Two points. First of all, yes I would. There's a reason we use existing tools and don't have every junior programmer write a TGA viewer when they want to view an image that is sent to them.
Secondly, I used time as a proxy for cost. A single junior can "only" spend their own 15 minutes, but an agent can farm out to N subagents to do the work in 15 minutes, and spend $3000 in tokens building something. As you said, scale matters, so if they do this once a day for a month, it costs the same as paying 12 juniors to avoid asking a single question.
alt Hacker News
Two points. First of all, yes I would. There's a reason we use existing tools and don't have every junior programmer write a TGA viewer when they want to view an image that is sent to them.
Secondly, I used time as a proxy for cost. A single junior can "only" spend their own 15 minutes, but an agent can farm out to N subagents to do the work in 15 minutes, and spend $3000 in tokens building something. As you said, scale matters, so if they do this once a day for a month, it costs the same as paying 12 juniors to avoid asking a single question.