$60k/yr still seems like a good deal for the productivity multiplier you get on an experienced engineer costing several times that. Actually, I'm fairly certain that some optimizations I had codex do this week would already pay for that from being able to scale down pod resource requirements, and that's just from me telling it to profile our code and find high ROI things to fix, taking only part of my focus away from planned work.
Another data point: I gave codex a 2 sentence description (being intentionally vague and actually slightly misleading) of a problem that another engineer spent ~1 week root causing a couple months ago, and it found the bug in 3.5 minutes.
These things were hot garbage right up until the second they weren't. Suddenly, they are immensely useful. That said, I doubt my usage costs anywhere near that much to openai.
Wildly different experience of frontier models than I have, what's your problem domain? I had both Opus and Gemini Pro outright fail at implementing a dead simple floating point image transformation the other day because neither could keep track of when things were floats and when they were uint8.
> $60k/yr still seems like a good deal for the productivity multiplier you get on an experienced engineer costing several times that.
Maybe, but that's a hard sell to all the workplaces who won't even spring for >1080p monitors for their experienced engineers.