If a good SWE is $150/hour, does the model cost actually matter? Surely you'd be willing to spend $10/hour to make that SWE 20% more productive? The model cost is still much less than the salary.
Most of the gains right now come from tooling and process and any big post 2025 language model. The specific model isn’t that important right now.
Congrats, now you’re paying an engineer’s salary to make your engineer at best 20% more productive.
Better to hire another engineer, or two jrs, and build up your in house talent.
If you’re doing a one-off project, sure. But if you’re coding like this full time, you’re paying the year’s salary anyway.
And faster? Not so sure about that. Sure they can write code faster, but writing code is a small part of building something.