brave statement the day after Codex CLI got a revamp

Bait and switch is a very old game. And venture capital is not a charity.

Did anyone really believe that companies would burn through billions in funding without trying to recover it and then some?

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Github + VSCode will probably eat Kiro's lunch pretty soon with this: https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/spec-driven-deve...

Kind of glad that I missed the Cursor hype then rapid slide into enshittification, since I didn't think its goal of replacing an IDE would be a winning strategy and instead went for IDE plugins/extensions AI assistants like Augment Code, GitHub Copilot and Gemini Code Assist as they work in both Rider/Intellij, VS Code and NeoVim.

I'm assuming I don't use AI as much as most devs as I'm still comfortably within Augment Code's 600 user messages/mo dev plan limit which IMO is great value for being able to use its Context Engine. If I ever exceeded that I'd likely temporarily switch to Qwen Coder's effectively unlimited free tier [1] until the next quota refill.

Not sure if Augment's going to increase their prices or downgrade their quotas since they're still at the whims of Claude Sonnet / GPT 5 API pricing, but if they do I'd be looking at moving to an open model solution like Open Code / Roo Code so I can easily switch to the best value coding models of the day, between Qwen3 coder, Grok Code Fast, GLM, Kimi K2, DeepSeek, etc we're spoilt for choice [2].

[1] https://github.com/QwenLM/qwen-code

[2] https://openrouter.ai/rankings#categories

This reminds me of S07E01 of the TV show Black Mirror, which tells a story about a free brain tumor operation, followed by a monthly fee for "remote mind hosting". The standard plan goes worse and worse; your brain needs to serve as a computational resource while sleeping, and they keep pushing you to upgrade to Plus or Lux plans.

I don't understand how tech companies get away with using terms like "unlimited" or "lifetime"

At this point I don't see the point of using a coding tool not provided directly by one of the big foundation model companies. They all clearly see the market of agentic coding tools is one of the first real markets willing to pay, and they are all working on first party tools that are tightly integrated with their models.

Any thoughts on how long before Zed Pro starts down this path? Or maybe they already are?

I switched from Cursor to Zed about five months ago. It’s a tradeoff of simplicity vs too many features that I’ve mostly been happy with. The last few days though, the “suggested” sonnet 4 model has gotten really slow.

Wish they explicitly introduced Openrouter in the article. Aider (my choice) and Kilocode uses it to connect to any models and switches providers for a given model (for example Sonnet is hosted by Anthropic, Google and AWS and OSS models have even more hosts). I try models 20x cheaper than Sonnet.