alt Hacker News> If you haven’t spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement
At that point, outside of FAANG and their salaries, you are spending more on AI than you are on your humans. And they consider that level of spend to be a metric in and of itself. I'm kinda shocked the rest of the article just glossed over that one. It seems to be a breakdown of the entire vision of AI-driven coding. I mean, sure, the vendors would love it if everyone's salary budget just got shifted over to their revenue, but such a world is absolutely not my goal.
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This is an interesting point but if I may offer a different perspective:
Assuming 20 working days a month: that's 20k x 12 == 240k a year. So about a fresh grad's TC at FANG.
Now I've worked with many junior to mid-junior level SDEs and sadly 80% does not do a better job than Claude. (I've also worked with staff level SDEs who writes worse code than AI, but they offset that usually with domain knowledge and TL responsibilities)
I do see AI transform software engineering into even more of a pyramid with very few human on top.
It would depend on the speed of execution, if you can do the same amount of work in 5 days with spending 5k, vs spending a month and 5k on a human the math makes more sense.
If the output is (dis)proportionally larger, the cost trade off might be the right thing to do.
And it might be the tokens will become cheaper.
$1,000 is maybe 5$ per workday. I measure my own usage and am on the way to $6,000 for a full year. I'm still at the stage where I like to look at the code I produce, but I do believe we'll head to a state of software development where one day we won't need to.
Yeah I'm going to update my piece to talk more about that.
Edit: here's that section: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/#wait-...