He does have a point about fees. It's not really surprising that the fee structure designed for chatbots would not make sense when applied to long running tasks and agents. But an increase in prices can solve this problem.

Doubtless some people will reduce usage as a result. But Ed seems to find the idea that a 10 man developer team might spend 80K a year on tokens ridiculous. I don't understand this. Has he seen how much developers are paid? If you get a 20% productivity boost from coding agents, then that's two developers for 80K - effectively very good value.

Where things could go wrong is in comparison to cheaper models. If it's 5K a year for Qwen, and it's 2/3 as good will you pay 75K extra for Opus? Perhaps not.

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blks 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think that team is better off with a junior developer. This alleged “20% productivity boost” even if it exists, is individual. On the team level, it will be largely offset by people having to review 20% more code.

	▲	fancyfredbot 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Obviously in some cases a junior developer is a better investment if it's a straight up choice. Actually I think it'll be rare for a manager to be choosing between either a junior developer or a coding assistant, since each are going to benefit the team in very different ways and it'll often be obvious which you need. What I mean is that at the price levels in the article the coding agent still had a realistic chance of positive ROI. People will pay for things with positive ROI.

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Yizahi 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem is that LLM cost is more or less the same for generating some fixed amount of code or it will converge to that soon. But developer costs vary wildly based on the seniority*geographical location. Sure some Silicon Valley architect will be always more expensive than any LLM bills he incurred. But a middle tier dev at an outsource or local cheap shop overseas using the same LLM for the same tasks and same token costs? Eeh, it can go either way really.