4 ms·

And you are paying for their tokens on top of their salary, right? Right?

• aurareturn 8mo ago
  You can do a lot with just $20 Codex CLI subscription. Tokens are cheap compared to the $20k we're paying for a dev each month.
  • baq 8mo ago
    Exactly, the $20 codex is so good value it’s irresponsible to not give it to everyone. Claude code $20 is otoh pointless, the limits are good enough for 10 mins of work twice per business day.
  • ido 8mo ago
    Even the $200 claude max monthly subscription is peanuts compared to salary cost.
    • monksy 8mo ago
      Tell that to the company that I was just at that cut Intelij licenses as cost cutting measures.
      • aurareturn 8mo ago
        If they really want to cut cost, fire the worst dev on the team and use that money to give everyone a Codex subscription.
        • KronisLV 8mo ago
          Or better yet, fire the managers or bean counters that think decreasing everyone’s productivity is good for long term savings. I’m reminded of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
          • mikkupikku 8mo ago
            Fire the middle management, HR, and etc that have been enthusiastically using AI to do their jobs for the past two or three years already. 90% of them can be replaced by an agent with access to an email account.
            • thewebguyd 8mo ago
              Tbh, if companies want to use AI to lay off and cut costs, that's exactly where they should be doing it, not engineering. How much bloat and bureaucracy bottleneck is sitting in middle management whose favorite past time is wasting everyone's time on meetings that could have been an email? HR? Not the execs, but the HR drones that do nothing but answer employee questions about policy, could have already been replaced with not even an AI, just an old school chatbot, a long time ago. Instead of cutting engineers, cut the non-tech jobs, flatten the structure.
          • monksy 8mo ago
            Oh they laid people off so they could outsource more to India. Despite the managers reminding them, the cost is 1/3 the cost but 3x slower. American devs were 5x more productive overall.
  • hdgvhicv 8mo ago
    Amazes me that people pay 20k a month for a dev rather than paying 2k a month for one in Poland or 1k a month for one from India There’s obviously a benefit of paying higher rates for US programmers, but does that benefit change when llms are thrown into the mix
    • forgotlastlogin 8mo ago
      2k in Poland you say...
    • apercu 8mo ago
      My experience with outsourcing over 20+ years (Russia, Romania, India, South America) is that you just move money around when you do it. It takes more planning, more specification, more coordination, more QA. The quality is almost always worse, and remediation takes forever. So your BA, QA and PM time goes way up and absorbs any cost savings. YMMV.
      • thewebguyd 8mo ago
        Sounds like an LLM, tbh. Using Claude also takes more planning, more explicit specification, prompting, more manual review, more QA.
    • aurareturn 8mo ago
      Makes no sense because LLMs makes it far less worth it to outsource developers.
• onion2k 8mo ago
  Every business that's taking AI seriously is giving their team enterprise accounts to AI services. Otherwise you have no control over where your code, data, company info, etc is going. Someone deciding to drop a spreadsheet of customer data into their personal AI account to increase their productivity would be catastrophic for business, so you need rules. And rules means paying for enterprise AI tooling.
• mikkupikku 8mo ago
  "Bring your own tools" is not exactly novel in the workplace. Maybe so for office workers, but not more generally. Anyway, these particular tools are cheap enough that it hardly even matters who is expected to pay for them. The $20 a month tier in particular is a trivial expense, on par with businesses that expect their workers to wear steel toed shoes. Some may give workers a little stipend to buy those boots, some not. Either way, it doesn't really matter.
  • thewebguyd 8mo ago
    Just because it's not novel, doesn't mean it's right. I also don't agree with, for example, many mechanics being forced to buy their own tools (especially what little they get paid). I don't do tech outside of 9-5, so either my employer pays for it all, or I don't use it. Simple as that. Thankfully, they do pay for it, but I couldn't imagine working somewhere that says "You need to use AI" and then not providing it on their dime. Quite frankly it should be regulation that if a W2 employee needs something to perform their job duties, the employer must provide it.