Yesterday, I got access to a supply of monthly free tokens for coding.
I needed to do some dull refactoring on some personal config, so I gave it a go. It cost $1.33 for about 40 lines of changes across two commits.
I don't know what the future of software development is, but I very much hope it doesn't include having to periodically load up a money gun and fire it into Sam Altman's face.
@tommorris That's why I refuse to give them any money now. They don't need more help.
@shtrom indeed. I have a bright line rule with trying out AI stuff of “I absolutely won’t spend any money on any of this”.
(In this case, a company is giving a small allowance for testing which, well, that’s their problem.)
@tommorris @shtrom Same here. I try downloadable models now and again to see what the fundamental technology is capable of and whether it’s actually improving, rather than just having more compute thrown at it by the cloud providers.
@tommorris honest question, how long would have taken it manually though, including looking up stuff and trying it out?
And how much does that person make per hour?
But also, could a local model have done it?
@vrandecic not too long. Was a fairly simple refactor, it was one of those “I can’t be bothered” tasks on my list of things to do.
And Qwen 3.5 could have probably done it, a little bit slower perhaps. But without the knowledge that confidential stuff may have been hoovered up into training data.
Oct 11, 2026, 9:40 AM@tommorris theres always the choice to not use it
@mrjre oh indeed. I’m playing around with it because I kind of want to know how the tools work (or don’t) for professional reasons.