4 ms·

Humans are very expensive, so the equation almost always falls against them. It's not just salary, but also safety/labor regulation, legal risk, vacations, sic

Humans are very expensive, so the equation almost always falls against them. It's not just salary, but also safety/labor regulation, legal risk, vacations, sick time, personal conflicts, HR, benefits. Even when automation is more expensive on paper, it's generally still cheaper

warkdarrior 4mo ago
That's the beauty of these AI advancements. You, a human, will have to compete against a model for the same job. If you get $100,000 per year as a SWE, and Anthropic offers a coding model for $100,000 per year (but working 24/7), then you'll have to give up all of those addons that make the fully burdened cost of the employee. Say goodbye to vacation, sick time, benefits, etc.
- rspeele 4mo ago
  > "What have you got against machines?" said Buck. > "They're slaves." > "Well, what the heck," said Buck. "I mean, they aren't people. They don't suffer. They don't mind working." > "No. But they compete with people." > "That's a pretty good thing, isn't it--considering what a sloppy job most people do of anything?" > "Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave," said Harrison thickly, and he left. Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
- dyauspitr 4mo ago
  They will do it for far less. Once manufacturing catches up and they have the data centers built out tokens are going to be dirt cheap.
TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
Good to know that LLMs will be removing all regulatory and legal risks, as well as creating a consumer economy that no longer employs or pays consumers. I can't help thinking there might be some kind of strategic issue here. Perhaps someone should ask Mythos about it.
- Ferret7446 4mo ago
  By the point where we have work hours regulation for AI, all of our current debate about AI will be long irrelevant because we've clearly achieved AGI
gopher_space 4mo ago
One of the large (and enjoyable IMHO) challenges in this line of work is developing a de facto understanding of your process and the context it's in service to, and that's only possible if you're actually on your industry equivalent of a "shop floor" for each domain the project touches. As far as I can tell this part of the job isn't really on anyone's radar anymore.
rstuart4133 4mo ago
> Humans are very expensive, so the equation almost always falls against them. You underestimate what these models cost. Uber's budget is $1,500/dev/month. I gather that was put in place because the dev's were going through $6,000/dev/month, which Uber decided could not be cost justified. Fable costs at least twice as much, or $12,000/dev/month. Fable can apparently work for hours without supervision, which means a skilled engineer can now have it working on many tasks concurrently. I would not be at all surprised if they can put a nought or two on that number. If you do that, you are well out of "what a human costs" territory.
- ramesh31 4mo ago
  > I would not be at all surprised if they can put a nought or two on that number. People keep saying this and it keeps not happening. ChatGPT Pro was $200/mo when it launched in '23 for a ~100B class model with 8k context. Claude Max is now the same price for practically unlimited access to a ~1T class model with 1M context. Moore's Law never died, it just switched architectures.
  - swiftcoder 4mo ago
    Not to mention, the cost/performance of the baseline keeps falling. The cost-effective Deepseek V4 Flash is better than frontier models from a year ago, at a fraction of the cost.
- winwang 4mo ago
  Minor note, 2x $/tok is not 2x cost. Personally, I see Fable being significantly more token-efficient than Opus 4.8. Then, there's also the compounding costs of quality.
  - squidbeak 4mo ago
    On top of which, as the article mentions, it delegates simpler tasks to cheaper models.
- nearbuy 4mo ago
mitxela 4mo ago
Since the recent re-pricing many companies are finding AI coding to be more expensive than human coding.
LogicFailsMe 4mo ago
The real issue IMO is what Richard Sutton alluded to in his talk about GenAI creativity. These models are quite creative at problem solving, but for now, they still need a human to set direction and to occasionally pull them out of doom spirals of churn. However, given this model now silently corrupts its own work if it thinks you are up to no good, it's absolutely 100% not Mythos so possibly Mythos is better, but who knows now that the alignment and safety safety people are on the case, inadvertently keeping humans in the loop? https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/10/if-claude-fable-stops-helping-you/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/10/if-claude-fable-stops-...

warkdarrior 4mo ago

That's the beauty of these AI advancements. You, a human, will have to compete against a model for the same job. If you get $100,000 per year as a SWE, and Anthropic offers a coding model for $100,000 per year (but working 24/7), then you'll have to give up all of those addons that make the fully burdened cost of the employee. Say goodbye to vacation, sick time, benefits, etc.

rspeele 4mo ago
> "What have you got against machines?" said Buck. > "They're slaves." > "Well, what the heck," said Buck. "I mean, they aren't people. They don't suffer. They don't mind working." > "No. But they compete with people." > "That's a pretty good thing, isn't it--considering what a sloppy job most people do of anything?" > "Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave," said Harrison thickly, and he left. Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
dyauspitr 4mo ago
They will do it for far less. Once manufacturing catches up and they have the data centers built out tokens are going to be dirt cheap.

TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago

Good to know that LLMs will be removing all regulatory and legal risks, as well as creating a consumer economy that no longer employs or pays consumers. I can't help thinking there might be some kind of strategic issue here. Perhaps someone should ask Mythos about it.

Ferret7446 4mo ago
By the point where we have work hours regulation for AI, all of our current debate about AI will be long irrelevant because we've clearly achieved AGI

gopher_space 4mo ago

One of the large (and enjoyable IMHO) challenges in this line of work is developing a de facto understanding of your process and the context it's in service to, and that's only possible if you're actually on your industry equivalent of a "shop floor" for each domain the project touches. As far as I can tell this part of the job isn't really on anyone's radar anymore.

rstuart4133 4mo ago

> Humans are very expensive, so the equation almost always falls against them. You underestimate what these models cost. Uber's budget is $1,500/dev/month. I gather that was put in place because the dev's were going through $6,000/dev/month, which Uber decided could not be cost justified. Fable costs at least twice as much, or $12,000/dev/month. Fable can apparently work for hours without supervision, which means a skilled engineer can now have it working on many tasks concurrently. I would not be at all surprised if they can put a nought or two on that number. If you do that, you are well out of "what a human costs" territory.

ramesh31 4mo ago
> I would not be at all surprised if they can put a nought or two on that number. People keep saying this and it keeps not happening. ChatGPT Pro was $200/mo when it launched in '23 for a ~100B class model with 8k context. Claude Max is now the same price for practically unlimited access to a ~1T class model with 1M context. Moore's Law never died, it just switched architectures.
- swiftcoder 4mo ago
  Not to mention, the cost/performance of the baseline keeps falling. The cost-effective Deepseek V4 Flash is better than frontier models from a year ago, at a fraction of the cost.
winwang 4mo ago
Minor note, 2x $/tok is not 2x cost. Personally, I see Fable being significantly more token-efficient than Opus 4.8. Then, there's also the compounding costs of quality.
- squidbeak 4mo ago
  On top of which, as the article mentions, it delegates simpler tasks to cheaper models.
nearbuy 4mo ago

mitxela 4mo ago

Since the recent re-pricing many companies are finding AI coding to be more expensive than human coding.

LogicFailsMe 4mo ago

The real issue IMO is what Richard Sutton alluded to in his talk about GenAI creativity. These models are quite creative at problem solving, but for now, they still need a human to set direction and to occasionally pull them out of doom spirals of churn. However, given this model now silently corrupts its own work if it thinks you are up to no good, it's absolutely 100% not Mythos so possibly Mythos is better, but who knows now that the alignment and safety safety people are on the case, inadvertently keeping humans in the loop? https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/10/if-claude-fable-stops-helping-you/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/10/if-claude-fable-stops-...