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I'm observing a process to purchase an AI Coding assistant right now, and it made me wonder, when the rubber hits the road, how much would I actually spend on t
by techblueberry 9mo ago
I'm observing a process to purchase an AI Coding assistant right now, and it made me wonder, when the rubber hits the road, how much would I actually spend on the assistant?
I don't know if I'd call myself a booster or skeptic. I'm loosely speaking all in in the office, but what would I actually spend?
On the one hand, my - I dunno, thought leader-y hat would say, why wouldn't I spend 10k/head on them. These tools are amazing, they could double someone's output.
But they also are these like infinite toys that can do anything, and you can spend a lot of money trying all the things. And does that actually provide value. Actually provide like rubber hits the road monetary value on a per-head basis. If you're really focused and good, probably? But if you're not disciplined. You can spend a bunch of money on tokens, then spend a bunch of money on the new features / services in production, and spend a lot of your colleagues time cleaning up that mess.
And this is all human stuff. This is all assuming the LLM works relatively perfectly at interpreting what you're trying to do and doing it.
So like. Does it actually provide the benefit of X dollars per engineer per year? Because it wouldn't have to, it could in fact go the opposite.
- njhnjh 9mo agoIf I was working for you and I heard that you spent 10k on a bullshit LLM subscription instead of paying me 10k to work harder I would look for a new job immediately.
- sevenzero 9mo agoYup, while I like being invested in at work (sending me to learn new shit at conferences or stuff like that) I'd never agree with spending 10k on some tool where even the tool vendors say "use with caution, dont use this in production, bla bla bla". If it really augments my output, sure, currently I just watch my tokens drop to 0 within 3-4 days of using it and then having to wait a month for them to reset because I wont pay for more parrot tokens. The output speeds up some small things but to my overall speeds its not noticeable a ton.
- jaredklewis 9mo agoI like what you’re saying but if I had changed jobs every time my employer set $10k on fire, I guess I would have pretty long resume.
- blargey 9mo agoI'm not sure how you could spend 10k/head when ex/ a Claude Team premium plan is $150/mo/head.
- kingstnap 9mo agoThere is no ceiling to how much waste you can create. Much like stacks and stacks of badly written web frameworks made things like collapsing comments on new reddit 200 ms of JavaScript execution ( https://bvisness.me/high-level/burnitwithfire.png https://bvisness.me/high-level/burnitwithfire.png ) I can easily imagine people layer stuff together till token burn is beyond insane. I mean just look at the Gastown repository. Its like literally hundreds of thousands of lines of go and md files.
- bdangubic 9mo agoyou can buy 10 individual max licenses per dev (have seen it done :))
- techblueberry 9mo agoThey're all usage based plans. You probably wouldn't hit 10k/head for most users, but thousands is not unheard of. But it's kind of anticipating that's what they would want to charge.
- bossyTeacher 9mo agoAverage corporate: sorry, I can't afford to give you a 10k raise. Also, average corporate: let us buy this wonderful 10k tool.