Real developer who has been programming daily since the 80s. The quality of the models used to vary pretty wildly, but here in the past year or two, everything has gotten way better and most models are pretty capable. Claude, Gemini, GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek. The prices haven't, but my advice is to ignore the bullshit and just pick the models that work for you. Claude isn't 25x better than DeepSeek, so it doesn't deserve to be 25x the cost.

I think Claude and OpenAI have started to realize that nobody's buying their overpriced token costs. Although, frankly, none of these prices even make sense compared the cost of compute for an average cloud-based GPU cluster. I can't see how any of these companies are making a profit, just riding the private equality wave until the money runs out. Maybe Amazon, Microsoft, Google, since they own their own hardware, but not OpenAI or Anthropic. China's going to run them out of business in a few years, anyway.

And of course, if you have the option, use local models. VRAM size is still a bit of a problem, but quantization techniques have gone a long way. You can run a decent model on a personal PC with a bit of tweaking, for home programming tasks, or just a personal model that doesn't immediately sell your data to Peter Thiel.