The subscription plans are insanely cheap currently, but won’t be forever. Atm you can pay $200/month to get anywhere from 1.2x to 5x faster depending where you are on the learning curve. If people aren’t taking advantage of that then it’s equivalent to if your office had a team of 10 engineers but only 5 of them are being given any tasks and the others are told to do nothing.
As to people adopting it naturally, there are any number of reasons why they wouldn’t, even if it’s good. Firstly it’s a massive change and people as a rule do not like change. Secondly it’s a learning curve, it’s not easy, and you have to invest time in it and initially it will make you slower rather than faster. Thirdly, what’s in it for the employee? They’re not gonna get paid more if they use AI to get 2x more work done, they’re employer captures all of that. They work the same hours, have to learn a whole new workflow, just go get the same pay. Why bother?
I currently use what would be around half my salary at the currently listed full API prices (which I doubt we’d ever have to pay but lets assume we did), and a decent portion of that is experimentation, learning, wastage etc. I could cut it down to a third of my salary if I was more conservative. And I’m building 3x more features than I was without it. That’s a good deal even at full price, it’s just even better now with the subscription which is why the smart thing for any engineer to do right now is to take advantage of those temporary heavily subsidised prices to get as good as they can at agent accelerated coding