[oblio]

$200h * 8 * 5 * 4 * 12 = $384 000 per year.

You're like in the top 0.05% of earners in the software field.

Of course, if you save 10 hours per month, the math starts making more sense for others.

And this is assuming LLM prices are stable, which I very much doubt they are, since everyone is price dumping to get market share.

[CMCDragonkai]

Across most anglosphere countries and tech cities - wages and salaries far outstrip what you can get for AI. AI is already objectively cheaper than human talent in rich countries. Is it as good? Yea I'd say it's better than most mid to junior engineers. Can it run entirely by itself? No, it still needs HITL.

[oblio]

Again, those prices aren't stable.

Nobody is investing half a trillion in a tech without expecting a 10x return.

And fairly sure soon those $20/month subscriptions will sell your data, shove ads everywhere AND basically only allow you to get that junior dev for 30 minutes per day or 2 days a month.

And the $200/month will probably be $500-1000 with more limitations.

Still cheap, but AI can't run an entire project, can't deliver. So the human will be in the loop, as you said, so at least a partial cost on top.

[alwillis]

What’s different is all the open weight models like Kimi-k2 or Qwen-3 Coder that are as good and, depending on the task, better than Anthropic’s Sonnet model for 80% less via openrouter [1] and other similar services.

You can use these models through Claude Code; I do it everyday.

Some developers are running smaller versions of these LLMs on their own hardware, paying no one.

So I don’t think Anthropic and the other companies can dramatically increase their prices without losing the customers that helped them go from $0 to $4 billion in revenue in 3 years.

Users can easily move between different AI platforms with no lock-in, which makes it harder to increase prices and proceed to enshitify their platforms.

[1]: https://openrouter.ai/

[Quinner]

The wages aren't stable either. There's going to be gradual convergence.

[oblio]

Oh, by the way, this entire discussion revolves around LLMs being an exponential tech. Real life only works with sigmoids.

[CMCDragonkai]

Not gonna happen. The competition for AI models is approaching commodity.

[lumost]

The percentages in the field are skewed, FAANG employ a vast number of engineers.

[oblio]

No, they don't. FAANG probably employs 400 000 programmers worldwide, and I think the US alone probably has about 3-4 million programmers. Worldwide there are probably 30 million.

And even for FAANG, an SDE for them in Spain makes 60-100k total comp, not 400k.