True, that was more hypothetical if it got good enough to 2x.

But even taking a more realistic 1.25x (20% time savings) gain, lets say you drop from 500 to 400 devs, you'd have to hit around $4,000/dev/month in token spend before hiring humans again would break even.

Payroll is just expensive, in most companies it's by far the biggest expense. AI still has to cost drastically more before investors would call it out as being worse than increasing headcount, from a pure dollars perspective.