[avidphantasm]

Calculating hourly costs for these models makes me think that the decision of when to hire an SWE vs. increase use of AI may follow a similar pattern to the decision to use cloud compute vs. on-premises. I don’t cost $120/hr (incl. fringe), but my employer pays my salary all year long, no matter if I am working or on vacation. Whereas if they use an AI model to do the same work, they may be happy to pay $120/hr or more, since they may only use the model for a small fraction of 2080 hours per year, so they’d still save money, and not have a messy human to deal with.

[aisaasbuilder]

The framing of AI vs SWE cost assumes you know what the AI is actually spending. Most teams don't. They see a monthly total, not per-agent/per-step attribution. The decision math only works if both sides of the equation are real numbers. That is the gap Traeco closes. traeco.dev

[aisaasbuilder]

The framing of AI vs SWE cost assumes you know what the AI is actually spending. Most teams do not. They see a monthly total, not per-agent/per-step attribution. The decision math only works if both sides of the equation are real numbers. That is the gap Traeco closes. traeco.dev

[bbatha]

I remain convinced we won’t look at project estimates as time based in software engineering as our primary cost estimate. And this is transition will happen rapidly. We’re going to shift to a capex/token spend model for project estimates where the business will say “ok I do want that feature for $1000 in tokens”.

[onchainintel]

I agree with you directionally that project estimates are/will be affected by this but I don't see a scenario in which time is completely removed from the equation with respects to projects & estimates to execute on them. We're all constrained by time, finite resource. It's always a factor in business.