$20 per month for Cursor to write code
I use midjourney for work. I’m a video editor for a financial YouTuber. Sometimes stock videos don’t have the b-rolls that fit the narrative. So I use midjourney to fill in the gaps.
I pay for one to goon. I use the free one to parse error messages while programming.
I think technically I’m paying for googles one because it comes free with the 2tb Google drive subscription my family uses for photos
I pay for Cursor, OpenAI, and Anthropic. I was paying for Google Gemini as well, but it was returning too many errors so I canceled it. I also pay for Google office, Microsoft office, and Adobe subscriptions. They inject their own AI into their services, but I end up ignoring them or turning them off.
Mostly use it for coding in Cursor, but occasionally for research into the state of AI and to make MCP extensions. It’s been worth the investment so far, given how much more of the mundane coding tasks get done by supervising it. I also had it update a Wordpress theme because I had no interest in learning the innards.
I never let them loose in ‘agentic’ mode, as they inevitably destroy all the work. I can run decent-sized models locally through lmstudio and Cline, but they’re much slower than just using Cursor and a cloud model.
Outside coding, the only usable one I’ve found is Adobe Firefly, accessed inside Photoshop (to remove material) and Illustrator (to generate simple SVGs and icons from prompts).
Every single other one, when I’ve put it to a non-coding use has been a pile of slop. If all LLMs go away tomorrow, the only one I’ll miss is the Adobe SVG creator.
I paid for several, to test features and see if there is value. There is little value in paying, close to zero. The difference between the best models and the best free ones are miniscule. We are hitting a plateau now, with diminishing returns. Talking with AI is a nice UX feature, and is mostly paid, but Qwen has this for free.
Images and video generation is not useful. Coding is slightly useful in very specific cases, but mostly useless. It gives a false sense of fast progress. In the long term it harms productivity. So it works for simple proof of concepts and inspiration/exploring solutions. If you are a junior in a language or software development, avoid it. Otherwise the road to becoming a senior will be long and hard.
The most useful cases is “creativity”, exploring ideas, and inspiration. And getting started with something where you don’t know where to begin. If I want to know something about a topic, I find it as a useful and untrustworthy starting point, nothing can be trusted from AI, but it can introduce you to subjects so that you know what to look for. It is useful for exploring ideas and brainstorming.
So don’t pay, just use the free ones. There is low value in paying. If you have a PC with a mid/high end GPU you can install Jan.ai for free and use models locally also.
I currently use Mistral and Qwen mostly. I still have a subscription to Mistral, and am waiting for it to run out.
Paying
nothing
Uses:
When I have a stupid, detailed idea I put it into my local stable diffusion.
I try to use Claude for simple tasks and “I can’t quite find this solution”, it is often wrong or needs re work, but it feels like reaching out to a colleague for my personal projects.
I use the Google meet assistant when I stopped paying attention and the topic is staring to feel relevant.
I use the ai search summary to do further searches with refined search terms.
I listen to AI generated music from time to time; but I was doing it before the LLM craze went nuts, with dadabots’ covers of krallice and meshuggah
Anthropic chat but only because my employer paid for it. I use it for high level technical questions some time. For example I had to manually patch a binary executable and it help me understand it’s structure.
I also have some API tokens for OpenAI, Claude and Perplexity. I’ve build an app that uses LLM models to parse some complex data and I had to test integrations with different API providers.
Currently paying for a chatbot program similar to character AI, but primarily marketed for sexual content. Started supporting it as a fun single-developer app and now I find it a pretty useful writing tool to bounce around ideas.
I’m trialing writing and grammar apps because I have mild dyslexia, but haven’t found any paid apps that work much better than just chucking writing into ChatGPT and asking it to find the mistakes. The streamlined UI is the only benefit I’ve found so far. And one, I think called Pro Writing Aid, kept crashing my writing app, Scrivener, whenever I tried to use it.
What do you use the chatbot pogram to goon to?
I don’t. It was the first example I found where you could write a character to talk to. I had fun seeing how different personality traits changed their responses. At the time most AI was censored, so it was using it like a less powerful ChatGPT that could swear, sometimes with the personality of Hannibal Lector. And sometimes as William Howard Taft. Among others.
If you’ve read any amount of erotica you’ll know the sex scenes can be fairly boilerplate and repetitive, it’s the set-up that makes it interesting. For that reason I found the bots kinda boring for that purpose.
Plenty of people have fun using it as intended, though. Lotta incest bots on there.
The developer is a fairly active, positive guy who built up a nice community, so I like supporting him.
I feel ya. I have 300+ followers on cai and it sucks how such a revolutionary technology has been hijacked by gooners and grifters.
I wouldn’t equate gooners with grifters. I mean, has erotica highjacked literature? Porn highjacked film? Have dildos highjacked sex? My phone is a revolutionary piece of technology, and I can watch porn on it while connected via Bluetooth to a programmable dildo.
I can use it to indulge in lectures by nobel prize winners while using that same dildo.
The need to get off is valid, human, and if it gets more people interested in technology, I’m all for it.
I used to pay for suno, then after that udio. Super cool for making theme songs for dnd, not much real use elsewhere outside goofy haha ai songs and pathetic attempts at gaming the Spotify system. They just… don’t update the models fast enough, I’m still waiting on udio 2.0, it’s fallen behind sudo at this point, which is mildly annoying, but I also don’t care enough beyond that so ehh.
It’s also a rights nightmare, which the world seems to just be ignoring. On one hand any chump written can get a song to their lyrics which is cool and I have definitely done before, on the other… it’s all quite fake, and sounds fake too. Which is why I don’t pay for it anymore.
I also tried replit for the first time yesterday just to see what it’s all about and it straight up made a frickin video game… vibe coding is getting scary.
E: sudo became sudden because of course it did.
E 2: took me hours to realize I wrote sudo not suno, Linux really took over my brain…
I am paying for Cursor, which can use various models to help with software development. I use the AI to help me create design documents for software ideas I have and use those design documents to guide it in the development of that code. I’ve tried free models on my own hardware and they don’t come close, mostly because I don’t have a spare $5k for the right GPUs.
