[jvanderbot]

My AI tool use has been a net positive experience at work. It can take over small tasks when I need a break, clean up or start momentum, and generally provide a good helping hand. But even if it could do my job, the costs pile up really quickly. Claude Code can burn $25/ 1-2 hrs, easily on a large codebase, and that's creeping along at a net positive rate assuming I can keep it on task and provide corrections. If you automate the corrections we are up to $50/hr or some tradeoff of speed, accuracy, and cost.

Same as it's always been.

For agents, that triangle is not very well quanitfied at the moment which makes all these investigations interesting but still risky.

[torginus]

My somewhat cynical 2 cents say, it that these thinking LLMs, that constantly re-prompt themselves in a loop to fix their own mistakes, combined with the 'you don't need RAG, just dump the all code into the 1m token context windows' align well with the 'we charge per token' business model.

[stillsut]

One of the ideas i'm playing with is producing several rough drafts of a commit ai-generated at the outset, and then filtering these both manually and with some automations for manual refinements.

_Knowing how way leads to way_, the larger the task, the more chance there is for an early deviation to doom the viability of the solution in total. Thus for even the SOTA right now, agents that can work in parallel to generate several different solutions can reduce your time of manually refactoring the generation. I wrote a little about that process here: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/case-studies/a...

[swader999]

Subscription?

[jvanderbot]

I have one, and upgrades don't have unlimited access as far as I can tell. Correct me if I'm wrong.

This cost scaling will be an issue for this whole AI employee thing, especially because I imagine these providers are heavily discounting.

[13zebras]

Re: discounting… Given that OpenAI is burning billions and making trivial revenue in comparison, the cost per token is probably going to skyrocket when Sam runs out of BS to con the next investor. I’m guessing the only way that token cost doesn’t explode is if Claude ends up in Amazon’s hands and OpenAI is Microsoft’s. Then Amazon, Google, and MS can subsidize if they want. But as standalone businesses, they can’t make it at current token prices. IMHO

[joshvm]

There are usage limits, but the argument is that unless you're writing and modifying large swathes of code in YOLO mode, you don't hit them. At least for what I would call a small and tedious task. I'm thinking "write a docstring", "add type annotations", "write a single unit test for this case", "fill in this function". For a good prompt these are often solved in <10 interactions. Especially when combined with scoped rules that are pulled in on demand to guide output.