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> some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools

Aren't we in the middle of literally the entire industry adopting 200/mo AI subscriptions? It seems to me like engineers will absolutely pay for tools if they justify their value.

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Every company I know is lamenting their out of control SaaS spend for developer tooling.

$200/month/user isn’t a big incremental cost, to be honest. SaaS and subscription tooling costs are high for developers.

It's less a binary pay/no pay, and more the value of accessing the dev tools. If you consider the fact that AI companies are most likely losing money running the models, then AI tools are incredibly cheap - they're in some ways paying you to use it.

No model maker is going to try to generate a profit off users using their models, they're gonna try to generate it some other way - much like dev tools.

OP was saying "no one pays for tools", but AI tools are a clear counterexample. That the AI tools are themselves not profitable isn't part of the argument - "no one pays for tools which are profitable" is not an argument that anyone was making.

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