I still don't trust AI. It still has not helped me beyond being a search engine. Even at that it can be poor.
Twice, in the last couple of weeks including yesterday, I couldn't remember a setting. I Googled for it but got a Gemini result. I don't trust Gemini cause it's too commerce related so I switched to Claude. Claude reminded me of the setting but mentioned some interesting things. I know better but followed that rabbit hole which led to twisty passages and an hour later realized my mistake in following it, had my own Torvalds/nVidia moment, and kicked myself for wasting the time.
I don't and won't pay for it but I'm tempted to spend $20 for a month just to see what would happen but I can also buy a very nice lunch at the new restaurant that opened down the street for me.
I can relate - I subscribed briefly to OpenCode with the goal of migrating my shell script apps to nodejs ... That was largely successful; however, to your point, it is a rabbit hole and even though much of it was migrated, I still need to manually verify that it does what I want it to. It would often say one thing (this goes for any provider), then when I press it further it would do a complete reversal of what it just said. I think part of that is that my experience for my entire life has been using computers to do deterministic things, not probalistic. I need to think about problems differently then. In that space then it works really well.
On top of that, I don't understand the code in nearly the same way I did with my shell script apps because I had built that from the ground up over 5 or more years versus nearly overnight with AI and without having written any of the code. To make matters worse, my code base is now insanely large whereas with shell scripts, it was relatively small.
It depends on what your goal is, I spent $5 at OpenCode and as I mentioned earlier, for a hobbyist, it was very difficult to burn through my usage unless using the more expensive models. That was mainly because of life ... But, in the case of OpenCode, my observation is that 'Big Pickle' seemingly out performs Qwen Code Max, at least for me. Then, it makes no sense to pay for a subscription where the free service out performs the paid one and in either case, you can only use the free one the same amount whether you pay or not.
The joy of coding is still there, but it isn't necessarily in the weeds, it is higher-level, at least for me. I am solving problems that I've longed wanted to solve, but couldn't because I lacked skills in other programming languages, frameworks, or tools.
In terms of owning your own hardware or paying for a subscription, it is definitely more cost-effective to pay for a subscription. Not only is the upfront cost high for your own hardware, but your hardware can quickly become obsolete.
