I built a little app where you can burn money to signal exactly how you feel about that special co-worker. I can't decide whether this is the best thing I've ever done, or dystopian AF.
I've been loving Tidewave MCP since the day it launched and I wish I had that for all my work. I also fight the pain of driving web browsers through the playwright MCP every day, and while it's a huge help, it's also massively slow and kills my context window.
I want these problems solved. But I want them solved in a way that isn't unique to one stack, because I don't have the luxury of sticking to my preferred Elixir stack all the time. I also want them solved in a way that doesn't force me to take a huge backward step in my AI usage by bypassing my all-you-can-eat Max subscription.
The $10 subscription isn't that expensive, but then again, since this isn't a complete solution, it's going to be on top of other subs like Cursor/Max/Phoenix.new etc etc and it becomes death by a thousand cuts.
Maybe I just need to calm down a bit and not look at it as all-or-nothing.
Like, sure, switching to this full-time would be impossible. But maybe as a tool in my toolbox, where I pay $10 and use it once-in-a-while, when I have a tricky thing to do and it's worth me burning $10-20 on API tokens just to unblock me.
I'm just concerned that software development is fast becoming pay-to-play / pay-to-win, and that can quickly lead to chickenization, where prices are carefully titrated to shift most of the value to the tool providers.
We've seen this play out in infrastructure and tooling, and most orgs now "donate" a huge chunk of their profit margins to AWS.
> I'm just concerned that software development is fast becoming pay-to-play / pay-to-win
The people did it to themselves.
Instead of investing time learning these things, people (like always) want to take a shortcut. Big co's are more than willing to take advantage of that laziness and will indefinitely into the future—whether diet pills, AI, or a brain chip that occasionally makes you drool but is 100x more accurate with directions than Google Maps.
I hear you. I'd love to integrate with whatever model subscription is available but it seems using Max outside of Claude products is against their terms. I suggest reaching out to Anthropic and letting them know you would like to use your Max subscription with other coding agents.
Send help.