This take is ridiculous. Nearly everyone who uses Max agrees that what they get for the money paid is an amazing deal. If you don't use or understand how LLMs fit in your workflows, you are not the target customer. But for people who use it daily, it is a relatively small investment compared to the time saved.
> If you don't use or understand how LLMs fit in your workflows, you are not the target customer.
I feel like this is a major area of divergence. The "vibes" are bifurcating between "coding agents are great!" and "coding agents are all hype!", with increasing levels of in-group communication.
How should I, an agent-curious user, begin to unravel this mess if $200 is significantly more than pocket change? The pro-agent camp remarks that these frontier models are qualitatively better and using older/cheaper approaches would give a misleading impression, so "buy the discount agent" doesn't even seem like a reasonable starting point.