alt Hacker NewsBut if e.g. a developer can do 50% more, shouldn't it be worth it to pay up to 50% of developer salary for the product?
So the % is debatable of course. There's cases where an AI agent can save weeks worth of investigation, there's cases where you are mainly blocked due to processes, and many different circumstances. It's up to every company on their own to decide it. But if they decide it's 50%, why shouldn't they spend 50% of salary on it?
Like imagine a large company with thousands of microservices. You need to build a feature, before you had to setup cross timezone team meetings to figure out who owns what, what is happening in each microservice, how it all connects together. But now you can essentially send an AI Agent to scour and prepare all this material for you, which theoretically in this planning could save hours of back and forth meetings.
If 1 hour / 1 eng costs $200, then a 10 people 1h meeting avoided would save $200 x 10 = $2000 alone.
I don't see it as a replacement for dev, it's more of a multiplier.
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I believe what GP is saying is that there is a price calculation today, but then if enough devs become unemployed, their salary will go down, making them more competitive by finops calculations, at which point the Ai prices will have to come down as well. Where equilibrium is, no one knows
>But if e.g. a developer can do 50% more, shouldn't it be worth it to pay up to 50% of developer salary for the product?
That's the upper bound but it's not the market price.
Accounting software (+ hardware) doesn't cost nearly as much as the accountant hours it saves. Accountant salaries are simply not a relevant yardstick for the price that software vendors can charge for accounting software.
Equally, the market price for code generators will not stay anywhere near the price of developer hours it saves. It will be determined by competition.