[goosejuice]

Perhaps my point wasn't clear. The article suggests humans are needed. So does the person here I responded to. Someone has to tell the LLM what to do and verify it.

Outsourced can be anywhere and when you're referring to US, anywhere else is cheaper. Commonwealth devs for example are at least 20% the cost of a US dev. That 20% more than covers the cost of access to a frontier model that this dev could drive.

Thinking of LLMs in human units is super strange and if you wish to consider the economics you have to also account for the lowering of barriers to entry.

[jujube3]

My point is that current-year LLMs are a better replacement for low-skilled developers than high-skilled developers. For example, if your mental model in 2016 was that you would have a senior engineer write a specification, and have an outsourced team in India implement the specification, in 2026, an LLM replaces the outsourced team in India, not the senior engineer. As a bonus, everyone is now in the same time zone, and there are no language or cultural barriers.

[goosejuice]

Frontier models are pretty good at executing on a spec when all the decisions have been made already. The author reached the same conclusion. It's the agency that the humans bring that ties it all together, which is still required. Doesn't sound like you disagree.

I think where were missing each other is that the human agent can also be outsourced. Not all outsourcing involves rote tasks and the lowest skilled workers. The difference between the mean US senior dev salary and everywhere else is large enough to cover a manageable LLM cost. So there's no reason why a company looking to cut costs need stop at the lowest rung to makeup for LLM expenditure.

[jujube3]

Outsourcing comes with significant costs. One of them is that it takes time to communicate with the outsourced team. For example, if you want to talk to someone in India, you might have to send an email that they read the next day, because they're almost 12 hours separated from you. So exchanges that would have just been 15 minute chats with a US-based developer turn into multi-day back-and-forths. If you are hiring someone to be the architect of your system, don't you want to be able to talk to that person? That's why even the most outsourcing-obsessed companies usually did not outsource architects.

Another issue is that there are cultural barriers. People in India or elsewhere may say "yes" when they really mean "hmm, probably not" because saying no to a superior could be considered rude.

If you replace a big team with a small team and LLMs, you are actually saving money overall because LLMs are much cheaper than humans. But you may actually need more skilled humans than previously, not less skilled ones, because they need to be able to manage a large volume of code being generated. LLMs are not good news for outsourced developers. They are the opposite: a cheaper substitute for the grunt work that they had been providing.

[goosejuice]

You don't have to convince me, I've experienced what you're describing. I'm just being realistic with the options decision makers have.

Simply put, if you want frontier models at API prices, you can make up for that expense by hiring non-US talent. Many who have a good command of English and are willing to overlap US hours. There's plenty in LatAm alone. Whether or not that's a good choice for a business isn't relevant to the point I was making.

Where you appear to be stuck is that you think outsourcing is only workers with poor English who do grunt work. It's a rather myopic view of the situation to be polite.

[jujube3]

You appear to be assuming that frontier LLM models will be more expensive than outsourced developers. That seems like a crazy assumption to me. Even with current prices of about $1000 a month, that's still just $12,000 a year, which you cannot live on, even in Eastern Europe. Maybe some people in India could live on that, but probably not the people you want writing your code.