FWIW, you're nitpicking a strawman. I put "justified" in scare quotes for a reason, qualified it with "if it works" (which is, quite literally, the definition of a justification) and put it immediately after a sentence enumerating a list of legitimate questions for debate (all of which would be part of any justification analysis).

You agree with me, basically.

The core point is that these very large AI bills are not actually large in context, as the pre-existing scale of expenses for software engineering are larger still and this at least promises to reduce those markedly.

To wit: argue about whether AI works[1] for software development, don't try to claim it's too expensive, it's clearly not.

[1] "Is justified" in the vernacular.