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Comment by axus | Hacker News Reader

It'd be embarrassing if you have to spend $10 in AI tokens for it to fix one line that you could have fixed quicker yourself for free.

Not sure if the savings add up enough to offset the investment in learning to program.

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On the other hand, sometimes the hardest bugs are only a few lines of code and days of debugging. If an LLM can do it in a day, you've saved time.

but not necessarily costs

Time's expensive too.

on the other hand you spend time and tokens using the AI approach

It's like hiring someone to do part of your job for you, which is a rather proven approach to getting more done in less time. A proud tradition going back hundreds of thousands of years.

Except when you buy tokens instead of hiring someone, you buy Sam Altman a yacht instead of buying somebody dinner.

Yeah, though unfortunately paying anyone I know to fix my code sure isn't going to go nearly as well as asking Claude. Or at all.

A word of advice from an European: Tax the rich. Then you no longer have these problems. Even running a local model just shifts the yacht to Jensen Huang instead.

I worked with mid level devs that would write 5 lines of code (literally) and run it through an llm for validation, so yeah they were spending tokens like crazy. They end up being more expensive to the company with no added benefit

I wonder if people writing these comments actually do this hands on.

That's because I do and a one line fix rarely costs anything but cents. Unless you first need to let it figure out which line it is, but that's not a fair comparison because you'd also first need to find out. And if it takes you an hour then instead paying $10 could be a reasonable price to pay.

Only way it's costing $10 is if you're putting your whole code base in without without any work or guidance, which is what people who don't use AI day to day think is what happens.

It ain't gonna be 10 bucks for long

Does their comment not read as hyperbole from someone frustrated at the state of the industry?

But it took you probably years of knowledge and learning to be able to fix the line. If you start learning that from 0 today, the AI will be cheaper in the long run - because while it cost 10$ today, we know from history that everything computers & electronics gets faster and more efficient, so it will be 1$ or less in a couple of years.

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