You've always been doing that. Whether it's called "subscription" or not.

The "you" in this case is yourself, your team or your organization.

Your computer / laptop, the software it runs on, the mouse, keyboard, monitor, desk or whatever else you always had to pay = things you pay to do your work.

Even back in the day you had to pay for pen and paper. Consumables = API credit then?

Point being, what's the difference?

Just like you can code without AI you can also code without a chair. You can hold the laptop and try type.

> The new norm?

No

There have always been costs associated with tools, whether in money or time. A lot of businesses have been paying SaaS subscriptions for decades, and support contracts for longer. I don't understand how AI would be any different.

You are paying to get the work done much quicker. You are saving time, if you don't think your time has more value than the cost of AI agent then you should not pay for these tools.

> The new norm?

As long as companies are ok to pay for these tools and they believe that these do provide value, yes this is going to be the new norm.

> Lets see what local models can do?

My hope is that local models become as good as cloud models but the tricky part is all the AI companies would prefer to have big giant cloud models instead of innovating on optimization so that even small models can do good work.