I Canceled My Netflix Subscription to Pay for Claude Code Pro. Here’s Why.

Dario Amodei says we are approaching the end of exponential AI growth. And if you are like me, you are celebrating his words. It is the end of an era — coming out of the tunnel. This exponential growth is ready to be harvested for its benefits, and it is time to shun away many demons… forever.

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: a huge chunk of what passed for “engineering culture” was never really engineering. It was performance art with a Jira board as the stage. You didn’t update your tickets because it helped the system run better. You updated them because someone upstream needed a green dashboard to justify their own existence.

Meetings existed to prove you were present. Emails existed to document that an email had been sent. Bureaucracy didn’t slow the work down by accident — control on code was the only code of conduct for leaderships’ jobs — and every line of code that shipped cleanly without their involvement was a quiet threat to their relevance.

So they made themselves relevant. Loudly.

That era is ending. And this is not a tragedy.

If your job depended on talking about the problem — on being the articulate human bottleneck between builders and outcomes — the AI tsunami is really is coming for you.

But my everyday is different now.

I wake up excited — about what I’m going to design that day. No inbox triage. No calendar block defending itself against other calendar blocks. Just: what am I building, and how?

AI handles the parts that were never really engineering anyway. The boilerplate. The curl syntax I’d otherwise spend 20 minutes searching because I can never remember if it’s -d or --data and frankly I refuse to feel bad about that anymore. The Dockerfile for a stack I'm setting up for the first time. The scaffolding, the setup, the syntax that has nothing to do with systems thinking and everything to do with just getting out of the way.

I review what AI generates. I refine it. I bring the things that don’t live in documentation — the patterns that held up, the failure modes I’ve watched unfold at 2am, the architectural decisions that look obvious in retrospect and cost three weeks when you got them wrong. Years of system design intuition don’t deprecate in this new world. They become the only currency that matters.

Is the competition increasing? Sure. But here’s the reframe:

If your career was always about getting closer to the engineering — the real design problems, the actual systems, the work that made you want to do this in the first place — then competition is just an invitation to go deeper into the thing you were already doing. The people who spent years trying to get to the interesting part are finally, permanently, at the interesting part.

The people who spent years managing the perception of getting to the interesting part? Different story. Not my story.

Turns out $20 a month hits different when it’s buying you back your own career.

So yes. I canceled Netflix to pay for Claude Code Pro.

Not as a statement. Not as a productivity hack to post about. But because I realized I was using Netflix to recover from a version of work I no longer have to do. The boredom that required a two-hour streaming buffer at the end of the day? Gone. Replaced by actual momentum, actual output, actual days where I close the laptop having built something I’m proud of.