You live in a bubble. 299 is a crazy amount of money for me. I am currently debating whether to pay for copilot at 20/mo or keep using the free version.
Even if I was paying for that, there's no comparison between AI and a web framework that has many free competitors.
You don't need to pay for datastar. As I've said befor I don't use any of the pro plugins (plugins anyone can build themselves for that matter).
Sad to see developers getting ripped off by AI. Copilot is junk. The whole AI bubble is just a tax powered by fear of missing out. Save yourself 20$ a month, learn to touch type, use snippets and download a local copy of the docs.
Just because something is overhyped doesn't mean it can't be useful. You can literally try it for free with vscode and figure out quickly where it saves you time and where it doesn't. I made a value judgement that it saves me more than 20usd of time. If it didn't I wouldn't pay for it. Developers are not idiots motivated by fomo.
Using it for vibe coding where you pay for every token - and end up paying hundreds over dozens of iterations, when it would have been easier to write it yourself - is probably closer to what you're talking about. That's a totally different use case.
If you're using vscode your going to experience one of the biggest rug pulls in history (even more so if you're using copilot). I mean wasn't copilot free until recently?
Developers are idiots (I include myself in that). The industry is myopic and completely driven by fashion.
Because most of vscode is not open source. See the python lsp, copitlot, plugin store, the fact that it's practically impossible to turn off telemetry/tracking. Gradually more and more of the actual value, is being moved into these proprietary systems and plugins to the point where vscode is really just an open source shim. In fact the vscode binary running on your machine does not have an MIT licence.
For now that's fine as it's mainly an on-ramp for Azure. But, if Windows is anything to go by, I imagine the enshitification of vscode is inevitable given enough time.
299$ lifetime which includes future features seems like a steal. I bought it and don't use it, but I'm excited to see what comes next.