[kemotep]

So is it strictly necessary to sign up for the 200 a month subscription? Because every time, without fail, the free ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Mistral, Deepseek whatever chatbots, do not write PowerShell faster than I do.

They “type” faster than me, but they do not type out correct PowerShell.

Fake modules, out of date module versions, fake options, fake expectations of object properties. Debugging what they output makes them a significant speed down compared to just, typing and looking up PowerShell commands manually and using the -help and get-help functions in my terminal.

But again, I haven’t forked over money for the versions that cost hundreds of dollars a month. It doesn’t seem worth it, even after 3 years. Unless the paid version is 10 times smarter with significantly less hallucinations the quality doesn’t seem worth the price.

[azuanrb]

Not necessary. I use Claude/Chatgpt ~$20 plan. Then you'll get access to the cli tools, Claude Code and Codex. With web interface, they might hallucinate because they can't verify it. With cli, it can test its own code and keep iterating on it. That's one of the main difference.

[Aurornis]

> So is it strictly necessary to sign up for the 200 a month subscription?

No, the $20/month plans are great for minimal use

> Because every time, without fail, the free ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Mistral, Deepseek whatever chatbots, do not write PowerShell faster than I do.

The exact model matters a lot. It's critical to use the best model available to avoid wasting time.

The free plans generally don't give you the best model available. If they do, they have limited thinking tokens.

ChatGPT won't give you the Codex (programming) model. You have to be in the $20/month plan or a paid trial. I recommend setting it to "High" thinking.

Anthropic won't give you Opus for free, and so on.

You really have to use one of the paid plans or a trial if you want to see the same thing that others are seeing.

[brokencode]

You are exposing your lack of learning how to use the tools.

Tools like GitHub copilot can access the CLI. It can look up commands for you. Whatever you do in the terminal, it can do.

You can encode common instructions and info in AGENTS.md to say how and where to look up this info. You can describe what tools you expect it to use.

There are MCPs to help hook up other sources of context and info the model can use as well.

These are the things you need to learn to make effective use of the technology. It’s not as easy as going to ChatGPT and asking a question. It just isn’t.

Too many people never get past this low level of knowledge, then blame the tool.

[kemotep]

I hate that Microsoft did this but I meant Microsoft 365 Copilot. Not Github Copilot. The Copilot I am talking about does not have those capabilities.

[brokencode]

GitHub Copilot has a free tier as well. The $20/month one gives you much better models though.

All I’m saying is that the vast majority of people who say that AI dev tools don’t work and are a waste of time/money don’t know how and really haven’t even made a serious attempt at learning how to use them.

[3vidence]

To be fair there seems to be a weird dissonance between the marketing (fire your workers because AI can do everything now) and the reality (actually you need to spend time and effort and expertise to setup a good environment for AI tools and monitor them).

So when people just Yolo the ladder they don't get the results they expect.

I'm personally in the middle, chat interface + scripts seems to be the best for my productivity. Agentic stuff feels like a rabbit hole to me.

[kemotep]

Well I am not a dev so I am just using the freely available search assist and chatbots. I am not saying the dev tools don’t work; I am saying the chatbot makes up fake PowerShell commands. If the dev tool version is better it still seems significantly less efficient and more expensive than just running “Get-Help” in the terminal from my perspective.

[brokencode]

You are not disproving my point. You are just repeating that you don’t want to try to learn how you can actually use AI tools to help you work, but yet you still want to complain online that they are a waste of time and money.

[rootnod3]

I tried. Several times. Just quick prompting, full agentic, and all I see as a result is mostly garbage to be honest. Not even talking about the atrophy one would get skill-wise by relying on AI tools all the time.

[andai]

I'm on the $20 plan with Claude. It's worth mentioning that Claude and Codex both support per token billing, if your usage is so light that $20 is not worth it.

But if you use them for more than a few minutes, the tokens start adding up, and the subscriptions are heavily discounted relative to the tokens used.

There are also API-neutral tools like Charm Crush which can be used with any AI provider with API keys, and work reasonably well (for simple tasks at least. If you're doing something bigger you will probably want to use Claude Code).

Although each AI appears to be "tailored" to the company's own coding tools, so you'll probably get better results "holding it right".

That being said, the $3/month Z.ai sub also works great in Claude Code, in my experience. It's a bit slower and dumber than actual Claude, so I just went for the real thing in the end. 60 cents a day is not so bad! That's like, 1/3 of my canned ice coffee... the greater cost is the mental atrophy I am now undergoing ;)

[johnfn]

No, it's not necessary to pay 200/mo.

I haven't had an issue with a hallucination in many months. They are typically a solved problem if you can use some sort of linter / static analysis tool. You tell the agent to run your tool(s) and fix all the errors. I am not familiar with PowerShell at all, but a quick GPT tells me that there is PSScriptAnalyzer, which might be good for this.

That being said, it is possible that PowerShell is too far off the beaten path and LLMs aren't good at it. Try it again with something like TypeScript - you might change your mind.