To be fair, the cost of software development has always been fairly unpredictable. What may be different is that the cost used to be roughly proportional to man-hours spent, while now the number of agents running in parallel may be less predictable.

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ilovecake1984 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The cost per month is 100% known and always has been. What has been variable is the rate of delivery. AI is different and can be substantial in countries with lower wages.

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xienze 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> To be fair, the cost of software development has always been fairly unpredictable.

Yes, but in a "oops this is gonna take another two months to finish" kind of way, not the "oops this is the 12th time this month 8 developers have burned $2K in tokens in a single day and no one really knows how it happened" kind of way.

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kridsdale1 16 hours ago | parent [-]

We’re all being given belt-loaded machine guns and tossed on to Planet K. We used to pay for the salaries of soldiers, now we have an Ammo Budget.

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dgellow 6 hours ago | parent [-]

A belt loaded spinwheel machine gun, where there are some chances the next bullet is a dummy round, or goes in the wrong direction. And everytime you reload a new soldier is in charge of the gun

	▲	bluGill 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You don't need that analogy as the normal use of a automatic gun in war is not to kill, it is to suppress - stop the enemy from moving. If you are hit by a gun in automatic mode it is your own stupid fault. When you want to kill someone you switch to one shot or maybe 3 round bursts.