What Did People Spend on AI Before Claude Code?

Thariq Shihipar says no one was used to spending more than $20 a month before Claude Code came out, and no one was used to spending $200 a month on subscriptions. He does not think they understood the value yet. Opus 4 was a very expensive model. It was very big. Opus 4.5 was both great and cheap.

Even when Claude Code first came out, it used a lot of tokens relative to what people expected AI to cost. The team has lots of tokens. The monthly spend people were used to stopped at $20. The subscription spend they were not used to was $200 a month.

He thinks the same thing will happen with Fable. Its intelligence will get cheaper and more abundant, and then spending tokens will make sense as people see the value. Passive and proactive cases are part of where the value shows up. The misnomer is having to add Claude to do things. Some of the most powerful use cases, and the most AGI-pilled ones, are not adding Claude. They are having Claude do the work proactively.