Is this another case of someone using API keys and not knowing about the claude MAX plans? It's $100 or $200 a month, if you're not pure yolo brute-force vibe coding $100 plan works.
For context: that's 1-2% of a senior engineer's fully loaded cost. The ROI is clear if it delivers even 10% productivity gain (we're seeing 2-3x on specific tasks).
You're right that many devs can start with MAX plans. The higher tier becomes necessary when running multiple parallel contexts and doing systematic exploration (the "3-attempt pattern" burns tokens fast).
I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think it was value for money. I've always been a cost-conscious engineer who weighs cost/value, and with Claude, I am seeing the return.
What if what feels like a productivity gain is actually a productivity loss?
https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
(see link in the article to a study showing developers thought AI gave them a 20% gain in productivity, but measuring this showed they instead had a 20% loss)