If you pay out of pocket it means it's not an approved tool by your company, which means you can be fired and sued for leaking their intellectual property.
Also 20$ per month is way less than what it costs them to run it. Eventually they will need to charge way more to cover their costs, and the people who can't code without an AI assistant will need to pony up :)
It likely doesn’t matter if it is for training in this case. I can’t send our codebase to a friend even if they would never look at it or use it.
The issue would be based on the terms of employment and the software license. There’s likely a provision that just says “don’t share” regardless of what the other party will use it for.
To OP’s point, if your company is paying for the sub, then sending the codebase data would be an approved use of the codebase as part of your job.
I do a lot more work with cline and aider than without. For now that translates to a lot more money. In the end it's probably just going to be part of your normal job; you will just deliver a lot more in your 40 hour week than you did before. At this stage in the AI hype, I would insist on more or code side projects or do multiple projects. I write a lot more code and still have more time than before sonnet came out.
If it improves your performance by 1%, then for a salary of $2000/mo, that $20/mo is breakeven.
If it benefits you more than 1%, then you're in profit.
Of course, if you're in a job that doesn't actually care about performance, and performing won't lead to better salary at some point, then it may not matter.
Only if it increases your compensation by that 1%?
I get making economic/stats based analysis like this, but is your boss going to notice that 1% to give you a raise they otherwise wouldn’t? Probably not…
Your company culture can be performance-minded and this still be true.
What a weird way of thinking. If you act so pedantic anyway, you can stop coding simply 1 percent earlier each day, since your boss would not notice anyway. Personally I live in Belgium and I would be glad to pay 20 euros per month if it increases my productivity, as noticed by my boss or not.
The real problem however is, I cannot simply share my employer's repos to be absorbed by any LLM out there. So I use only the tools that my employer provides and approves of. Currently that is Microsoft Copilot chat/RAG via my work account. It takes some copy/paste and adaptations of problems/solutions but it is much more efficient than using SO. It is also a great teacher that never gets tired of my plenty why/how questions.
In my view, the future is that LLMs can train on entire private code repos until it understands its ins and outs. Currently it would need to fit in the context window, hence you need to babyspoon it, as I understand things.
I was only embodying the mindset in the comment I was replying to. Thinking in terms like “My time is worth $X, so if I do Y thing that takes Z minutes, that’s D dollars saved.” It gets really hairy and leads people down false paths where they think they’re being super “rational” all the time.
In this case it tricks you because it assumes that the LLMs increase productivity and launders that into the calculation. For me, and many people, LLM usage decreases my productivity.
