work full time job and also as a self-employed contractor for other companies.

So when I'm finished with my work, HO of course, I just work on my "contractor" projects.

Honestly, I wouldn't sign a full time contract banning me from other work.

And if you have enough customers, you just drop full time job. And just pay social security and health insurance, which you must pay by law anyway.

And specially in my country, it's even more ridiculous that as self-employed you pay lower taxes than full time employees, which truth to be told are ridiculously high. Nearly 40% of your salary.

At a previous job, my department was getting slashed because marketing was moving over to using Salesforce instead of custom software written in-house. Everything was going swimmingly, until the integration vendor for Salesforce just kept billing, and billing and billing.

Last I checked no one is still there who was there originally, except the vendor. And the vendor was charging around $90k/mo for integration services and custom development in 2017 when my team was let go. My team was around $10k/mo including rent for our cubicles.

That was another weird practice I've never seen elsewhere, to pay rent, we had to charge the other departments for our services. They turned IT and infrastructure into a business, and expected it to turn a profit, which pissed off all the departments who had to start paying for their projects, so they started outsourcing all development work to vendors, killing our income stream, which required multiple rounds of layoffs until only management was left.

That doesn’t happen anywhere outside of Silicon Valley.

> Here in EU, if not stated in your work agreement, it's pretty common people work full time job and also as a self-employed contractor for other companies.

First time I'm hearing this. Where in the EU are you? I don't know anybody doing this, but it could depend on the country (I'm in the nordics).

I think that was the joke

for all the lip service capitalists give to the free market, they hate it. their revealed preference is for a monopoly.

In my country France, your contact May state hours, so you're paid to sit in the chair

Freelancing as a side hustle may be forbidden if your employer refuses

And it makes sense to pay more taxes since you also have more social benefits (paid leaves, retirement money and unemployment money), nothing is free

Hmm, not a practice I’ve come across in the EU. What countries specifically are you talking about?

No it doesn't. People tell that story but the system is incredibly heavily leveraged to prevent that.

If you're salaried, you are not a task-based worker. The company pays you a salary for your full day's worth of productive time. If you can suddenly get 5x more done in that time, negotiate a higher salary or leave. If you're actually more productive, they will fight to keep you.

As a non-founder / not a VC you max get a few percentage points, and its mostly paper toilet money until there's an exit or IPO, and the founders will always try to squeeze you if they can, not because they're bad people, but because the system incentivises it. (you'll keep getting diluted in future rounds)

tbh, if im gonna bust my ass I'd rather own the thing.

And even in Silicon Valley you get the survivor ship bias of the 1% of companies getting to IPO and making their employees decent exit stories...

99% of startups die off worthless and your equity never realises.

IT charging other departments is standard practice at every large company I've been at.

Maybe in a true -capitalistic- market that'd happen.

but the state keeps meddling and making oligarchs and friends have unfair advantages.

It's hard to compete when the system is rigged from the start.

> Current job "permits" Claude usage, but does not pay for it.

That seems like the worst of all worlds from their perspective.

By not paying for it they introduce a massive security concern.

I've seen it too - not uncommon. A frustrating angle is vendor lockin. You are required to only use the internal IT team for everything, even if they're far more expensive and less skilled. They can 'charge' whatever they want, and you're stuck with their skills, prices and timeline. Going outside of that requires many levels of signoffs/approvals, and untold amounts of time making your case. There's value in having some central purchasing process, but when you limit your vendors to one (internal or external) you'll creating a lot more problems that you don't need to have.

Well that leads to shadow IT and upper management throwing a shit fit when we can't fix their system we don't know anything about.

More accurate representation is this:

Productivity multiplies x2 You keep your job x0.5 Your salary x0.8 (because the guy we just fired will gladly do your job for less) Your work hours x1.4 (because now we expect you to do the work of 2 people, but didn’t account for all the overhead that comes with it)

Your salary is not determined by your productivity, it's determined by market rates. 5X productivity does not mean 5X salary. Employers prey on labor market inefficiencies to keep the market rates low.

Any employer with 2 brain cells will figure out that you are more productive as a developer by using AI tools, they will mandate all developers use it. Then that's the new bar and everyone's salary stays the same.

Yeah a 20$ plan is prob enough for the AI slop you need to fill in your 8h working time. Unless you have many projects that require more AI slop that is.

A recent job offer for a startup was a 5 year vest with a 2 year cliff. Seriously?

This is really interesting because I was in business school almost thirty years and a cost accounting professor used almost this exact example, only with photocopiers and fax machines to illustrate how you can cost a company to death.

He would have considered that company to be running a perfectly controlled cost experiment. Though it was so perfectly controlled they forgot that humans actually did the work. With cost accounting projects, you pay morale and staffing charges well after the project itself was costed.

I hadn’t thought of that since the late 90s. Good comment but how the heck did I get that old??? :)

> Here in EU, if not stated in your work agreement, it's pretty common people work full time job and also as a self-employed contractor for other companies.

Absolutely not a common thing in my corner of the EU.

Capitalism is exactly about amassing capital to make others reliant on capitalist providing capital for the tools necessary to do the work, then extracting rent from the value produced.

In true capitalist market you end up with oligarchy.

> Communism is an ideal but never a reality

There is nothing ideal about communism. I'd rather own my production tools and be as productive as I want to be. I'd rather build wealth over trading opportunities, I'd rather hire people and reinvest earnings. That is ideal.

also a fair point :)

I think you're missing the point. Communism doesn't actually exist in the real world. In fact you are right now using it as a straw man (my entire point).

Who in the actual real world with any authority at all is telling you you can't be as productive as you want to be, build wealth, hire people, and reinvest your earnings?

I responded to the main points in the communist manifesto. It is clearly against putting a price on labor and declares hiring as exploitative practice. Clearly against individual capital. Clearly against individual products since capital is a "social power". That manipulative weasel. I can't even own a frickin laptop because it is a means of production and thus "state-owned".

Just because it hasn't been "successfully implemented" according to your personal opinion doesn't mean it cannot be scrutinized.

That's like if there is a sign that says "do not cross 3km/h" when someone says "that's too slow" you go "a-hah! straw man! How do you know you can't go 300kmph with that in place? nobody implemented that sign before!". Socrates would be proud.

Your salary is determined by whether you play golf with your boss's boss.

Problem is, you may own the means of production, but most people don't.

If you don't address that, you'll end up with a "dictatorship of the proletariat".

That's not a problem anymore. I live in a 2nd world country. Every farmer has a phone, anyone who wants can get their child a laptop. Just because I don't have access to machines which build plane engines doesn't mean I have the right to complain about proletariat. People who invented, invested, earned and built the damn things own them. If that's "dictatorship" that's fine.

I've also seen this exact thing happening about 15 years ago.

Second largest private university of my state, 30000 students. They cut 5 software development positions that were halfway on their rewrite, then purchased a blank slate ERP for 1 million (50% discount, imagine that!), and had spent a few years and around 2-3 million on customising said ERP with consultants by the time I left them.

Not sure about where you are but here the tax rate when not taken as an employee is effectively the maximum individual tax rate, so usually for actual cash it is best to pay yourself a salary from your freelance “business” and handle employees tax.

There are always loopholes and ways to work around which our tax code will happily discover and kill year on year.

So you get to pick how you want to pay tax but the amount usually isn’t much different when you get to the highest brackets

I guess having only worked in one large organization and only for a couple of years, I had never come across it before. I had even consulted for that company for a few years 10 years prior, and they treated IT a lot differently. That was during a push to insource. So as a consultant, they fired me, years later hired me as an employee, then a new CIO came in and laid off all ICs and replaced us again with consultants.

They even had one of their vendors extend a job offer to me for slightly more than I was making, but I couldn't in good conscience take that offer. Fool me once, and all that.

> I responded to the main points in the communist manifesto.

OK but that's irrelevant to my post. There's lots of books and manifestos that say lots of stupid things. You're arguing as if this manifesto is a real threat, and I'm saying "show me this threat". This isn't a real person with any impact on your day to day, like say a politician. It's a fantasy opposition.

> Just because it hasn't been "successfully implemented" according to your personal opinion doesn't mean it cannot be scrutinized.

OK sure, where? Where is this real world communism that meets the manifesto you are railing against?

> That's like if there is a sign that says "do not cross 3km/h" when someone says "that's too slow" you go "a-hah! straw man! How do you know you can't go 300kmph with that in place? nobody implemented that sign before!". Socrates would be proud.

OK that's an awkward analogy. It's more like someone wrote a manifesto that said cars shouldn't go over 3km/h and you want to use this "slow manifesto" to argue that any laws that would slow you down are some sort of slippery slope in to "slowmunism".

No one with any authority in the real world is trying to implement the communist manifesto on to you. Not even the terrifying Bernie Sanders wants anything to do with communism. For the love of god, there is no communist threat. You can relax.

The communist manifesto is what basically communism is. It is a real document billions swear by.

But I get it. You are basically arguing that nothing and nobody exists or ever existed or do or does anything to anything or anyone or had any ideas and arguing ideas or what people do or could do or would do is pointless.

Well, have fun with that. Sorry all this thread space was a waste.

> But I get it. You are basically arguing that nothing and nobody exists or ever existed or do or does anything to anything or anyone or had any ideas and arguing ideas or what people do or could do or would do is pointless.

And so now you are just putting words in my mouth I assume because you have no argument. I can’t even parse this.

You started an argument with a stance I never took by railing against a bogeyman I never advanced. And now you’re doing it again.

If communism was anything more than an impractical ideal then you should have been able to point out where it actually exists. But of course it doesn’t exist. It’s just a fantasy. Maybe you want it to exist so you can point a finger and say “see what happens when you don’t do what I want?”?