Yeah it's funny how the needle has moved on this kind of thing.

Two years ago people scoffed at buying a personal license for e.g. JetBrains IDEs which netted out to $120 USD or something a year; VS Code etc took off because they were "free"

But now they're dumping monthly subs to OpenAI and Anthropic that work out to the same as their car insurance payments.

It's not sustainable.

There's also zero incentive for individual companies to care: if I only want to use opus in VS code (and why would I use anything else, it's so much better at the job) I can either pay for copilot, which has excellent VS Code integration (because it has to), or I can pay Claude specifically and then use their extension which has the absolute worst experience because not only is the chat "whimsical, to make AI fun!", its interface is pat of the sidebar, so it's mutually exclusive with your file browser, search, etc.

So whether you pay Claude or GitHub, Claude gets paid the same. So the consumer ends up footing a bill that has no reason to exist, and has no real competition because open source models can't run at the scale of an Opus or ChatGPT.

(not unless the EU decides it's time for a "European Open AI Initiative" where any EU citizen gets free access to an EU wide datacenter backed large scale system that AI companies can pay to be part of, instead of getting paid to connect to)