Two dollars spent over and over would still take a while to equal a software engineer's salary, and if the end result is "produce a fully functional codebase in minutes" the premium might be worth it even if it exceeds that much.
We all know the game Sam Altman is playing. Eventually you can squeeze the full salary in cost out of companies who have laid off their workers and it would still be a good deal because AI does not need health care, pay taxes, hardware, sick days and so on.