The Mythical Man-Month, revisited

These tools (e.g. Chatgpt pro) lose money at $200/month

So expect, maybe, $1000 a month? Until your business is dependant on these LLMs. Then they can extract basically all your margin lol

>The AI fluency tax. This isn't free to learn.

In programming we've often embraced spending time to learn new tools. The AI tools are just another set of tools, and they're rapidly changing as well.

I've been experimenting seriously with the tools for ~3 years now, and I'm still learning a lot about their use. Just this past weekend I started using a whole new workflow, and it one-shotted building a PWA that implements a fully-featured calorie tracking app (with social features, pre-populating foods from online databases, weight tracking and graphing, avatars, it's on par with many I've used in the past that cost $30+/year).

Someone just starting out at chat.openai.com isn't going to get close to this. You absolutely have to spend time learning the tooling for it to be at all effective.

I use the Copilot extension in VS Code, which links back to my enterprise GitHub account, where I have Claude Sonnet 4.5 available amongst other things. I'm not familiar with Opus. I just open the Copilot Chat window in my VS Code, configure it to use Sonnet 4.5, tell it what I need and it writes the responses and code for me. I'm not using it for large tasks. Most of my usage is "examine this codebase and tell me how to fix xyz problem" or "look at this source code file and show me the code to implement some feature, make sure to examine the entire codebase for insight into how it should be integrated with the rest of the project"

There's other more advanced coding AI tools but this has accomplished most all of my needs so far

Same. I started coding before hitting puberty, and Im well into my 30s.

If you know the problem space well, you can let LLMs(I use Claude and ChatGPT) flesh it out.