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Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

blog.kilocode.ai

151–160 of 363 posts

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think it is great to take pride in ones craft, but in the end it comes down to this: We create software for users. If the user can't feel any difference in quality between human made software, or AI made software, then it does not mater. It is that easy. If AI makes better software, at lower prices, human developers will become obsolete. It is the natural way of life. Once we had telephone operators, now we don't.…

There's still work for artisanal woodworkers, doing everything by hand with the utmost care[0]

But that doesn't change the fact that the VAST majority of people are just fine with mass-produced furniture

I think this is the difference that's going to happen to software.

There's the one doing everything in bare vim with zero assist, just rawdogging function names and library methods from rote memory.

And then there's the rest who use all the tools at their disposal to solve problems. Is the work super clean, efficient and fully hand-crafted? Nope. Does it solve the problem? Yes it does, and fast.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@ISHITANIFURNITURE

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#152

"I firmly believe that AI will not replace developers, but a developer using AI will replace a developer who does not." Ugh, anyone who says that and really believes it can no longer see common sense through the hype goggles. It's just stupid and completely 100% wrong, like saying all musicians will use autotune in the future because it makes the music better. It's the same as betting that there will be no new invent…

+1, even though I mildly disagree with you. I pay For Gemini Pro by the year, and even though I don’t use it often, it is still high value. There are obvious things like generating a Bash shell script quickly - and other things I rarely do, are simple, and I save 5 minutes here and there. Sometimes code generation can be useful, in moderation. But the big thing is using AI to learn new things, explain some tricky mat…

> explain some tricky math in a paper I am reading

To me this seems to be the single most valuable use case of newer "AI tools"

> generating a Bash shell script quickly

I do this very often, and to me this seems to me the second most valuable use case of newer "AI tools"

> The value of AI is in improving ourselves

I agree completely.

> help brain storm

This strikes me as very concerning. In my experience, AI brainstorming ideas are exceptionally dull and uninspired. People who have shared ideas from AI brainstorming sessions with me have OVERWHELMINGLY come across as AI brained dullards who are unable to think for themselves.

What I'm trying to say is that Chat GPT and similar tools are much better suited for interacting with closed systems with strict logical constraints, than they are for idea generation or writing in a natural language.

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#153

"I firmly believe that AI will not replace developers, but a developer using AI will replace a developer who does not." Ugh, anyone who says that and really believes it can no longer see common sense through the hype goggles. It's just stupid and completely 100% wrong, like saying all musicians will use autotune in the future because it makes the music better. It's the same as betting that there will be no new invent…

Lol, I think making confident claims in either direction is total copium at this point. It's abundantly obvious that LLM-based tools are useful, it's just a question of what we'll settle on using them for and to what degree. Nobody knows how this will play out yet. Reality does not care about your feelings, unfortunately.

Just completely ignoring LLMs is like not wanting to use autocomplete or language servers, preferring to hand-craft everything.

But on the other hand there is the other end who think AGI coming in a few months and LLMs are omniscient knowledge machines.

There is a sweet spot in the middle.

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#154
post #61

"I firmly believe that AI will not replace developers, but a developer using AI will replace a developer who does not." Ugh, anyone who says that and really believes it can no longer see common sense through the hype goggles. It's just stupid and completely 100% wrong, like saying all musicians will use autotune in the future because it makes the music better. It's the same as betting that there will be no new invent…

I disagree. While there are developers that truly build new technology and invent novel solutions, the overwhelming majority of developers who are paid for their work daily do pretty mundane and boring software development. They are implementing business logic, building forms, building tables, etc. And AI already excels at building those sorts of things faster and with cleaner code. I’ve never once seen a model gener…

> the overwhelming majority of developers who are paid for their work daily do pretty mundane and boring software developmet

So are musicians. We think of them as doing creative stuff but a vast majority is mundane.

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#155
post #92
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI isn't a stylistic preference or minor enhancement, but cognitive augmentation that allows developers to navigate complexity at scales human cognition wasn't designed for. Just as the developer who refused to adopt version control, IDEs, or Stack Overflow eventually became unemployable , those who reject tools that fundamentally expand their problem-solving capacity will find themselves unable to compete with those…

> cognitive augmentation that allows developers to navigate complexity at scales human cognition wasn't designed for I don't think you should use LLMs for something you can't master without. > will find themselves unable to compete I'd wait a bit more before concluding so affirmatively. The AI bubble would very much like us to believe this, but we don't yet know very well the long term effects of using LLMs on code,…

Two masters go head to head. One uses AI tools (wisely - after all, they're a master!), the other refuses to. Which one wins?

To your second point -- With as much capital as is going into data center buildout, the increasing availability of local coding LLMs that near the performance of today's closed models, and the continued innovation on both open/closed models, you're going to hang your hat on the possibility that LLMs are going to be only available in a 'limited or degraded' state?

I think we simply don't have similar mental models for predicting the future.

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#156

When you offer "unlimited", you're immediately exposing yourself to the 0.1% of userbase that will absolutely treat it is unlimited. Whale users/hoarders. This has been a known problem since the dawn of hosting...hell, it goes back to times before computers. One thing I miss for the other users, i.e. the casual users that never use anywhere near of their quota, is rollover. If you haven't used your quota this month,…

Exactly. "Unlimited" is practically guaranteed to become a lie for any service that provides some amount of utility and lasts long enough to accumulate a significant number of users.

Nothing in our world is truly unlimited. Digital services and assets have different costs than their physical counterparts, but that just means different limits, not a lack of them. Electrical supply, compute capacity, and storage are all physical things with real world limits to how much they can do.

These realities eventually manifest when someone tries to build an "unlimited" service on top of limited components, similar to how you can't build a service with 99.999% reliability when it has a critical piece that can only get to 99.9%.

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#157
the reaction to all of this, and this article in particular, is really very very stupid.

you can see here in this Reddit thread from April, when Claude Max was launched, that it was explicitly explained as being limited: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1jvbpek/breaking_...

Max is described as "5-20x more than Pro", clearly indicating both are limited.

here's their launch blog post: https://www.anthropic.com/news/max-plan

> The new Max plan delivers exactly that. With up to 20x higher usage limits, you can maintain momentum on your most demanding projects with little disruption.

obviously everyone wants everything for free, or cheap, and no one wants prices to change in a way that might not benefit them, but the endless whinging from people about how unfair it is that anthropic is limiting access to their products sold as coming with limited access is really extremely tedious even by HN standards.

and as pointed out dozens of times in these threads, if your actual worry is running out of usage in a week or month, Anthropic has you covered - you can just pay per token by giving Claude Code an API key. doing that 24/7 will cost ~100x what Max does though, I wonder if that's a useful bit of info about the situation or not?

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#158
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My credit card web portal has a section for reversing transactions without having to call anyone. Maybe yours does too?

nice feature. so its like backcharge via app instead of calling credit card customer care. do you mind sharing the credit card company

This is getting to be the norm rather than a unique feature. I can dispute a credit card transaction through the app for my Citi, X1, or Fidelity cards.

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One does find it occasionally. My mobile phone plan (in Sweden) currently says that I have 774G left of my 25G/month quota for example :)

Still limited. But "unlimited" to most people In the same way your next-door supermarket has effectively "infinite soup cans" for the needs of most people.

Unlimited means for a flat rate. Pay per use/item, like at the supermarket, isn’t it.

Re: Stop selling “unlimited”, when you mean “until we change our minds”

#160

I didn't look at the URL at first and was surprised when this turned in to an ad. Oh well! > Stop selling "unlimited", when you mean "until we change our minds" The limits don't go in to affect until August 28th, one month from yesterday. Is there an option to buy the Max plan yearly up front? I honestly don't know; I'm on the monthly plan. If there isn't a yearly purchase option, no one is buying unlimited and then…

TBH paying yearly for ANY LLM tool at this time is just pure insanity.

The field is moving so fast that whatever was best 6 months ago is completely outdated.

And what is top tier today, might be trash in a few months.

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