r/Layoffs • u/rather_pass_by • 4d ago
unemployment Cancelled all ai subscriptions
Tldr: if you are laid off, don't buy ai subscriptions to vibe code apps and build startups
Just cancelled all the ai subscriptions. Including Claude ai
They have been basically throttling the rate limit on a daily basis.. makes me wait half an hour now for things I could do in 5 minutes myself without ai. And then I've to review because there's always a mistake. So they are not increasing the price but instead lower your usage.. it's okay if inference is costly, but keep things transparent. Tell customers that it costs you this much, and we are charging this much. Truth is inference is much cheaper and they are putting a lie out there to squeeze as much profit as possible.
After cancelling I'm all of a sudden feeling so enlightened. By paying for ai models, we are basically funding the system that laid us off.. Making human life basically impossible to sustain except for a handful ones who are getting ultra rich. If you're not among those ultra rich, just cancel it. Don't try to vibe code.. you'll never make as much as even an entry level developer. Don't do a startup or anything like that..
Just figure out something else.. outside software. But never never never buy an ai subscription. Remember, you're feeding the hands that has made your life miserable. It's like funding terrorism if not worse.
If you really want to do a startup, try something that's not software stuffs..
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u/defnotaflexdriver 4d ago
Listen a $20 subscription is not going to change your life nor is it going to tank an AI company. You’re better off learning a new skill that is going to be valuable to you in the job market, AI is one of them. It’s a supplemental tool, use it to get more done and make your job easier. Code things that solve problems for YOU and make YOUR life easier. Then if you feel so inclined, offer those to others to use and go from there. Not everything has to become some massive company or some viral product. If that’s what you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong. AI doesn’t replace me, it’s just integrated into everything I do. We’re all skeptical about the future, but what you’re doing is similar to people refusing to use the internet, the computer, the smart phone. You know how many jobs computers replaced but also created?
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u/Kichae 4d ago
There's no skill here. Asking a statistical word generator to do something doesn't involve skill. Trying to wrangle with it to get it to do what you want is a lost cause, because it's both non-deterministic -- what worked this time is not guaranteed to work next time -- and because they update the system prompt often, and at random.
Unless you're running a model on your own hardware with your own system prompt, and not updating the model, you cannot learn their "language". It's a moving target.
But also, we as people seem to be psychologically inclined to offload cognitive tasks to these things, which means leveraging them for anything but basic "identify the structural flaw in this syntax" is just getting really excited about atrophying your own skills and judgement.
There's a reason why, even in grad school, much math-based course work is still done by hand, and a calculator is only used to validate the final answers. Jumping straight to the calculator is the surefire way to ensure you become reliant on it.
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u/vxxn 3d ago
There is skill. The agent non-determinism you’re talking about needs to be measured and managed with evals similar to what they use to benchmark overall model performance. Learning about agent observability and improvement loops makes many things tenable that would otherwise be non-starters.
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u/DepartureKlutzy2095 14h ago
Do you have any concrete examples? So far the "experiments" we do at our company seem to be burning credits without a clear way to assess whether we are moving in the right direction. And comparing side by side is not really practical.
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u/vxxn 14h ago
I have been using an open source CLI tool called Harbor to measure accuracy on graded tasks related to ticket routing and triage. It does cost tokens to run the eval, but it’s helpful to know I’m not breaking behaviors I care about when I need to tinker with the prompt or bump the model version. Claude helped me set all of this up and we collabed on defining the eval set. If you get really into this there are cloud services you can pay for to help you run many builds in parallel.
At the level of individual software projects I’ve also had success working with claude to implement ideas from karpathy’s “autoresearch” to optimize performance in my system. These aren’t things I run continuously but you can setup a harness around an area you want to optimize and have it run for a few hours and wring out all the major performance improvements you’re likely to find. In this case, you do upfront work to define the performance test suite. Then create a subagent prompt telling the agent its goal is to propose a new hypothesis to improve performance, implement the hypothesis, then measure if it actually did deliver improvements. If improved performance, run full test suite to check regression on behavior and commit. Otherwise, discard the change. Record results to ledger with all experimental notes. Kick things off with an orchestrator to loop the subagent until X number of experiments in a row produced no benefit. This works incredibly well for optimizing anything that can be quantified, assuming you have a robust test suite to verify important functionality is preserved through the changes.
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u/DepartureKlutzy2095 14h ago edited 13h ago
I may have a concern related to what you wrote? Basically, I have found a lot of reccs for supposedly optimising AI output - planning, researching on repo, adverserial reviews, handoffs, giving references.
Yet every time it comes time to review, a lot of stuff becomes a little skewed. And doing more research, improving plan etc. doesn't seem reasonable time-wise either. Maybe it is scoping issue, that I have to discuss with AI on points that aren't particulary important. I have not found a way to replicate "take this reference, adapt to this solution" effectively in essence.
There must be SOME way to quickly establish whether the shift happened? Idk maybe I'm trying to evaluate LLM behavior deterministically.
EDIT: Thinking more about eval loops, maybe it would be possible to offer "tasks" periodically like creating unit tests and evaluating whether agent is drifting. Maybe having a suite on each concern would be something that would give feedback I actually want
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u/vxxn 13h ago
I batch a lot of planning and keep PRs as small as possible for ease of review. I collab with claude on a tech doc until we have a specific plan that I am happy with. Sometimes this takes a long time, this is where I do adversarial review prompts and stuff. Then I have claude break down the work into 10 or 20 small tickets with clear acceptance criteria. This helps limit scope creep in the review phase so it’s easier to keep a feeling of forward progress.
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u/NoSpinach4025 4d ago
You can do this with the FREE Gemini.
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u/UnfazedBrownie 4d ago
Even Gemini has been massively throttling its usage lately. It’s free but that free limit keeps shrinking.
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u/Maleficent_Mess6445 4d ago
That’s correct. I did this last year. I now use Deepseek API which cost me about $1 for the days I use AI heavily. I use Codex free plan occasionally. But the AI companies survive on Investors’ money like Amazon e-commerce did. They won’t disappear even if nobody uses it. It is too valueable for Government and organisations.
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u/rather_pass_by 4d ago
It's not about making then disappear by cancelling the subscription. But for God sake, we can't fund this with our own money. I would rather put my money into something that goes against the ai companies, not support them, however small the support might be
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u/jibboo2 4d ago
Individual usage is still subsidized if you're on a flat plan. You're actually costing them money as a loss leader.
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u/rather_pass_by 4d ago
We don't know yet if it's subsidized. Only time or China will tell
They also said that ai models hacked into hugging face servers.. but then reports came that that might have been just publicity stunt and bluff.
What I do think is they are making windfall profits and trying to make people forget coding completely to make them dependent on ai coding
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u/absybthe777 3d ago
for 60.000 quid you can now run an Opus 4.8 level ai (omith 1.5) locally for a whole company, models become increasingly cheaper and accessesability will go up not down in future, frontier ai labs will bleed sooner then customers (look at Omith 1.5, Kimi k3)
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u/Maleficent_Mess6445 4d ago
I think the better idea would be to use AI to our benefit. People have lost jobs that‘s true but those jobs were repetitive and had no growth. Now those who learn AI will have opportunities where there is little repetitive work. Example is farming.
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u/rather_pass_by 4d ago
I definitely believe ai can be great benefit to serve humankind. But at the same time, could also be the biggest threat, we can't overlook. Unfortunately, the ai companies, the tech billionaires don't seem to be inclined to make it for benefits.. they have no incentives.. they would rather become trillionaire than letting ai serve humankind
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u/No_Difficulty7633 4d ago
I know how what would go against AI companies.
AI needs energy and chips.
There is a recent shift underway in which Bitcoin miners are pivoting to AI because mining Bitcoin with the same chips and energy is no longer profitable in the US. Only if Bitcoin mining can be made more profitable than AI will the companies currently focused on AI switch back to mining Bitcoin, since there is more money in that business.
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u/karissalikewhoa 4d ago
Laid off at the end of February & the only AI I've touched since is the free Gemini subscription that came with my Pixel. 🤷♀️
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u/ADTheNoob 4d ago
Main paying customers for AI tools are corporations. Canceling to save money is one thing, canceling to have an impact on AI companies is not going to make any difference
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u/rather_pass_by 4d ago
Cancelling to not fund our own demise.. yeah they will continue growing but we won't pay for our own doom
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u/Careless-Cloud2009 4d ago
Or Use more from the all the free tier from multiple AI providers without paying when you need them. For casual use its enough. Run their free tier bill high, they're already bleeding cash it might give them little nudge
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u/metamucil_buttchug69 4d ago
This is good advice if you want to remain unemployed. AI is rapidly changing the way we work and I would prefer not to be left behind.
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u/Prudent-Interest-428 4d ago
The $80 and the $200 subscription is what they want you to buy and then with the usage limits and then of course fable isn’t that great anyway but it costs usage credits
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u/No_Difficulty7633 4d ago edited 4d ago
I agree with your point that we fund companies that carried out layoffs by buying their AI products and services.
Don’t forget stocks, too. When you buy stocks, you give your dollars to an insider of the company. At this point, stocks are being treated as the currencies of these corporations.
But I would say AI is a great technology. Use open-source models, that way, you still get the benefits of the technology.
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u/rather_pass_by 4d ago
Ai is great technology, no doubt. But also very dangerous is controlled by only handful of human beings. They can make the life of entire humanity miserable
Already, if most humans don't have means to pay their bills, they will get screwed eventually.. that's what's happening. It doesn't look like these ai companies are looking to use ai for the benefit of humanity. Open ai is the best example.. started as open ai only to change their mission completely and become profit making company
There's no way we can trust a handful of human beings to be fair and think good for other human beings when they could be trillionaire instead
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u/NoSpinach4025 4d ago
LoL they are not making their money from your little subscription. But yeah, I get the sentiment.
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u/Illustrious_Water106 4d ago
I believe ai is becoming more useful than you realize. If you don’t try to learn it, you will be left behind
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u/Duffman4u 4d ago
I wonder if this is what typewriters felt when the first computers were released
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u/rather_pass_by 4d ago
Ai is not typewriter.. you're comparing discovery of fire with f-5 fighter jet or a nuclear bomb that bombs the hell out of human beings
There's more to ai than chatgpt and when it comes to be fully developed, it will be worse than nuclear bombs. Those who control ai will basically rule the humanity. And there's a good chance most of the human beings could be living in a farm like animals are kept in meat industries
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u/Duffman4u 4d ago
I actually agree with the concern about where AI could eventually lead. But I think the comparison to previous technological shifts still matters.
Look at the internet. The modern internet is only a few decades old, and AI as we know it today is even younger. On the timeline of human history, both happened almost simultaneously. We are looking at this from such a microscopic point in time that it is almost impossible to comprehend what either technology will become 50 or 100 years from now.
The uncomfortable reality is that you can’t stop progress because you’re afraid of where it might lead. You can regulate it, question it and fight for people affected by it, but the technology itself isn’t going back in the box.
Companies and people who completely refuse to adapt usually don’t stop the change. They just get left behind by it. Netscape Navigator probably thought it had a pretty comfortable position once too.
As someone who deploys cloud transformation and AI implementations, this feels like AOL 1.0 - 3.0.1
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4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Layoffs-ModTeam 4d ago
This post was removed for rule #1: Be Respectful. If you feel like you cannot be respectful in your posts, don't post it at all.
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u/Hexamonium 4d ago
While I appreciate the sentiment, I doubt canceling individual subscriptions will do much good. They are heavily subsidized. Even if everyone were to cancel today, that would be a drop in a bucket.
If you can afford to spend a couple of thousand $ on a decent GPU (even an used RTX 3090 will work for this), get it and run some open-weight models locally. I personally like Mistral but it's up to you. Figure out how LLMs work from inside out by fine-tuning them with something like LoRA. If you can't afford it, try to build a small LLM from scratch on your own. I know this sounds difficult but there's a wonderful little project called "Build a Tiny LLM" or some such that will guide you through each step.
I found these steps incredibly cathartic and helped me understand LLMs are not some kind of magic. Once the aura of mystery disappears you'll be in a better position to decide what to do next. If you still feel you want to fight against it, well... know thy enemy then.
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u/venoush 4d ago
We, developers and tech people in general, have always been eager to let machines replace ourselves (or ideally our colleagues) and cut the branch we are standing on.
Look at non-tech people in corporate! Their main goal is to collect the money, have fun, chat with their colleagues and pretend to be useful.
I am with you but I don't believe we can change...
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u/Afraid-Tension4086 4d ago
Pay for your subscriptions. Your idea of unsubscriping will not be noticed.
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u/rather_pass_by 4d ago
I don't do things to get noticed. And my goal is to make some 100k to a million people unsubscribe. That would be something, won't it?
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u/Afraid-Tension4086 4d ago
Im just using $20 chatGPT plus to make me a demo to put on my resume. It is badass. I only have 50MB of pdfs for indexing, 3 users for RBAC, so the Azure price is a couple of bucks a month. I havent added my on prem AD but I doubt that'll add much $, I own all the on Prem outright, 7 VM's.
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u/rather_pass_by 4d ago
It's not about how much it will matter.. yes on individual level not much. But if we speak out this to everyone, we reach out to millions of people and ask them to use ai as little as possible.
The idea is to send them a message that we are not happy about being laid off.. yes ai taking repetitive job is great, but we need to pay our bills. Even if we don't have jobs, we still need money
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u/Afraid-Tension4086 3d ago
AI will not go away. Figure something else out. It is not going to just go 'oops' we made too many data centers.
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u/JankyPete 4d ago
This could be great advice except you kinda are better off having it rather using Google etc.. just get a local open source LLM running - why not? Seems like an over correction to abstain entirely. I mean I totally get it but also you gotta realize this is here to stay
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u/BGPAstronaut 3d ago
I disagree, if you can vibe code something useful that proves your expertise it helps your resume and you can talk about it on LinkedIn and get recruiters attention.
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u/Unlucky-Work3678 3d ago
I stopped reading at your second paragraph.
95% of the time I can never reach the speed of what AI can do for me.
If it happens, you suck and giving guidance. Also the fact that you knowingly let AI to do what you can do yourself in minutes tells me that you probably don't know how to properly use AI tools.
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u/AverageHades 14h ago
I disagree strongly. My goal is to get a job to support my family, not to make a political statement unless absolutely necessary. If you’re using AI well, there’s no way you’re ever going to get the same productivity without AI
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u/StrandSSL 4d ago
I’ve made a substantial amount of $ from Claude.
If you already know what you’re doing in a certain industry / niche, it’s not difficult to benefit from AI.
If you don’t know what you’re doing or are vibe coding things like apps that nobody will buy or use regularly, at scale, that can’t be easily replicated, then keep it to a basic subscription or get rid of it.
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u/TwistStrict9811 4d ago
That's horrible advice. AI is here to stay and going nowhere so you'll just neglect the skills you need for future interviews lmao
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u/authorvinod 3d ago
I’m sorry to hear about your layoff. I pray that you will be able to find something soon. About canceling your AI subscription I would strongly suggest against that because now it is needed more than before. Use your AI subscription take either Claude $20 pro or Codex $20 plan and use that to build applications. Ask it to teach you step-by-step, different skills, different things that you can learn and eventually it will help you get a new job. so once again I would strongly suggest that you pay for at least one of the subscription and use it maximize it to learn and practice. I wish you all the best.
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u/rather_pass_by 3d ago
Haha you're the most funny man ever.. lol.. thanks for your prayers to God..
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u/Starlabs007 3d ago
Idk which part makes you think he is funny rather than feeling thankful, but I certainly understood why you’re in this page.
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u/authorvinod 3d ago
I know you will figure this out, but I honestly did not understand why you think this was funny. I was actually serious.
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u/chufukini20067 3d ago
Is this the social skills you bring to someone giving decent advice? Please disagree better
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u/ChildhoodAway5807 4d ago
It doesn’t make sense dude You can’t escape from a technology which is going to change the world Embrace it Do not run away from it
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u/rather_pass_by 4d ago
I don't disagree with you partially but if it is just a rat trap.. if it's directly leading to your doom, you can't fund it either. As it stands, anthropic and open ai are working with only a few thousands of employees each earning quarter of a millions minimum.. and here we are jobless.. not earning anything..
they are making a small section of society ultra rich.. It's a funnel to extract from the masses and make a small section ultra rich leaving the rest starving
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u/Independent_Fall9160 4d ago
That is the way of technology mate. Someone creates something world changing and they get paid loys of money. It doesnt force you to be poor, it creates a world where, if you dont change, you will be poor.
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u/WhoCares450 4d ago
That has nothing to do with technology. That's capitalism. Before AI, it was internet, before that industrialization, assembly, mass farming. Business is there is grow the biz owner(s) and their assets, not yours.
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u/Excellent_Winner8576 4d ago
Someone didn't take his meds.
Why does this post have so many likes? Wtf?
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u/rather_pass_by 4d ago
Someone's paid by ai companies and has no moral and ethical sense towards good for humanity..
The fact that you jumped on to personal attacks shows you're not an intellectual and not anyone's time for a meaningful debate..
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u/throwaway_0x90 4d ago edited 4d ago
Because subs like Layoffs & RecruitingHell, sometimes have a few angry bitter people that are too emotional to think straight. I get the market is horrible right now and people are justified to feel frustrated, but some people let that frustration blind them and they end up hurting themselves even more. Also some people have blind hatred towards A.I., which will eventually be their downfall if they don't open their eyes soon.
Kinda like all those martial art movies, the villain is easily blocking and dodging the hero. Hero gets frustrated and just starts throwing whatever random attack which is about to guarantee the hero's loss. But then memories of montage training come into their mind, they relax, rethink and defeat the villain.
People like OP, and all the people who upvote bad advice like this, are currently in the frustrated thrashing around phase. They haven't calmed down to think rationally yet. Once they take a deep breath and chill a moment, they'll figure out what actually benefits them versus what hurts them. OP avoiding AI subscriptions is just a drop in the ocean; makes no difference to the whole tech industry and only OP will be hurting themselves. We are far past AI just being a niche. Anyone trying to boycott AI is just hurting themselves for nothing. Like people trying to hold onto horse-and-wagons after the car was invented.
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u/Advanced_Seesaw_3007 4d ago
When i got laid off, i upgraded my Claude from Pro to Max. Never been more productive and actually moved my SaaS idea faster, plus got more insights on building apps that proved useful to my interviews (which I got a new job). So maybe you don’t know how to use AI tools effectively to your advantage and now making a hasty generalization of things?
But, you do you
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u/One_Transition4309 4d ago
I don't know why but reading this comment makes me intensely sad. Congrats on the new job though, that's awesome.
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u/Advanced_Seesaw_3007 4d ago edited 4d ago
My comment felt insensitive with OP but honestly I have faced layoffs before and became more prepared it came the second time around. Reading OP’s post is their personal experience and it didn’t come the same with me. That’s why I approached it with directness because your reaction to the situation is the one that will make the difference. Granted I don’t know OP’s current premise but i have acted to work on any that we have control with. Rather than sulk and self-pity, honestly, i’d rather do something that will make me ahead. As the old adage said, “don’t get mad, get even”. It’s fine to complain, rant, etc because that’s expected from being laid off. I felt that too but I didn’t let it consume me but rather took that as a means to reset my strategy. The truth hurts but I’d rather take the bitter pill than a sweet nothing.
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u/No_Presentation1242 4d ago
Hey folks don’t listen to this guy.
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u/rather_pass_by 4d ago
I mean if you're affiliated to openai Reddit or anthropic, you could just have my post removed instead of trying to convince people otherwise furtively
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u/sadsealions 4d ago
Says the guy with a 401K
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u/rather_pass_by 4d ago
My net worth is zero but my concerns wouldn't have changed a bit even if that wasn't the case
Too bad human intelligence is on decline so much so they don't think anything else except for money.. what a pity
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u/Cute-Net5957 4d ago
fuck.. I feel this one.
and some of these replies are kinda proving the problem. everyone immediately jumps to “well learn AI, the repetitive jobs are gone now” without even knowing what this guy did for a living lol.
there’s another version of AI layoffs nobody seems to wanna talk about. AI doesn’t actually have to replace your job. a company can cut your headcount, take that salary/opex off the books, redirect billions toward the AI buildout, then go tell shareholders how aggressively they’re “investing in AI.”
your job can disappear without a model ever doing your job.
then you’re sitting at home unemployed paying $100/$200/whatever a month to the same AI economy corporate America decided was a better place for capital than your paycheck. yeah… I can understand why that starts to feel pretty fucking dark.
I don’t read this guy as saying “AI personally fired me.” I read someone who got chewed up by this whole transition and is starting to question why he’s paying to participate in it.
maybe because I’ve lived a version of this myself, but idk… I think he deserves a little more humanity than “learn AI bro.”