While I do agree the iPhone was the major cause, I think this was an intentional move by Apple. During the early years, iTunes let you make your own ringtones for free using songs in your library. GEICO even had a novelty ringtone online you could download to your iPhone for free. Eventually, Apple started selling premade ringtones (for the same price as the full song!), after which the built-in iTunes functionality was removed.
There's a lot of tools now with a similar feature set. IMO, the main value prop an official OpenAI client could provide would be to share ChatGPT's free tier vs. requiring an API key. They probably couldn't open-source it then, but it'd still be more valuable to me than the alternatives.
I've ended up with $5K+ in a month using sonnet 3.7, had to dial it back.
I'm much happier with gemini 2.5 pro right now for high performance at a much more reasonable cost (primarily using with RA.Aid, but I've tried it with Windsurf, cline, and roo.)
I'm developing an open source coding agent (RA.Aid).
I'm using RA.Aid to develop itself (dogfooding,) so I'm constantly running the coding agent.
That cost is my peak cost, not average.
It's easy to scale back costs to 1/10 the cost and still get 90% of the quality. Basically that means using models like gemini 2.5 pro or Deepseek v3 (even cheaper) rather than expensive models like sonnet 3.7 and o3.
Too expensive for me to use for fun. Cheap enough to put me out of a job. Great. Love it. So excited. Doesn't make me want to go full Into The Wild at all.
I don’t think this is at the level of putting folks out of a job yet, frankly. It’s fine for straightforward changes, but more complex stuff, like concurrency, I still end up doing by hand.
And even for the straightforward stuff, I generally have a mental model of the changes required and give it a high level list of files/code to change, which it then follows.
Maybe the increase in productivity will reduce pressure to hire? We’ll see.
I didn't know this, thank you for the anecdata! Do you think it'd be more reasonable to generalize my suggestion to "This CLI should be included as part of ChatGPT's pricing"?
