[robrenaud]

If a good SWE is $150/hour, does the model cost actually matter? Surely you'd be willing to spend $10/hour to make that SWE 20% more productive? The model cost is still much less than the salary.

[OtherShrezzing]

I don’t think any engineers who cost $150/hr are having their productivity moved by 20% depending on a $10/hr gap between models on or near the frontier.

Most of the gains right now come from tooling and process and any big post 2025 language model. The specific model isn’t that important right now.

[pimeys]

Exactly. And being able to choose your own tools is much more valuable than having a tiny bit better model.

[rolisz]

With Claude Code Ultrathink, I used 3 million tokens in 20 minutes. At API prices, that would be around 30$. So 90$/h. Model cost is not that much lower.

[kennywinker]

x40hrs/week * 50 weeks = $180k

Congrats, now you’re paying an engineer’s salary to make your engineer at best 20% more productive.

Better to hire another engineer, or two jrs, and build up your in house talent.

[kopirgan]

Only you get things done lost faster and don't need to pay entire years salary?

[kennywinker]

How so?

If you’re doing a one-off project, sure. But if you’re coding like this full time, you’re paying the year’s salary anyway.

And faster? Not so sure about that. Sure they can write code faster, but writing code is a small part of building something.

[kopirgan]

That's a good point.. Writing code vs building

[cicko]

except this is way more than an engineering salary. At least in Europe.

[kennywinker]

I’m sure there are engineers making $180k usd / year in the eu. Maybe it’s unusual, but hey, now you can cancel your claude subscription and hire a really good engineer

[YmiYugy]

But SOTA models used liberally at API pricing is a lot more than $10/hour. You can probably burn $100+/hour with just a single agent, and probably thousands when running agents programmatically, e.g. workflows.