Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jimbokun 19 days ago
Just interesting to see Claude’s hourly rate is around $17.

Much cheaper than a human software engineer. But comparable to the wages for some human workers.

6 comments

As soon as human software engineers are Ubered away from the field, the price will ramp up to that of a human software engineer or more, have no doubt.

ROI won't make itself up.

It is hard to believe that no one sees this coming. I can’t imagine it will happen any other way.
Let's hope open models will continue to improve and avoid the price ramping.
Then everyone just starts running open weight models locally.
Running it on RAM and GPUs which cost like a private jet plane, or have to be smuggled in like cocaine due to import/export tariffs or bans.
U.S. is actively considering restricting highly advanced "open-weights" models due to cybersecurity and national security concern.

Chinese models will be enlisted in NATS - the National Terrorism Advisory System.

Can't have the fat, rich big boys who give the campaign contributions fail.

claude helped me build a functional visual modem (using the cameras and microphones/speakers) for mac/iPhone in about a day and <100 prompts. i’ve worked on mobile apps once 10 years ago and have never built one from scratch. i've built a handful of UIs in 20 years on different platforms. my actual work was mostly in systems software. so it would have probably taken me weeks to months to build this from scratch. it would have cost substantial money to outsource this and iterate on ui and core algo as i did.

i've been curious about the feasibility of this concept for quite some time and now i have an actual example to study and measure and hack on, for a fraction of the cost of my pro sub. it wasn’t trivial, i doubt a non-swe could get it done in that time, but i'm a pretty happy customer overall.

That’s around 28K EUR/year. I know some junior-mid engineers that earn that (and they are good) in southern Europe.
But now human will produce the same amount of work in an hour - not even close...
I would assume a human would require multiple hours for the same output though
And ofc the Chinese workers are a lot cheaper.