two hundred dollars per calendar month

apologies to anyone who already read me saying this on bsky but: for the price of claude code, I could pay off my mortgage 3-4 years earlier. so as a notional labour saving device, it is competing with "four years of additional uninterupted leisure time", which I would say is a pretty high bar to clear

the idea that I, a pretty capable computer programmer, should pay *four years of my life* to people who make 10x as much money as me to ship the worst dreck I have ever laid eyes on, is just profoundly insulting, on top of all the other harm this shit causes

I'm actually pleased I've spent several years very slowly writing a small program by actually learning a lot about what it needs to do and thinking about its design and painstakingly validating it. it beats the pants off putting my name on this garbage

having seen this, it's not at all surprising that the software is as slow as it is, that its output is as bad as it is, or that it costs so much to run. this is not work you produce if you have thought about how anything should work for more than 5 minutes

everyone I have ever worked with is leagues better at writing code than this, what are we doing here

until now I would have said that LLMs produce median-quality work, not high quality, kind of by definition. but this isn't even median quality, it is way below that