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
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.
$1,500/month needs to be contextualised against the fully-loaded cost of a software engineer. Uber's average TC for a US-based software engineer is around $350k, the fully-loaded cost is going to be in the $450k-$500k range. So we're talking around $38k/month for a software engineer.
$1,500/month isn't even a drop in the bucket. If LLM use lets them shave just one person off a team, that pays for tokens for the next 25 engineers.
I kinda get why execs are excited
Our 401ks turn on this actually being true. Otherwise pop.
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.
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.
> "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
I can't help thinking there might be some kind of strategic issue here.
Perhaps someone should ask Mythos about it.
As far as I can tell this part of the job isn't really on anyone's radar anymore.
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-...
