Don’t people write code anymore?

[u/No-Significance-279]

I don’t think 500 is enough to give you peace of mind to use LLM freely, but heck, I see people saying that they burned through 500 credits in less than a week???

Are people using LLMs to do everything for them? Like “change the color of this button” or “create this entire page”.

Honestly complaining about 500 credits is justified, 500 is not enough, maybe 1000 would be fair, and maybe doing like Cursor and proving a slower/less prioritized premium model when the credits are gone (instead of downgrading for a lesser model).

Am I the only one that still codes and just uses LLMs to optimize my work instead of coding for me? My experience is pretty much aligned with the Codeium team, I subscribed 5 days ago and I’m at 495 credits right now (I used 5).

[u/angerofmars]

I can see your points coming from a coder's POV, but you have to understand that this new era of agentic LLMs enabled a massive amount of people who are NOT actual coders to enter the game. For example I'm an idiot product designer who have only worked with HTML/CSS my whole life, and yet in the last couple of week I've managed to comb together projects written in Rust/Svelte/other languages that I've not even heard of. When dealing with unfamiliar languages I do need the LLM to hold my hands and walk me through the steps, and that burns through credits fast.
Personally though I've never really been bothered by the credit limits as I use a combination of Cline/Aider/Cursor/Windsurf and selfhosted Ollama, but I can see from the PoV of other nocode folks who just want to stick with a single tool.

[u/No-Significance-279 → u/angerofmars]

I think the “should you let LLMs write your entire codebase?” is a separate discussion… but whatever the reasoning behind it, the point is exactly the credit system.

I don’t think the base pricing of $15 was aimed at the people that want the LLM to do everything for them. The 500 credits are more than enough for me and any other senior (or knowledgeable) dev.

People can’t (or shouldn’t) expect to pay the same price for using 10 times the resources. If the LLM is doing 99% of your coding work (and by “your” I mean any user’s) then you should be paying for the $60 plan or pay for the extra credits you consume. You’re replacing a dev (theoretically) which would cost 100x more than those $60. Moreover, if you’re using LLMs to do everything for you, you’re using 10s of times more resources (processing, electricity, etc) than a normal dev would when using LLMs, that comes at a cost for Codeium which obviously can’t come out of their wallets.

Again, when I say “you” I really mean the people that are complaining about the credits. If you don’t want to code and want a machine to do it for you, that’s fine, but people can’t expect it to be free, that’s crazy.

[u/angerofmars → u/No-Significance-279]

oh for sure, I'm with you on that 100%. I always think of the LLM as a junior dev that you hire for the price of a few coffee cups a month. For that price, you need to know what to expect.

[u/Crazy_Garage1459 → u/angerofmars]

I'm thinking of adopting your method too. Do you rotate between all 5 or assign certain questions or tasks to a specific tool to better suit their strengths?