A neutral hobbyist on a $20 budget will build something and immediately bump into quotas. Its not going to be an enjoyable experience.
A negatively predisposed pro who only dabbles in AI gets to the first disappointment, smiles, and thinks "yeah, about what i expected" and quits.
To learn those new tools one needs to not be stingy. Invest as much as needed into tokens, subscriptions, and maybe most importantly invest the time. Spend time building various things. Try out various models not just for coding, but as part of apps being built. For bonus points, meaningfully experiment with local models. I try to avoid discussions with sceptics who have not put at least a few months of effort into learning those tools. It's like discussing driving with my mother in law, who spent maybe 20hrs behind the wheel through her whole life (and is very, very opinionated!).
In my opinion it's a complete waste of time and money to learn something that is gated by a company that might disappear tomorrow.
It's akin to company courses to learn something that is specific to that company. Of course you do them on the job, there is no point in doing them if you don't work there.
Similarly what's the point of trying 300 different models if any job will decide for you which one they approve the use of, and you are liable to get fired and asked for damages if you let anything else access company intellectual property?
The difference is (if you'll forgive me recruiting a couple of straw men for the purpose of illustrating the spectrum we are talking about here):
Hobbyist solo dev, counting tokens, hitting quotas, trying things on little projects, giving up and not seeing what the fuss is about.
vs
Corporate developer, increasingly held accountable by their boss for hitting metrics for token usage; being handed every new model as soon as it comes out; working with the tools every day on code changes that impact other developers on other teams all of whom have access to those same tools.
Okay, so just to be clear you're not commenting on productivity? Or what does "changes that impact" mean?
I might be missing a lot of self-evident assumptions here but I feel like I'm still missing so much context and have no idea what this difference is actually describing.
If you have some objective measure of productivity in mind, feel free to share it, but no that's not what I'm commenting on.
I'm talking more about why threads like this seem to be full of people saying 'this has completely changed how corporate development works' and other people saying 'I tried it a few times and I don't get the hype'
