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pvtmertyesterday at 11:41 PM0 repliesview on HN

> The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero

It hasn't. Large enterprises currently footing the bill, essentially subsidizing AI for now.

I constantly see comparisons between the 200$ Claude-Code Max subscription vs 6-figure (100k$) salary of an engineer.

The comparison here is, first of all, not apples-to-apples. Let's correct CC subscription to the yearly amount first; 12x200=2400$. Still more than 10x difference compared to the human engineer.

Although when you have the human engineer, you also pay for the experience, responsibility, and you somewhat transfer liability (especially when regulations come into play)

Moreover, creation by a human engineer, unless stolen IP or was plagiarized, owned by you as the employer/company. Meanwhile, whatever AI generated is guaranteed to be somewhat plagiarized in the first place. The ownership of the IP is questionable.

This is like when a layman complains when the electrician comes to their house, identifies the breaker problem, replaces the breaker which costs 5$ and charges 100$ for 10-minute job. Which is complete underestimation of skill, experience, and safety. A wrong one may cause constant circuit-breaks, causing malfunction in multitude of electronic devices in the household. Or worse, may cause a fire. When you think you paid 100$ for 10-minutes, in fact it was years of education, exams, certification, and experience you had paid for your future safety.

The same principle applies to the AI. It seems like it had accumulated more and more experience, but failing at the first prompt-injection. It seems like getting better at benchmarks because they are now part of their dataset. All these are hidden-costs 99% does not talk about. All these hidden costs are liabilities.

You may save an engineer's yearly salary today, at the cost of losing ten times more to the civil-lawsuits tomorrow. (Of course, depending on a field/business)

If your business was not that critical to get a civil-lawsuit in the first place, then you probably didn't needed to hire an engineer yourself. You could hire an agency/contractor to do that in much cheaper way, while still sharing liability...