$200/month isn't that much. Folks, I'm hanging around with are spending $100 USD to $500 USD daily as the new norm as a cost of doing business and remaining competitive. That might seem expensive, but it's cheap... https://ghuntley.com/redlining
A 2.5 hour session with Claude Code costs me somewhere between $15 and $20. Taking $20/2.5 hours as the estimate, $100 would buy me 12.5 hours of programming.
On average, one line of, say, JavaScript represents around 7 tokens, which means there are around 140k lines of JS per million tokens.
On Openrouter, Sonnet 3.7 costs are currently:
- $3 / one million input tokens => $100 = 33.3 million input tokens = 420k lines of JS code
- $15 / one million output tokens => $100 = 3.6 million output tokens = 4.6 million lines of JS code
For one developer? In one day? It seems that one can only reach such amounts if the whole codebase is sent again as context with each and every interaction (maybe even with every keystroke for type completion?) -- and that seems incredibly wasteful?
33.3 million input tokens / 7 tokens per loc = 4.8 million locs
3.6 million output tokens / 7 tokens per loc = 515k locs
All of the gate keeping around llm code tools are amusing. But whatever, I’m shipping 10x and making money doing it.
But if you are making money by using LLMs to write code then all power to you. I just despair at the idea of trillions of lines of LLM generated code.
The point is to get a pipeline working, cost can be optimized down after.
[0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...
If your staff engineers are mostly doing things AI can do, then you don't need staff. Probably don't even need senior
- L3 SWE II - $193,712 USD (before overheads)
- L4 SWE III - $297,124 USD (before overheads)
- L5 Senior SWE - $377,797 USD (before overheads)
These tools and foundational models get better every day, and right now, they enable Staff+ engineers and businesses to have less need for juniors. I suspect there will be [short-to-medium-term] compression. See extended thoughts at https://ghuntley.com/screwed
Delivery via LLMs is predictable, fast, and any concerns about outcome [quality] can be programmed away to reject bad outcomes. This form of programming the LLMs has a one-time cost...
The minimum wage in Poland is around USD 1240/month. The median wage in Poland is approximately USD 1648/month. Tech salaries are considerably higher than the median.
Idk, maybe for an intern software developer it's a good salary...
~$1200 is what I'd get paid here after a few years of experience; I have never saw an internship offer in my city that paid more than minimal wage (most commonly, it's unpaid).
They do, but I’ve seen a huge slowdown in “getting better” in the last year. I wonder if it’s my perception, or reality. Each model does better on benchmarks but I’m still experiencing at least a 50% failure rate on _basic_ task completion, and that number hasn’t moved higher in many months.
I get a lot of value out of LLMs but when I see people make claims like this I know they aren’t “in the trenches” of software development, or care so little about quality that I can’t relate to their experience.
Usually they’re investors in some bullshit agentic coding tool though.
Using the proper techniques, Sonet 3.7 can generate code in the custom lexical/stdlib. So, in my eyes, the path to Stage 3 is unlocked, but it will chew lots and lots of tokens.
Well, virtually every production-grade compiler is self-compiling. Since you bring it up explicitly, I'm wondering what implications of begin self-compiling you have in mind?
> Meaning the LLM is able to program itself without training data about the programming language...
Could you clarify this sentence a bit? Does it mean the LLM will code in this new language without training in it before hand? Or is it going to enable the LLM to programm itself to gain some new capabilities?
Frankly, with the advent of coding agents, building a new compiler sounds about as relevant as introducing a new flavor of assembly language and then a new assembly may at least be justified by a new CPU architecture...
1. My company cannot justify this cost at all.
2. My company can justify this cost but I don't find it useful.
3. My company can justify this cost, and I find it useful.
4. I find it useful, and I can justify the cost for personal use.
5. I find it useful, and I cannot justify the cost for personal use.
That aside -- 200/day/dev for a "nice to have service that sometimes makes my work slightly faster" is much in the majority of the world.