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Comment by douglee650 | Hacker News Reader

Author states, “Single developer projects can build to the caliber and consistency of large development teams.”

When I, as a single person, can produce a project in one month that would have taken a team of four people three months to produce, why would I care about token cost? I’m now spending $500/month instead of $40,000 month to get the same thing 3x faster. $500 for a project instead of $120,000. (Assumes my cost, $40k is the other three people)

It’s a no-brainer —- use frontier all the time.

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"A robot that's a tenth of the speed is still cost effective when it's a hundredth of the price"

-- CPG Grey, Humans Need not Apply. Released over a decade ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMFj75kBQlU

Have you laid those people off? You still have people on the payroll. If each one of them uses a $500 subscription, you are now spending $42k/month, not $40k.

Now think about that he is counting it like:

He never had to hire anyone in the first place.

He didn't have to make any contracts, deal with screening, background checks, recruitment calls.

All that money he didn't spend he can spend on maxing out token usage.

No, but the 3 of us can now accomplish a lot more than we used to. We spend around $450 a month on hosted inference plus capital / utility costs of around $100 a month in local inference.

And our 2 non-technical staff are now busy designing apps, so when they hand off something to be productised, it’s far more complete than the old days of a few Figma drawings

Are you sure you are?

Try laying some people off just to be sure.

I'm very un-motivated to do so since then I'd have more work to do, and I'd be making less money.

My bet is we no longer have the benifit of the doubt. and so taking capital and burning hard is not going to break through into consumer as easily as it did. So I extend the arc of time, tell people I'm a business, focus on giving customer as much free as I can, (probably add the harness to my product), and over time build an affectionate connetion with customers and then remind them I'm a business.

> use frontier all the time

Agreed. You may think that the task is simple, but a brainfart of a dumb model overlooking something can cost you more in time and effort (if you relied on the output of the wrong code and now have to go back to regenerate), that it just doesn't make sense to use non-frontier for anything but hobby projects.

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