[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.