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Comment by jeremyloy_wt | Hacker News Reader

They napkin math is fairly easy to do. One human works around 250 days per year, and if we assume Bay Area salaries we could assume ~300k/y conservatively for a fully loaded cost.

$1200 per day.

Your estimation is 50*11 days so $660,000. That’s 4x what Claude cost.

That’s assuming that you actually get those 50 people to work without blockers, stepping on each other, or other coordination issues. The coordination complexity alone is astounding.

I don’t like it necessarily, but Claude wins here, easily. It’s not close.

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Unless you hire smart people from EU and what have you (especially ex-USSR)

Which takes us to a point of future US dev salaries if this thing with agents gets better more and more

Sure, but can we not work out how to make humans more efficient for less money? There are obvious optimizations there that none of us would like to be part of.

Humans can't become 100x efficient cost wise. That's how cheap LLMs are.

Less money? Cost of living is much lower in EU

Why assume the upper level salary here? Using senior level developers making astronomical salaries for what is a mechanical line-by-line port would be a poor financial decision.

What does the math look like with 25 devs making ~100k and doing it in 22 days? I’m sure you could find a reasonable combination which costs less. And if you’re already paying the devs the salary, it’s basically free (minus the opportunity cost of them not working on other things).

> Why assume the upper level salary here?

Even a junior is going to cost you $200k by the time you're done paying payroll taxes, healthcare, etc.

Nonsense. Junior salaries are on the order of $50k in the UK. There's no healthcare to pay, but employer taxes and overheads might be around 30%, so you're talking way under $100k.

> That’s assuming that you actually get those 50 people to work without blockers, stepping on each other, or other coordination issues. The coordination complexity alone is astounding.

This is a question of exceptional management, which needs to be present both in the Claude and human cases, and is scarce. Not everyone given the Claude tokens would be able to deliver the same result.

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