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Comment by esskay | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit misleading to compare $20/month with an actual human person. The junior dev wont get half way through the day and tell you they've used up all their coding time for the month and will now respond with jibberish.

Cursor is a heck of a lot more than $20/month if you actually want it working for a full work day, every day.

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> The junior dev wont get half way through the day and tell you they've used up all their coding time for the month and will now respond with jibberish.

This issue manifests a bit differently in people, but I've definitely worked with people (not only juniors) who only have a few productive hours a month in them. And for what it's worth, some of those people were sufficiently productive in those few hours that it was rational for the company to keep them.

I worked on a team where a new hire from a prestigious school told his manager "That work is boring and mundane and I'm not going to do it."

He didn't last long.

Yeah, so you fire them and replace them with another human, thats still vastly cheaper than a person plus a per-token ai fee.

And it wouldn't surprise me if he is now the boss of people like his prior boss.

My coworkers are burning 10k/month on cursor.

how?? I consider myself pretty heavy handed with letting Gemini fill up its 1M token context window for individual tasks, and I don't exceed $20 per day. Do they just let the agent spin in a loop for 4 hours?

Maybe - but it will still probably be less than a junior dev.

You could probably hammer the most expensive cursor API all-day every-day and it would still be a fraction of the cost of a junior dev.

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