That's the cost of one employee (and not an expensive one). Do you think it's impossible he's getting more value from the AI than he would from a single employee?
If it's an employee, which I doubt but ok, it's an employee you constantly have to probe, talk to, give instructions to, so, not a really good employee.
Neither of us have any idea whether his manufacturing startup is successful. It looks to be a 5 person team. A google search suggests they had a funding round early this year.
It might, in fact, be that you are more successful with your approach. I have no idea. Congrats if so.
I mean, he must be pretty successful to be able to burn 10k in tokens. If he is successful because or despite of the AI, I don't know and I don't really care ? That wasn't the question.
It's not the case that someone successful is doing everything right and someone unsuccessful is doing everything wrong, I'd grant.
But I think it's odd for you to now say it doesn't matter whether or not his AI token use is leading to success or not. I personally think it's actually really important to learn whether/when this approach is smart.
Depends how you use the tokens. It's not 10k, but I have an agent do an investigation automatically when I get paged, so by the time I get to the computer I have a nice summary. But that's costing me like $5/mo at most.
But you could use tons of autonomous agents for all kinds of things. Probably shouldn't, but you can.