Savings Report #98 - AI Pressure

Stock market is still going up. We’re very close to some new milestones, in-fact with the stock market going up again a couple of days after taking this snapshot, we’ve probably already surpassed them, but let’s see next month when I take the snapshot again. (It’s already gone back down.)

I renewed my ChatGPT subscription but I’ve hit a bit of a productivity wall now and I’m considering cancelling it. With the £20 subscription, you get a certain amount of usage for the month, split into weekly limits. You also have a 5h limit, a certain amount of compute that you can use every 5h which is pretty small.

I hate this model.

With a monthly quota it makes your brain (especially my brain) want to spend all of your quota to get the most out of your purchase. You need to 33% each week to be able to use 100% of your monthly limit. Meaning that if you wanted to do all of your work and use up your allowance in 1 week of the month, you wouldn’t be able to.

The 5h limit makes this even worse as you need to then go on every 5h to use your 5h limit if you want to stand a chance of using your weekly allowance. This is gamified casino like behavior, and it turns the subscription into a chore that you’ve got to use rather than a utility that is there when you’re ready to work.

This creates a paradox for hobby projects. Agentic development clearly accelerates development exponentially, and if used appropriately to a high quality as well. It increases your speed so much that if you want any kind of financial success, you can’t not use it.

But then, you can no longer build something for fun on the side anymore. You need a subscription to an AI service which will use these predatory practices.

There may be a middle ground with a non-frontier AI subscription like OpenCode Go. Or I could use the “old fashioned” AI assisted development which comes bundled with Gemini Plus of copy and pasting code. But you’ll still be going much slower, and getting frustrating and worse results than using the frontier agentic models.

My thoughts on this subject are a bit murky. But if I try to put this simply…

Game development, all software development really, has gone from an open source free hobby where if you had some expertise, time, and passion, you could work on something in your spare time and even get some financial success along with a sense of achievement down the line. Now, to a hobby that can be done if you want to burn £200 a month on it and then be burdened with the pressure of a ticking monthly subscription that you need to make the most of it before it’s gone.

Of course you can still do things the old way, but it seems like a waste of time these days and you’ll just be left behind. You wouldn’t write things using assembly code when there are modern programming languages. The only difference is now there is a money-spent requirement.

Is anyone experiencing this with an AI subscription?

For now I will probably pause my subscription while I work on deciding what I want to build. I’ll collect ideas and create a queue of work for an agent to carry out in my notes. Then when this queue piles up and I feel it’s worth getting another month agentic capabilities, I’ll buy a single month to empty the queue.

I’m looking forward to Autumn, some more trips to Scotland, and for the weather to get colder and snowy.