Open AI o1 Pro

I’m an advocate of AI. Not to the point of absurdity, but I’m an advocate. It’s a tool. You can chose to not use modern tools at your own peril.

So, the “pro” subscription is $200. A month.

I can say with some honesty that I’ve been getting that much value out of the “normal” subscription just about every day that I’ve been using it. Based on this I decided to give the version that’s a literal order of magnitude more a try. My logic is that if I’m getting that much value regularly, it can only go up.

I’ve done some testing with it. Is it 10x better? Well, generally, no. Is it worth $200/month to me?

Yes.

What I’m finding is that unlike the "normal” versions, the prompting for this is even more critical. You need to address this like you would a graduate student to whom you are giving directions. You need to spell out what you want so that it can carry out whatever it is you’re thinking about.

When you get that right, holy crap…

I set it loose on the topic from yesterday: “test driven design.” It wrote around 4000 words on it (because that’s what I requested!), and the finished product is pretty much what I would have written. Except it got it done in under four minutes, whereas it would have taken me four days to do the same.

I’ve tried with a few other topics — and each time, assuming I did my part right, it knocked it out of the park.

Is it worth $200 a month? If you use it right, I think the answer very much is yes. Which is kind of creepy.