[bambax]

> That’s $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200

So the author claims he's getting $2000 per month worth of frontier AI free of charge. Ok. If he's been doing that for 6 months that's $12k. What has this produced concretely? For $12k you can find a used car in decent condition. Heck for $1200 (his actual out-of-pocket spend) you get a brand new ebike! (on which you could put a pelican and make a photo of both if that's your fancy). But here it's unclear what has come of it.

[simonw]

I've written a great deal of code - code that would have taken me years of work to produce without LLMs.

(It's mostly open source, you're welcome to dig around in https://github.com/simonw and https://github.com/datasette if you like.)

My time as an experienced software engineer is worth a lot of money - a whole lot more than $12,000 for the past six months.

[bambax]

> code that would have taken me years of work to produce without LLMs

As you might suspect, this is what I have an issue with. Without LLMs, isn't it possible or even likely that that code wouldn't have been written at all, and wouldn't have been missed? If LLMs are mostly used to produce throwaway prototypes then it's a stretch to say that's money well spent.

If indeed it let you advance your main product much faster then sure it's a different story. You're the judge of that. It's hard to see the impact from the consumer side; everything is still broken and no extraordinary app seems to be emerging. Maybe it's just a question of time. We'll see.

[simonw]

I've thought about this a lot. I am very confident that the way I use LLMs is both accelerating progress on my core projects (here's a substantial, reviewed PR I landed just yesterday https://github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2741) and helping me create plenty of projects that otherwise would not have existed.

[tredre3]

The point being made by GP was that your projects have no value and their non-existence wouldn't be a negative to this world.

And that is likely a fair assessment, though I understand perfectly the feeling that you have that you are accomplishing great(er) things thanks to AI.

[simonw]

I certainly hope that's not true, given that I've dedicated 7+ years to my main open source projects at this point.

I take some reassurance from knowing that they are indeed used by real people to solve real problems though.

[jwpapi]

Now what percentage of the 200$ have been used on the useful stuff and how much on exploration or other stuff.

How long would it taken you to do it yourself? How much longer will the next task take you, compared to when you would’ve written the code yourself. How is the mental model compared to when you would’ve written it yourself?.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, again there are use cases. But the calculation is not plain and simple it goes deep into our perception, perceived productivity versus actual productivity.

I’ve 2 months maxxed out all 6k of Claude Code and bought Antigravity on top. My codebase became 140k lines. I introduced tons of bugs and spent another 2 months, deleting 80k of code. I wish I would’ve just chatted with AI and not let agents touch my codebase. I would’ve saved approx 300$ subscription prices a month and 2 months of my life.

[bambax]

I was certainly not saying that all the author's projects, in general, have no value! That would be rude, mean and most of all, incorrect.

But yes, it's likely that the ease of which code can now be outout lets us produce lots of unnecessary code just because we can, and the author says as much in a below comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48303890

[jonluca]

This is the economic theory of value creation though - arguably the world is better off because new projects can be created, and they are marginally cheaper than they would have been previously

[odyssey7]

I’m watching to see what happens to big enterprise software contracts. Why pay some vendor $800k annually for something a couple mid-level devs can replace—-and tailor closely to your needs——by leveraging AI.

Open source software changed the world. AI that will cheaply write whatever you want in a few days will also change the world.

[nevertoolate]

> My time as an experienced software engineer is worth a lot of money - a whole lot more than $12,000 for the past six months

From this I assume you think that what the llm has generated is as valuable as your own work generally is. How do you even calculate this?

[ex-aws-dude]

And what was your return on investment?

[simonw]

As I commented elsewhere, I'm still bad at making money from my open source work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296794#48298909

(I have a feeling if I could say "and I closed $2m in sales with the software I wrote!" people would find a way to say that didn't mean anything anyway, because how can I prove I wouldn't have made those sales writing it by hand?)

[brazukadev]

> "and I closed $2m in sales with the software I wrote!"

Given the audience you are reaching, that is actually the expectation. Github stars is not a great metric.

[aspenmartin]

I would be very curious what kind of answer would satisfy you here. Simon isn't building a product, where $200 is a line item on a balance sheet. If he tells you what sort of analyses or time savings $200/mo on coding agents have enabled him, do you honestly think that would satisfy you?