[trenchpilgrim]

$2400? Mate, I have a free GitHub Copilot subscription (Microsoft hands them out to active OSS developers), and work pays for my Claude Code via our cloud provider backend (and it costs less per working day than my morning Monster can). LLM inference is _cheap_ and _getting cheaper every month_.

> No, but I expect my software to have been verified for correctness, and soundness by a human being with a working mental model of how the code works.

This is not exclusive with AI tools:

- Use AI to write dev tools to help you write and verify your handwritten code. Throw the one-off dev tools in the bin when you're done.

- Handwrite your code, generate test data, review the test data like you would a junior engineer's work.

- Handwrite tests, AI generate an implementation, have the agent run tests in a loop to refine itself. Works great for code that follows a strict spec. Again, review the code like you would a junior engineer's work.

[jplusequalt]

Writing the tests by hand, but letting the AI write the code sounds horribly dull.

[trenchpilgrim]

I'm an infrastructure/platform engineer. If the code is boring, that probably means I'm doing my job well. This isn't hobby coding.