It is massively cheaper than an overseas engineer. A cheap engineer can pump out maybe 1000 lines of low quality code in an hour. So like 10k tokens per hour for $50. So best case scenario $5/1000 tokens.
LLMS are charging like $5 per million of tokens. And even if it is subsidized 100x it is still cheaper an order of magnitude than an overseas engineer.
Not to mention speed. An LLM will spit out 1000 lines in seconds, not hours.
I trust my offshore engineers way more than the slop I get from the "AI"s. My team makes my life a lot easier, because I know they know what they are doing. The LLMs, not so much.
Here’s a story about productivity measured by lines of code that’s 40 years old so it must surely be wrong:
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
> When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000