September 15, 2025: The Day the Industry Admitted AI Subscriptions Don't Work
14 comments
·September 17, 2025cuber_messenger
This reminds me of S07E01 of the TV show Black Mirror, which tells a story about a free brain tumor operation, followed by a monthly fee for "remote mind hosting". The standard plan goes worse and worse; your brain needs to serve as a computational resource while sleeping, and they keep pushing you to upgrade to Plus or Lux plans.
abrookewood
Yep, it's a very disturbing and depressing episode that feels (like a lot of Black Mirror) all too possible.
shepardrtc
Github + VSCode will probably eat Kiro's lunch pretty soon with this: https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/spec-driven-deve...
CuriouslyC
If you take a look at what that tool is doing, it's all very hand waivey prompting that will sometimes work, but mostly not. You need to put agents on rails and the docs it produces are more like friendly suggestions.
mdaniel
Spoken like someone who hasn't tried one or perhaps both of those projects
Kiro is collaborative, but SpecKit is a bunch of templates and then wishes you good luck in your journey. It honestly reminds me of those unified process templates, which I guess all of those are great if one needs some structure to organize ones thoughts
As an alternative, SpecKit is also 0.x release so maybe in 9 months it'll be useful - or overcome by whatever 'ooh, shiny!' follows it
jqpabc123
Bait and switch is a very old game. And venture capital is not a charity.
Did anyone really believe that companies would burn through billions in funding without trying to recover it and then some?
null
whycome
I don't understand how tech companies get away with using terms like "unlimited" or "lifetime"
cwmoore
Is there a law against conning an honest person? How would they enforce it?
travisgriggs
Any thoughts on how long before Zed Pro starts down this path? Or maybe they already are?
I switched from Cursor to Zed about five months ago. It’s a tradeoff of simplicity vs too many features that I’ve mostly been happy with. The last few days though, the “suggested” sonnet 4 model has gotten really slow.
mythz
Kind of glad that I missed the Cursor hype then rapid slide into enshittification, since I didn't think its goal of replacing an IDE would be a winning strategy and instead went for IDE plugins/extensions AI assistants like Augment Code, GitHub Copilot and Gemini Code Assist as they work in both Rider/Intellij, VS Code and NeoVim.
I'm assuming I don't use AI as much as most devs as I'm still comfortably within Augment Code's 600 user messages/mo dev plan limit which IMO is great value for being able to use its Context Engine. If I ever exceeded that I'd likely temporarily switch to Qwen Coder's effectively unlimited free tier [1] until the next quota refill.
Not sure if Augment's going to increase their prices or downgrade their quotas since they're still at the whims of Claude Sonnet / GPT 5 API pricing, but if they do I'd be looking at moving to an open model solution like Open Code / Roo Code so I can easily switch to the best value coding models of the day, between Qwen3 coder, Grok Code Fast, GLM, Kimi K2, DeepSeek, etc we're spoilt for choice [2].
petesergeant
brave statement the day after Codex CLI got a revamp
At this point I don't see the point of using a coding tool not provided directly by one of the big foundation model companies. They all clearly see the market of agentic coding tools is one of the first real markets willing to pay, and they are all working on first party tools that are tightly integrated with their models.