The crazy part about this is if you compare it not to US wages but european, for instance in the UK where the median software hourly wage is somewhere around $35-40 an hour, then humans are already cheaper than the best models.
I rebuilt my house from the studs, did my own electrical and plumbing, etc. This took a significant amount of training and research back in the day. I worked under my father for a decade before making this attempt. My father is a journeyman electrician and carpenter. I think any able bodied human could soon forgo much of that and simply get a breakdown of actions to perform in a particular order and get similar results.
Today's models are insufficient for someone with 0 hands on experience, especially when limited to text modalities. However, I don't doubt the future ones you describe are coming though, if they're not already here.
24365 = 8760 8760$35 = $306,600
Yeah, a human working non stop will run $300k.
Now you said, the "best" models. I personally reckon that 80-90% of most work don't need the best models. They need a good model, and good models are super cheap. i.e, the tiny gemma4 or qwen3.6 models will be sufficient for most of those work.
AI cloud usage cost goes up near linearly, but local cost doesn't. So say someone built an under $10k system, with perhaps dual RTX 5090. That same system will be able to easily run 20 parallel requests. The only cost is electricity. You can run it 24/7. For 1 year, that's ~$6million. 20 humans will also have overhead of electricity, real estate and other things which far exceed the cost of electricity for just AI.
The thing AI agents are lacking is agency and autonomy. As they get closer and closer, the majority of humans competing in the same sort of tasks will have no chance.
I dont see how you get anywhere close to $6M of tokens out of a pair of 5090s. The class of model they could run is fairly small and extremely cheap to run via API (my math says running Gemma4-31B for 24 hours costs less than $1 on OpenRouter). Even with 20x concurrent requests you are orders of magnitude away from $6M/yr.
Your range of 80-120 gives a yearly wage of like 155k-234k which is clearly far too high for an average.
You'd have to be an expert on labor law in every country you seek to honestly compare. The only clean way to simply compare earnings is freelance rates.
An AI only doing a task correctly 50% of the time may in-fact be better than your N% chance of hiring a highly capable human for that task, and especially for contracting a human to a 1-2 hour task.
But your successful use of AI is still predicated on a human who can judge output and break the work into smaller tasks that fit the skill ceiling of the AI, which is currently no more than tasks that take a skilled human 2 hours.
I just want to put this plainly. Programmers are often completely delusional about their own productivity and nobody can reliably define work quality in the field. The whole field is a mess, and I’m glad product owners and users are finally being empowered.