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0 pointsACCount372mo ago0 comments

Yeah. Obviously. Duh. That's why we keep doing it.

Opus 4.5 saved me about 10 hours of debugging stupid issues in an old build system recently - by slicing through the files like a grep ninja and eventually narrowing down onto a thing I surely would have missed myself.

If I were to pay for the tokens I used at API pricing, I'd pay about $3 for that feat. Now, come up with your best estimate: what's the hourly wage of a developer capable of debugging an old build system?

For the reference: by now, the lifetime compute use of frontier models is inference-dominated, at a rate of 1:10 or more. And API costs at all major providers represent selling the model with a good profit margin.

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bodge50002mo ago

So could the company hiring you to do that work fire you and just use Opus instead? If no, then you cannot compare an engineers salary to what Opus costs, because the engineer is needed anyway.

> And API costs at all major providers represent selling the model with a good profit margin.

Though we don't know for certain, this is likely false. At best, it's looking like break even, but if you look at Anthropic, they cap their API spend at just $5,000 a month, which sounds like a stop loss. If it were making a good profit, they'd have no reason to have a stop loss (and certainly not that low).

> Yeah. Obviously. Duh. That's why we keep doing it.

I don't think so. I think what is promised is what keeps spend on it so high. I'd imagine if all the major AI companies were to come out and say "this is it, we've gone as far as we can", investment would likely dry up

schnitzelstoat2mo ago

But now instead of spending 10 hours working on that, he can go and work on something else that would otherwise have required another engineer.

It's not going to mean they can employ 0 engineers, but maybe they can employ 4 instead of 5 - and a 20% reduction in workforce across the industry is still a massive change.

bodge50002mo ago

Thats assuming a near 100% success rate from the agent, meaning it's not something he needs to supervise at all. It also assumes that the agent is able to take on the task completely, meaning he can go do something else which would normally occupy the time of another engineer, rather than simply doing something else within the same task (from the sounds of things, it was helping with debugging, not necessarily actually solving the bug). Finally, and most importantly, the 20% reduction in workforce assumes it can do this consistently well across any task. Saving 10h on one task is very different from saving 10h on every task.

Assuming all the stars align though and all these things come true, a 20% reduction in workforce costs is significant, but again, you have to compare that to the cost of investment, which is reported to be close to a trillion. They'll want to see returns on that investment, and I'm not sure a 20% cut (which, as above, is looking like a best case scenario) in workforce lives up to that.

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0 pointsACCount372mo ago0 comments

Yeah. Obviously. Duh. That's why we keep doing it.

0 comments

bodge50002mo ago

So could the company hiring you to do that work fire you and just use Opus instead? If no, then you cannot compare an engineers salary to what Opus costs, because the engineer is needed anyway.

> And API costs at all major providers represent selling the model with a good profit margin.

> Yeah. Obviously. Duh. That's why we keep doing it.

schnitzelstoat2mo ago

But now instead of spending 10 hours working on that, he can go and work on something else that would otherwise have required another engineer.

It's not going to mean they can employ 0 engineers, but maybe they can employ 4 instead of 5 - and a 20% reduction in workforce across the industry is still a massive change.

bodge50002mo ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse