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stulttoday at 5:33 PM0 repliesview on HN

You're assuming the price won't come down as the tech matures. That seems like a big assumption, considering how quickly open weights models are catching up to frontier models, and how little effort has been invested so far in optimizing inference costs.

It's especially a crazy assumption to make relative to the costs of employing a human. The costs of paying an entry level employee are unlikely to go down at all, and even if those costs do decline, there's a floor they can't drop below (minimum wage at the extreme end), whereas companies are free to optimize agentic costs as close to zero as possible.

So you are assuming that a cost which is extremely susceptible to optimization but which no one has yet seriously attempted to minimize will remain perpetually above a cost which is much less susceptible to optimization, is already subject to enormous efforts to minimize, and has a legally mandated floor. That seems like a bad bet.