4 ms·

Programmers are used to paying nothing for tools. A basic laptop (SSD, multi core, 16GB of RAM) is hugely powerful if you are building in C/C++/Rust, even pytho

Programmers are used to paying nothing for tools. A basic laptop (SSD, multi core, 16GB of RAM) is hugely powerful if you are building in C/C++/Rust, even python. But all of a sudden it's no good, and we're back to using someone else's computer, hiring our tools every day. Worse, we get a different model every day, and maybe we aren't allowed to borrow the good tools some days because some mafioso are shaking down the manufacturer. Most other trades need to invest significantly in tools. If you want good tooling, you really want 64GB of GPU memory (e.g. 2x 5090) and 96GB of RAM. If I'm paying $200k for an expert engineer then $50k every other year for tooling seems pretty reasonable.

rsanek 4mo ago
Who's paying the $50k? I don't see how it makes sense to pay that much for a home-grown setup when I could pay <$5k/year total for both of the two best frontier models at effectively unlimited usage.
- fragmede 4mo ago
  > best frontier models at effectively unlimited usage. It would've been easy to spend $5k on Fable in the short week it was available. If that's the direction things are going (we can assume GPT-6 to be if similar class) $5k's not going to get you "best frontier models at effectively unlimited usage".
  - angry_octet 4mo ago
    I know some orgs that are already spending more on tokens than developer salary. That's what unlimited use leads to. Teams of agents running on expensive models, agents designing and running test suites with barely any oversight.
- angry_octet 4mo ago
  This is for clients paying millions for deliverables, with high stakes deadlines. Expertise in the domain is in short supply. Data and model control is very important, so relying on AIaaS was already risky. You can LLM enable engineers without big AIaaS risks. A 16C Ryzen 128GB with 96GB Blackwell is ~US$16k, quite reasonable for a worker billed at $300k. In fact so reasonable it's worth having AI enabled backend for lots of things.
- Epicism 4mo ago
  $5k? I work at a software company where one engineer has used that every month minimum.

rsanek 4mo ago

Who's paying the $50k? I don't see how it makes sense to pay that much for a home-grown setup when I could pay <$5k/year total for both of the two best frontier models at effectively unlimited usage.

fragmede 4mo ago
> best frontier models at effectively unlimited usage. It would've been easy to spend $5k on Fable in the short week it was available. If that's the direction things are going (we can assume GPT-6 to be if similar class) $5k's not going to get you "best frontier models at effectively unlimited usage".
- angry_octet 4mo ago
  I know some orgs that are already spending more on tokens than developer salary. That's what unlimited use leads to. Teams of agents running on expensive models, agents designing and running test suites with barely any oversight.
angry_octet 4mo ago
This is for clients paying millions for deliverables, with high stakes deadlines. Expertise in the domain is in short supply. Data and model control is very important, so relying on AIaaS was already risky. You can LLM enable engineers without big AIaaS risks. A 16C Ryzen 128GB with 96GB Blackwell is ~US$16k, quite reasonable for a worker billed at $300k. In fact so reasonable it's worth having AI enabled backend for lots of things.
Epicism 4mo ago
$5k? I work at a software company where one engineer has used that every month minimum.