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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

If I have to do the work to double-check all the answers, why am I paying $200?

Why do companies hire junior devs? You still want a senior to review the PRs before they merge into the product right? But the net benefit is still there.

We hire junior devs as an investment, because at some point they turn into seniors. If they stayed juniors forever, I wouldn't hire them.

Are you implying this technology will remain static in its capabilities going forward despite it having seen significant improvement over the last few years?

No, I'm explicitly saying that gpt-4o-2024-11-20 won't get any smarter, no matter how much I use it.

Does that matter when you can just swap it for gpt-5-whatever at some point in the future?

Someone asked why I hire juniors. I said I hire juniors because they get better. I don't need to use the model for it to get better, I can just wait until it's good and use it then. That's the argument.

I suppose the counterargument would be your investment in OpenAI allows them to fund the better model down the road, but I get your drift :)

I started incorporating LLMs into my workflows around the time gpt-3 came out. By comparison to its performance at that point, it sure feels like my junior is starting to become a senior.

Genuinely curious, are you saying that your junior devs don't provide any value from the work they do?

They provide some value, but between the time they take in coaching, reviewing their work, support, etc, I'm fairly sure one senior developer has a much higher work per dollar ratio than the junior.

Because double checking and occasionally hitting retry is still 10x faster than me doing.

Because you wouldn't have come up with the correct answer before you used up 200 dollars worth of salary or billable time.

because checking the work is much faster than generating it.

Because it's per month and not per hour for a specialist consultant.

I don't know anyone who does something and at first says, "This will be a mistake" Maybe they say, "I am pretty sure this is the right thing to do," then they make a mistake.

If it's easier mentally, just put that second sentence in from of every chatgpt answer.

Yeah the Junior dev gets better, but then you hire another one that makes the same mistakes, so in reality, on an absolute basis, the junior dev never gets any better.

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