As models train up the intelligence ladder, many common tasks will hit fully diminished returns, and instead it'll just get progressively cheaper to do that task. But the tasks that AI is capable of doing are also expanding. I'm not sure 'Some tasks don't require the peak of the frontier' is worth worrying about, from an AI finance perspective.

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tyre 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes. I use Opus for tasks that Sonnet could probably handle, but I'm not hitting my quota. Whatever minor incremental gain is "worth it", since marginal cost is zero.

Even now, I use Fable as the planner and coordinator, with it farming out to agents. I don't hit my Fable limits either.

Which means I could accomplish more, but these are side projects so I don't need 30x productivity. Still, claude is constantly churning away at something.

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jml78 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I operate mostly in the devops arena. Lots of things opus is fine for. But there is just things where I can hand hold Opus through changes, or I can ask Fable to do it and it gets it right on the first try. People will say let fable plan and validate with opus doing the work. I found that burns fable tokens even faster because opus makes so many mistakes, fable has to review things 4-5 times before opus gets it right. A single fable implementation at medium or low effort would have one shot it.

	▲	ACCount37 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yep. Every time you get more intelligence, that buys you more autonomy, more reliability, more task complexity. Tasks done with less mistakes, less handholding, less interventions. This is what the "good enough" people fail to grasp. There's no "good enough" - unless your tasks are genuinely small scope and will stay that way forever. If not, there are always more gains to extract.

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a2ff6eeb0 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Exactly; so far, we've only replaced the need to design algorithms and hand-write code; what if we apply the same effort towards the skill needed for system architecture, project management, and the rest of the SDLC? Or even outside of software!

Right now, it feels like all of that is today where coding was a year or two ago, and we're on the cusp of some massive improvements outside of coding. It'll be interesting to see what these companies decide to automate next.

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vineyardmike 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Or even outside of software!

As a software engineer, I selfishly hope that they spend more effort on non software tasks since I’ve feel like we hit a sweet spot where engineers still have some value and autonomy, but a super charged tool.

Pragmatically, I suspect that “non software” tasks will be a tarpit because most tasks can’t be automated and verified as easily in an RL loop compared to software projects. Especially since most skilled labor is either not nearly as expensive as software engineers (eg biologists), or regulated (eg doctors, lawyers).

	▲	a2ff6eeb0 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I suspect the focus will probably shift once software engineering is no longer the biggest cost center for most AI company's clients, and we'll start working on getting rid of the next cost center.

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dgellow 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s worth considering for companies paying API prices, and not relying on a subscription quota