alt Hacker NewsThis right here is where I feel most concerned
> If you haven’t spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement
Seems to me like if this is true I'm screwed no matter if I want to "embrace" the "AI revolution" or not. No way my manager's going to approve me to blow $1000 a day on tokens, they budgeted $40,000 for our team to explore AI for the entire year.
Let alone from a personal perspective I'm screwed because I don't have $1000 a month in the budget to blow on tokens because of pesky things that also demand financial resources like a mortgage and food.
At this point it seems like damned if I do, damned if I don't. Feels bad man.
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My friend works at Shopify and they are 100% all in on AI coding. They let devs spend as much as they want on whatever tool they want. If someone ends up spending a lot of money, they ask them what is going well and please share with others. If you’re not spending they have a different talk with you.
As for me, we get Cursor seats at work, and at home I have a GPU, a cheap Chinese coding plan, and a dream.
> No way my manager's going to approve me to blow $1000 a day on tokens, they budgeted $40,000 for our team to explore AI for the entire year.
To be fair, I’ll bet many embracing concerning advice like that have never worked for the same company for a full year.
May be the point is, that the one engineer replaces 10 engineers by using the dark factory which by definition doesn't need humans.
Same. Feels like it goes against the entire “hacker” ethos that brought me here in the first place. That sentence made me actually feel physically sick on initial read as well. Everyday now feels like a day where I have exponentially less & less interest in tech. If all of this AI that’s burning the planet is so incredible, where are the real world tangible improvements? I look around right now and everything in tech, software, internet, etc. has never looked so similar to a dumpster fire of trash.
I read that as combined, up to this point in time. You have 20 engineers? If you haven't spent at least $20k up to this point, you've not explored or experienced enough of the ins and outs to know how best to optimize the use of these tools.
I didn't read that as you need to be spending $1k/day per engineer. That is an insane number.
EDIT: re-reading... it's ambiguous to me. But perhaps they mean per day, every day. This will only hasten the elimination of human developers, which I presume is the point.
I think corporate incentives vs personal incentives are slightly different here. As a company trying to experiment in this moment, you should be betting on token cost not being the bottleneck. If the tooling proves valuable, $1k/day per engineer is actually pretty cheap.
At home on my personal setup, I haven't even had to move past the cheapest codex/claude code subscription because it fulfills my needs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. You can also get a lot of mileage out of the higher tiers of these subscriptions before you need to start paying the APIs directly.
Yeah, that's one part of this that didn't sit right with me.
I don't think you need to spend anything like that amount of money to get the majority of the value they're describing here.
Edit: added a new section to my blog post about this: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/#wait-...