Since last week it’s possible to use Claude Code in the VSCode terminal where it now automatically installs a plugin to display the diffs.

thanks! i never set this up properly. did it now though, really cool!

I feel unstoppable with Claude Code Max. I never thought I'd pay $200 per month for any developer tool, yet here we are, and I also couldn't be happier with it.

Would you pay $400?

Don't give people ideas.

Other professions pay a lot for their tools, and developers are loaded with cash.

>developers are loaded with cash

Maybe in the US? I will never pay 100$ for a subscription and I despise that people normalized it by even buying this stuff instead of saying "no, that's way too expensive".

Well bucko it’s time to open your wallet. There’s creatives out there who spend at least $1000/month in subscriptions for tools, but without those tools they could never do most of the work they do. And some who buy physical gear like photographs and videographers pay even way more than that for equipment.

Soon it will be the same for developers. Developers really are a spoiled bunch when it comes to paying for things, many will balk at paying $99/year just to publish stuff on an App Store. Everyone just wants free open source stuff. As expectations on developer productivity rises, you will be paying for these AI tools no matter how expensive they get, or you will just be gentrified out of the industry. The choice is yours.

I work in a cleanroom to fabricate semiconductor devices and I spend hundreds of euros per hour to use specific tools which mostly just use electricity and maintenance. Should we complain that it’s too expensive or should we use them because they’re worth the price?

Things have a price for a reason. It’s up to you whether it’s worth paying that or not.

We are talking about personal use and then people don't pay for it out of their own pocket but the company's. At least I hope so because otherwise it would be very dumb.

I’m also talking about personal use. These are research devices for my PhD. I’m obviously not paying out of pocket, but my funding agency does.

I’m trying to convey that if a tool increases your efficiency by more than it costs then it’s worth paying for it regardless of how expensive it is. It’s how the economy works.

There is no free lunch. Even if a company pays for it instead of you, their LLM costs per developer will be factored in to what they are willing to provide as compensation. So one way or another, the end result is you get paid for less for the same amount of work today.

Why not? If you charge $50/hr and it saves you even just two hours a month, it’s a profitable trade.

That “if” doesn’t apply to all of us, though. Not everybody is paid by the hour. I’d love to try something like Claude code, but $100 per month is way too expensive for me, and it probably wouldn’t even give me a single extra dollar of income. I think I’ll just wait for the time when local LLMs will be good enough to be a viable alternative.

By the time you can run good enough local LLMs without splurging on sufficiently powerful hardware, those LLMs will look like toys compared to whatever cloud based LLMs are available.

I'm not paid by the hour, it's just basic math on what my time is worth

That's a great question. Probably not. IDK. I'm also only paying this much to maintain momentum on a personal project. I also know in a year, these LLM products will change drastically, pricing tiers will transform, etc.. So I can't predict what will happen in a year but things will probably be cheaper.

Edit: On the other hand, the state of the art tools will also be much better in a year, so might keep that high price point!

Am I rationalizing my purchase? Possibly. If I'm not using it daily, I will cancel it, I promise :)

I think there is definitely room to price AI tools way higher. Developers are being slowly boiled like frogs right now. Getting addicted to AI tools to the point they can’t work without them, that’s when you raise the price.

I see it as an investment into my future. I was able to make progress on a personal project with Claude Code which I failed at using other tools. Yes, I will, and apparently have, paid multiple hundreds of dollars to get the project release ready. But I definitely need to keep in mind that I'm not going to at that velocity all the time, which would make the $200 price point not justifiable long term.

Can you elaborate? How is it better than Cursor?

I just started with it, so still getting my feet wet, but it's been better than any other tool at really grokking my codebase and understanding my intent. The workflow feels better than a strict IDE integration, but it does get pricey really quickly, and you pretty much need at least the $100 Max subscription.

Luckily, it should be coming with the regular $20 Pro subscription in the near future, so it should be easier to demo and get a feel for it without having to jump in all the way.

Try it

The current max pricing is actually as transparent as it has ever been: It's 20% more to use Max than the APIs directly. I am not sure if your feedback is outdated/based on a previous version of reality?

Yes, they've updated the docs since last week, I guess. Before, it didn't mention the 20% markup.

> The only real thing I'm missing is the diff view across files

You can commit checkpoints prior to each major prompt and use any IDE’s builtin visual diff versus last commit. Then just rebase when the task is done

I have a workflow that also uses micro commits. I keep my older JetBrains IDE open at the same time. Using feature branches liberally, any successful interaction between me and the LLM in Cursor results in a micro commit. I use the Cursor AI ‘generate commit message’ for speed. Every so often, I switch over to Jetbrains to use Git Interactive Rebase to tidy up the commits, as the diff viewer is unsurpassed. Then those micro commits get renamed, reordered, squash merged as required. All possible from Git CLI of course, but the Jetbrains Git experience is fantastic IMHO. All their free community edition IDEs have this.