I don't want to come across as negative here, because I love Hive. I've been around since the Steemit days, and the developer community is genuinely strong even if it's smaller than other blockchain ecosystems. And I appreciate that this is a modest pilot with a conservative budget. That's the right way to test an idea.

But I'd honestly rather see proposals funding specific projects and developments on Hive than AI subscriptions, even at this scale.

The proposal does mention accountability, and I think that's good. Developers showing tangible progress after each month is better than nothing. But here's where I get stuck: if we're measuring success by output anyway, why not just fund the output directly? If someone builds a great dApp or contributes meaningful infrastructure work, fund that. You skip the middleman of monitoring whether a subscription is actually being used for Hive work, because you're paying for results instead of tools.

And that's the core issue for me. There's no way to verify that these subscriptions are being used for Hive development specifically. A dev could use 80% of their Claude Code usage on freelance work and 20% on a Hive project, show the Hive project as their monthly progress, and nobody would ever know. I'm not saying people will do that, but when you're spending community funds, the structure should make that kind of thing difficult by design, not just hope it doesn't happen.

What I think would be more beneficial is starting with a list of things the community believes Hive actually needs. Tools, dApps, services, infrastructure layers, documentation, onboarding flows, whatever. Then fund those efforts directly with clear scope and milestones. Tie the money to deliverables. That way the community sees exactly what it's getting, and developers have something concrete to be accountable for.

I also want to push back a little on the 10x productivity framing. AI tools in the hands of a skilled, experienced dev are an absolute force multiplier. I've seen it firsthand. A senior developer who already understands architecture, system design, and debugging can use these tools to move at genuinely impressive speed. The AI handles the repetitive stuff while the dev focuses on the decisions that actually matter.

But for inexperienced juniors, or even some intermediate devs I've worked with over the years, these tools can be a trap. They generate code that looks right, passes a quick review, and then falls apart in production because nobody involved actually understood what was being built. The 10x claim assumes a baseline level of competence that not every applicant is going to have. AI doesn't replace the need to know what you're doing. It accelerates people who already do. That's a big difference, and the vetting process would need to be pretty rigorous to account for it.

None of this is me saying the idea has no merit. I get the reasoning, and I respect that it's being pitched as a small pilot rather than a massive funding ask. But if we're going to spend community money to grow the developer ecosystem (especially during what appears to be a bear market and negative sentiment in crypto), I'd rather see it go toward bounties for specific features, grants tied to shipping working software, or direct funding for projects that people on Hive can actually use. That feels like a more accountable path to the same goal.

In my case, I'm a senior dev and I already use these tools, so I don't need a subsidised subscription. I would rather be paid to work on a problem or task instead.