alt Hacker NewsHumans are very expensive, so the equation almost always falls against them.
It's not just salary, but also safety/labor regulation, legal risk, vacations, sick time, personal conflicts, HR, benefits.
Even when automation is more expensive on paper, it's generally still cheaper
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One of the large (and enjoyable IMHO) challenges in this line of work is developing a de facto understanding of your process and the context it's in service to, and that's only possible if you're actually on your industry equivalent of a "shop floor" for each domain the project touches.
As far as I can tell this part of the job isn't really on anyone's radar anymore.
Good to know that LLMs will be removing all regulatory and legal risks, as well as creating a consumer economy that no longer employs or pays consumers.
I can't help thinking there might be some kind of strategic issue here.
Perhaps someone should ask Mythos about it.
That's the beauty of these AI advancements. You, a human, will have to compete against a model for the same job.
If you get $100,000 per year as a SWE, and Anthropic offers a coding model for $100,000 per year (but working 24/7), then you'll have to give up all of those addons that make the fully burdened cost of the employee. Say goodbye to vacation, sick time, benefits, etc.
> Humans are very expensive, so the equation almost always falls against them.
You underestimate what these models cost. Uber's budget is $1,500/dev/month. I gather that was put in place because the dev's were going through $6,000/dev/month, which Uber decided could not be cost justified.
Fable costs at least twice as much, or $12,000/dev/month.
Fable can apparently work for hours without supervision, which means a skilled engineer can now have it working on many tasks concurrently. I would not be at all surprised if they can put a nought or two on that number. If you do that, you are well out of "what a human costs" territory.