[dudewhocodes]

> I am at the tail end of AI adoption, so I don’t expect to say anything particularly useful or novel.

Are they really late? Has everyone started using agents and paying $200 subscriptions?

Am I the one wrong here or these expressions of "falling behind" are creating weird FOMO in the industry?

EDIT: I see the usefulness of these tools, however I can't estimate how many people use them.

[NothingAboutAny]

>Has everyone started using agents and paying $200 subscriptions?

If anything in my small circle the promise is waning a bit, in that even the best models on the planet are still kinda shitty for big project work. I work as a game dev and have found agents to only be mildly useful to do more of what I've already laid out, I only pay for the $100 annual plan with jetbrains and that's plenty. I haven't worked at a big business in a while, but my ex-coworkers are basically the same. a friend only uses chat now because the agents were "entirely useless" for what he was doing.

I'm sure someone is getting use out of them making the 10 billionth node.js express API, but not anyone I know.

[bunderbunder]

I’m using it for scripts to automate yak shaving type tasks. But for code that’s expected to last, folks where I work are starting to get tired of all the early 2000s style code that solves a 15 LOC problem in 1000 lines through liberal application of enterprise development patterns. And, worse, we’re starting to notice an uptick in RCA meetings where a contributing factor was freshman errors sailing through code review because nobody can properly digest these 2,000 line pull requests at anywhere near the pace that Claude Code can generate them.

That would be fine if our value delivery rate were also higher. But it isn’t. It seems to actually be getting worse, because projects are more likely to get caught in development hell. I believe the main problem there is poorer collective understanding of generated code, combined with apparent ease of vibecoding a replacement, leads to teams being more likely to choose major rewrites over surgical fixes.

For my part, this “Duke Nukem Forever as a Service” factor feels the most intractable. Because it’s not a technology problem, it’s a human psychology problem.

[agumonkey]

yeah it seems the usual front/back complexity is well in the training corpus of gemini and you get good enough output

[rootnod3]

Definitely FOMO. I have tried it once or twice and saw absolutely zero value in it. I will stick to writing the code by hand, even if it's "boring" parts. If I have to sit down and review it anyway, I can also go and write it myself.

Especially considering that these 200$ subscriptions are just the start because those companies are still mostly operating at a loss.

It's either going to be higher fees or Ads pushed into the responses. Last I need is my code sprinkled with Ads.

[RobinL]

> saw absolutely zero value in it

At the very least, it can quickly build throwaway productivity enhancing tools.

Some examples from building a small education game: - I needed to record sound clips for a game. I vibe coded a webapp in <15 mins that had a record button, keyboard shortcuts to progress though the list of clips i needed, and outputted all the audio for over 100 separate files in the folder structure and with the file names i needed, and wrote the ffmpeg script to post process the files

- I needed json files for the path of each letter. gemini 3 converted images to json and then codex built me an interactive editor to tidy up the bits gemini go wrong by hand

The quality of the code didn't matter because all i needed was the outputs.

The final games can be found: https://www.robinlinacre.com/letter_constellations https://www.robinlinacre.com/bee_letters/ code: https://github.com/robinL/

[brokencode]

So using something once or twice is plenty to give it a fair shake?

How long did it take to learn how to use your first IDE effectively? Or git? Or basically any other tool that is the bedrock of software engineering.

AI fools people into thinking it should be really easy to get good results because the interface is so natural. And it can be for simple tasks. But for more complex tasks, you need to learn how to use it well.

[kibwen]

Good news, if you upgrade to our $300 plan you can avoid all ads, which will instead be injected into the code that you ship to your users.

[mixermachine]

Regarding the $200 subscription. For Claude Code with Opus (and also Sonnet) you need that, yes.

I had ChatGPT Codex GPT5.2 high reasoning running on my side project for multiple hours the last nights. It created a server deployment for QA and PROD + client builds. It waited for the builds to complete, got the logs from Github Actions and fixed problems. Only after 4 days of this (around 2-4 hours) active coding I reached the weekly limit for the ChatGPT Plus Plan (23€). Far better value so far.

To be fully honest, it fucked up one flyway script. I have to fix this now my self :D. Will write a note in the Agent.md to never alter existing scripts. But the work otherwise was quite solid and now my server is properly deployed. If I would switch between High reasoning for Planing and Middle reasoning for coding, I would get even more usage.

[moron4hire]

> ChatGPT Codex GPT5.2 high reasoning

"... brought to you by Costco."

But seriously, I can't help but think that this proliferation of massive numbers of iterations on these models and productizations of the models is an indication that their owners have no idea what they are doing with any of it. They're making variations and throwing them against the wall to see what sticks.

[CurleighBraces]

I've paid, but I am usually quick to adopt/trial things like this.

I think for me it's a case of fear of being left behind rather than missing out.

I've been a developer for over 20 years, and the last six months has blown me away with how different everything feels.

This isn't like JQuery hitting the scene, PHP going OO or one of the many "this is a game changer" experiences if I've had in my career before.

This is something else entirely.

[rootnod3]

Just because it feels faster or are you actually satisfied with the code that is being churned out? And what about long term prospects of maintaining said code?

[AstroBen]

Its blown me away also

I'm also fairly confident having it write my code is not a productivity boost, at least for production work I'd like to maintain long term

[jjice]

> Are they really late? Has everyone started using agents and paying $200 subscriptions?

No, most programmers I know outside of my own work (friends, family, and old college pals) don't use AI at all. They just don't care.

I personally use Cursor at work and enjoy it quite a bit, but I think the author is maybe at the tail end of _their circle's_ adoption, but not the industry's.

[Insanity]

I have a really simple app that I asked various models to build, but it requires interacting with an existing website.

(“Scrape kindle highlights from the kindle webpage, store it in a database, and serve it daily through an email digest”).

No success so far in getting it to do so without a lot of handholding and manually updating the web scraping logic.

It’s become something of a litmus test for me.

So, maybe there is some FOMO but in my experience it’s a lot of snake oil. Also at work, I manage a team of engineers and like 2 out of 12 clearly submit AI generated code. Others stopped using it, or just do a lot more wrangling of the output.

[sodapopcan]

I do not pay for any AI nor does my employer pay for it on my behalf. It will stay this way for as long as I can make that work while remaining employed.

[PlatoIsADisease]

Are you a programmer?

The $20/mo I pay is quite affordable given the ROI.

I could see jumping between various free models.

[zapnuk]

Thats like being proud of not using google or stackoverflow and only reading manuals, or using notepad instead of an IDE (or editor with language server support).

A 10$ GitHub Copilot or 20$ ChatGPT/Claude subscription get you a long way.

And if the employer isn't willing to spend this little money to improve their workers productivity they're pretty dumb.

There are valid concerns like privacy and oss licences. But lack of value or gain in productivity isn't one of them.

[quijoteuniv]

What kind of work do you do?

[rdiddly]

I can't figure out if I'm at the tail end of adoption, or the leading edge of disillusionment. I guess being able to say where you are in relation to the herd, depends on knowing where the herd is and which way it's headed. Which I don't know. All I know is, it seems to take longer to write the prompt, wait for the output, and then verify/correct the output, iteratively mind you, than to just write the goddamn code. And said process, in addition to being equal or longer, is also boring as fuck the entire time, and deeply annoying about half the time. Nobody is pressuring me to use it, but if this is the future, then I'm ready to change to a different career where I actually enjoy the work.

[keeda]

> Are they really late? Has everyone started using agents and paying $200 subscriptions?

If you rephrase the question as "Are most engineers already using AI?" -- because it transcends the specific modality (agents vs chat vs autocomplete) and $200 subscriptions (because so many tools are available for free) -- signs point to "yes."

Adoption seems to be all the way upto 85% - 90% in 2025, but there is a lot of variance in the frequency of use:

https://dora.dev/research/2025/

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragmatic-eng...

If there is FOMO, I'm not sure it's "weird."

[Aurornis]

> Are they really late? Has everyone started using agents and paying $200 subscriptions?

The $20/month subscriptions go a long way if you're using the LLM as an assistant. Having a developer in the loop to direct, review, and write some of the code is much more token efficient than trying to brute force it by having the LLM try things and rewrite until it looks like what you want.

If you jump to the other end of the spectrum and want to be in the loop as little as possible, the $100/$200 subscriptions start to become necessary.

My primary LLM use case is as a hyper-advanced search. I send the agent off to find specific parts of a big codebase I'm looking for and summarize how it's connected. I can hit the $20/month windowed limits from time to time on big codebases, but usually it's sufficient.

[giancarlostoro]

Is it FOMO if for $100 a month you can build things that takes months, and then refine them and polish them, test them, and have them more stable than most non-AI code has been for the last decade plus? I blame Marketing Driven development for why software has gone downhill. Look at Windows as a great example. "We can fix that later" is a lie, but not with a coding agent. You can fix it now.

[anonymous908213]

> Is it FOMO if for $100 a month you can build things that takes months

It is the very definition of FOMO if there is an entire cult of people telling you that for a year, and yet after a year of hearing about how "everything has changed", there is still not a single example of amazing vibe-coded software capable of replacing any of the real-world software people use on a daily basis. Meanwhile Microsoft is shipping more critical bugs and performance regressions in updates than ever while boasting about 40% of their code being LLM-generated. It is especially strange to cite "Windows as a great example" when 2025 was perhaps one of the worst years I can remember for Windows updates despite, or perhaps because of, LLM adoption.

[CodeMage]

"We can fix it later" is not the staple of Marketing Driven Development. It's not why Windows has been getting more user-hostile and invasive, why its user experience has been getting worse and worse.

Enshittification is not primarily caused by "we can fix it later", because "we can fix it later" implies that there's something to fix. The changes we've seen in Windows and Google Search and many other products and services are there because that's what makes profit for Microsoft and Google and such, regardless of whether it's good for their users or not.

You won't fix that with AI. Hell, you couldn't even fix Windows with AI. Just because the company is making greedy, user-hostile decisions, it doesn't mean that their software is simple to develop. If you think Windows will somehow get better because of AI, then you're oversimplifying to an astonishing degree.

[andai]

A hobby of mine was listening to motivational audio tapes from the 1980s.

In those days already the attitude with regard to professional work was that if you aren't constantly advancing in your industry, you are falling behind.

[kibwen]

For the past 20 years the population of the internet has been increasingly sorted into filter bubbles, designed by media corporations which are incentivized to use dark patterns and addictive design to hijack the human brain by weaponizing its own emotions against and creating the illusion of popular consensus. To suggest that someone who has been vibecoding for only a few months is at the tail end of mass adoption is to reveal that one's brain has been pickled by exposure to Twitter. These tools are still extremely undercooked; insert the "meet potential man" meme here.

[nurettin]

A bulk of developers are probably on claude $20 or cursor waiting for their company to pay up.

[ryanSrich]

When fortune 500, 100 and 50 organizations are buying AI coding tools at scale (I know from personal exp), then I would say you're late. So yes. Late stage adoption for this wave.