alt Hacker Newsthere are two camps: those who have spent the tokens to figure out how to wield AI, and those who haven't. unfortunately, it's not cheap to get to the former category… and i imagine it'd be difficult to lose access to that tooling and fall back to the second category.
Experimenting can be pricey but early on I spent my own money thinking "if I can get a handle on how to do this I'll get a 100x return on my money" and it was a good bet.
If you're not convinced - sign up and pay by the token of a high or highest level model. Anthropic or Grok for example. The vendor isn't the concern. The quality of what can be done. Then, find an agentic 'harness' that is written in a language you can read. There are several (pi, opencode, crush, etc) and then clone that repo or one of yours you don't mind having exposed and then point your agent to that repo.
Now ask questions: what api calls are made by this repo? Where are secrets stored and sourced from? Do an adversarial investigation and list the bugs. Then fix the bugs.
Then review the work and determine the value and how to wield this new tool. It replaces reading, writing, and editing - not thinking.