The cheapest plan for both Claude and Codex is the sweet spot IMO.

It also forces you to keep your workflow mostly harness-independent because Claude supports next to no standards and Codex does some.

That works until openai does the same thing. Pretty clear as an industry they want to establish a new price floor for non-trivial coding use.

Yep, and the price point theyre looking at is 95% of an engineer.

Once they get people hooked, deskilled, and paying, the money ratchet only tightens.

And the companies KNOW that theyre replacing engineers, or trying to. So each engineer replaced is X salary a year they now have available, so make it back in SaaS LLM tokens.

Thank god for the Chinese labs. Keeping us (relatively) honest.

That's what Claude is testing I guess (people often don't do what they say they do when it comes to pricing)

They confirmed that it does not affect existing users

Presumably for new subs.