$1k per day, 50 work weeks, 5 day a week → $250k a year. That is, to be worth it, the AI should work as well as an engineer that costs a company $250k. Between taxes, social security, and cost of office space, that engineer would be paid, say, $170-180k a year, like an average-level senior software engineer in the US.

This is not an outrageous amount of money, if the productivity is there. More likely the AI would work like two $90k junior engineers, but without a need to pay for a vacation, office space, social security, etc. If the productivity ends up higher than this, it's pure profit; I suppose this is their bet.

The human engineer would be like a tech lead guiding a tea of juniors, only designing plans and checking results above the level of code proper, but for exceptional cases, like when a human engineer would look at the assembly code a compiler has produced.

This does sound exaggeratedly optimistic now, but does not sound crazy.

Meanwhile, me

> $20/month Claude sub

> $20/month OpenAI sub

> When Claude Code runs out, switch to Codex

> When Codex runs out, go for a walk with the dogs or read a book

I'm not an accelerationist singularity neohuman. Oh well, I still get plenty done

I'm one of the StrongDM trio behind this tenet. The core claim is simple: it's easy to spend $1k/day on tokens, but hard (even with three people) to do it in a way that stays reliably productive.

My favorite conspiracy theory is that these projects/blog posts are secretly backed by big-AI tech companies, to offset their staggering losses by convincing executives to shovel pools of money into AI tools.

Yeah, it's hard to read the article without getting a cringy feeling of second hand embarrassment. The setup is weird too, in that it seems to imply that the little snippets of "wisdom" should be used as prompts to an LLM to come to their same conclusions, when of course this style of prompt will reliably produce congratulatory dreck.

Setting aside the absurdity of using dollars per day spent on tokens as the new lines of code per day, have they not heard of mocks or simulation testing? These are long proven techniques, but they appear bent on taking credit for some kind revolutionary discovery by recasting these standard techniques as a Digital Twin Universe.

One positive(?) thing I'll say is that this fits well with my experience of people who like to talk about software factories (or digital factories), but at least they're up front about the massive cost of this type of approach - whereas "digital factories" are typically cast as a miracle cure that will reduce costs dramatically somehow (once it's eventually done correctly, of course).

Hard pass.

This is some dumb boast/signaling that they're more AI-advanced than you are.

The desperation to be an AI thought leader is reaching Instagram influencer levels of deranged attention seeking.

It's crazy if you're an engineer. It's pretty common for middle managers to quantify "progress" in terms of "spend".

My bosses bosses boss like to claim that we're successfully moving to the cloud because the cost is increasing year over year.

It's not so much crazy as very lame and stupid and dumb. The moment has allowed people doing dumb things to somehow grab the attention of many in the industry for a few moments. There's nothing "there".