alt Hacker News$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.
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$250k a year, for now. What's to stop anthropic for doubling the price if your entire business depends on it? What are you gonna do, close shops?
>> $170-180k a year, like an average-level senior software engineer in the US.
I hear things like this all the time, but outside of a few major centers it's just not the norm. And no companies are spending anything like $1k / month on remote work environments.
I think that is easy to understand for a lot of people but I will spell it out.
This looks like AI companies marketing that is something in line 1+1 or buy 3 for 2.
Money you don’t spend on tokens are the only saved money, period.
With employees you have to pay them anyway you can’t just say „these requirements make no sense, park for two days until I get them right”.
You would have to be damn sure of that you are doing the right thing to burn $1k a day on tokens.
With humans I can see many reasons why would you pay anyway and it is on you that you should provide sensible requirements to be built and make use of employees time.
That nobody wants to actually do it is already a problem, but some basically true thing is that somebody has to pay those $90k junior engineers for a couple years to turn them into senior engineers.
The seem to be plenty of people willing to pay the AI do that junior engineer level work, so wouldn’t it make sense to defect and just wait until it has gained enough experience to do the senior engineer work?
It doesn't say 1k per day. Not saying I agree with the statement per se, but it's a much weaker statement than that.
It sounds exaggeratedly crazy.
It’s a $90k engineer that sometimes acts like a vandal, who never has thoughts like “this seems to be a bad way to go. Let me ask the boss” or “you know, I was thinking. Shouldn’t we try to extract this code into a reusable component?” The worst developers I’ve worked with have better instincts for what’s valuable. I wish it would stop with “the simplest way to resolve this is X little shortcut” -> boom.
It basically stumbles around generating tokens within the bounds (usually) of your prompt, and rarely stops to think. Goal is token generation, baby. Not careful evaluation. I have to keep forcing it to stop creating magic inline strings and rather use constants or config, even though those instructions are all over my Claude.md and I’m using the top model. It loves to take shortcuts that save GPU but cost me time and money to wrestle back to rational. “These issues weren’t created by me in this chat right now so I’ll ignore them and ship it.” No, fix all the bugs. That’s the job.
Still, I love it. I can hand code the bits I want to, let it fly with the bits I don’t. I can try something new in a separate CLI tab while others are spinning. Cost to experiment drops massively.