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I use ChatGPT4 ever since it was released and it changed my computing life. - I started using Claude 3 when it was released. I realized that it’s answers were slightly different, sometimes better. Especially when I feed it long text. At some point I was so intrigued by its answers I became a paid subscriber. Now after a few weeks its my goto tool for programming. It beats both VS Code‘s Copilot (also a subscriber) and ChatGPT4 in coding, and aftentimes in text generation. But I still use both. Happy to have more options.

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I don't need another $20 subscription - are you using the api? I wouldn't mind spending 5-8 a month through the api for opus..

I use both the API and the web interface as that’s more convenient. I hardly use Google anymore these days. These tools are well worth every penny for me. They save me endless hours of research/ parsing the results and bringing it in a format I can use.

If you're a coder earning $150/hour, a tool that saves 'countless hours' is worth a lot more than $20

If you’re sitting all day, it’s worth investing $1000 on a chair. If you’re looking at the monitor all day, it’s worth the $3000 for a Studio display. If you’re programming all day, it’s worth getting the top end M3 Max for $5k. A mechanical keyboard, ergonomic mouse, overhead light. It’s worth paying a lot more than $20 for your text editor, your terminal app, window manager, your music subscription, your calendar, your email, todo app, notion, figma, miro..

Most of these make sense in isolation, but if you apply this thinking to everything it quickly adds up. I’m not keen on spending $3k-4k per year on software alone. Even if it provided massive productivity gains (hasn’t for me) my pay would not increase accordingly.

There are things that I have solved with this in a fraction of time that I otherwise wouldn’t have persued. Side projects I had in my mind. Or migration projects (old data) with lots of edge cases where I‘d have spent weeks to finish, I did in two days. Or apps I needed written in GTK as an interface for data or a workflow. Or semi-legal emails that I‘d have reached a lawyer for. There‘s a ton of things I can do with these tools in fractions of time. Or that I can do at all. This gives me superpowers. And it’s worth dropping a restaurant visit to pay for this.

Also don't forget about:

sleep: bed, mattress, pillow, sheets ... etc

workout: gym membership, bike, ... etc

food: organic, heirloom, natural ... etc

I'd claim that this is a logic that comes from rich, first world countries where you don't need to prioritize things in life much, as you can mostly afford everything. Poor people have to think thoroughly about everything they spend money on.

> it’s worth the $3000 for a Studio display

It’s worth $6000 for the XDR Pro Display

>I’m not keen on spending $3k-4k per year on software alone.

Heh, that little? If you're using any Autodesk stuff that's most of your budget at once.

it's just a question of roi. if those investments increase your earnings over their useful lifetime more than they cost, then yeah, they're worth it.

of course, you need to be an owner that can get the benefits of the increased productivity. if you're salaried, may not make sense.

> it’s worth getting the top end M3 Max for $5k

May I suggest learning enough Linux to remove the impedance mismatch between your dev and prod machines?

Yes but it's still nice to spend <$10 per month on per token APIs (and get faster responses) than $25 for chatgpt UI (that has horrid captchas besides being much slower than api). Also it's nice to store the data locally with Librechat.

To your employer maybe, but not to you. You get paid either way.

Enhancing your productivity can lead to an improvement in job performance, which in turn, may significantly increase your job security.

It's like trying to out dig a backhoe with a shovel. Well not yet but...

You can use a service such as nano-gpt.com where you pay for every single query only. I rarely spend more than $20 a month and I can choose whichever model I want.

Similar experience - my only issue is hitting the rate limitation with Opus.

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