Thats the thing right, like how many tokens can you extract from an employee per day? In API cost terms, LLMs cant currently cut it.

It gets worse when you look at LLM (or even any other kind of AI) benchmarks, they tend to cap out around 110% of human performance.

The more that LLM services try and creep towards profitability, the more features they are paywalling behind higher tiers, the more some lazy junior dev is going to look like a better value proposition.

And when some of the CTO's they have pushed LLMs on to go looking for cost savings, some of them are going to look at opex instead of capex and in house the LLMs using open models.

The only real question to my mind is whether the air will be let out of the AI balloon slowly, or if it escapes in one big pop.