> That’s $2,180.16 worth of tokens for $200

So the author claims he's getting $2000 per month worth of frontier AI free of charge. Ok. If he's been doing that for 6 months that's $12k. What has this produced concretely? For $12k you can find a used car in decent condition. Heck for $1200 (his actual out-of-pocket spend) you get a brand new ebike! (on which you could put a pelican and make a photo of both if that's your fancy). But here it's unclear what has come of it.

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simonw an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I've written a great deal of code - code that would have taken me years of work to produce without LLMs.

(It's mostly open source, you're welcome to dig around in https://github.com/simonw and https://github.com/datasette if you like.)

My time as an experienced software engineer is worth a lot of money - a whole lot more than $12,000 for the past six months.

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bambax an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> code that would have taken me years of work to produce without LLMs

As you might suspect, this is what I have an issue with. Without LLMs, isn't it possible or even likely that that code wouldn't have been written at all, and wouldn't have been missed? If LLMs are mostly used to produce throwaway prototypes then it's a stretch to say that's money well spent.

If indeed it let you advance your main product much faster then sure it's a different story. You're the judge of that. It's hard to see the impact from the consumer side; everything is still broken and no extraordinary app seems to be emerging. Maybe it's just a question of time. We'll see.

	▲	simonw an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I've thought about this a lot. I am very confident that the way I use LLMs is both accelerating progress on my core projects (here's a substantial, reviewed PR I landed just yesterday https://github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2741) and helping me create plenty of projects that otherwise would not have existed.

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nevertoolate an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> My time as an experienced software engineer is worth a lot of money - a whole lot more than $12,000 for the past six months

From this I assume you think that what the llm has generated is as valuable as your own work generally is. How do you even calculate this?

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ex-aws-dude an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

And what was your return on investment?

	▲	simonw an hour ago \| parent [-]
		As I commented elsewhere, I'm still bad at making money from my open source work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296794#48298909 (I have a feeling if I could say "and I closed $2m in sales with the software I wrote!" people would find a way to say that didn't mean anything anyway, because how can I prove I wouldn't have made those sales writing it by hand?)

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aspenmartin an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I would be very curious what kind of answer would satisfy you here. Simon isn't building a product, where $200 is a line item on a balance sheet. If he tells you what sort of analyses or time savings $200/mo on coding agents have enabled him, do you honestly think that would satisfy you?