alt Hacker NewsWell yes it is expensive, but companies are paying for that. It is far more expensive than the Max and it does go up to or more in some cases compared to the employee salary.
Larger companies are using Claude through AWS Bedrock and are willing to easily pay $5k+ per engineer per month for it.
The thinking appears to be that a model that can do the work of a developer must be worth a significant share of a developer salary. I think this idea is flawed.
Developer salaries are driven up by scarcity - scarcity of developer skills overall and scarcity of developer skills in specific places like California. If AI models destroy the scarcity then the price worth paying for a coding agent will drop dramatically.
Maybe Anthropic can get away with it for a couple of months. But this will not last.