Are you seriously asking if employing people, for the same cost, is a better ‘investment’ than relying on LLMs? Jesus Christ.

Yes. Hiring people has various benefits, I will lay them out for you:

- They learn the domain of your product, which means long term ownership and knowledge establishes itself. If you've only ever shipped SaaS slop, you might not know, but lots of companies are solving real world problems that have no better solution. Owning and understanding the code and the domain is key.

- They will learn from their mistakes (no LLM does this).

- Human skill is a REAL moat. Once you build a team that fully understands and is skilled in the domain you work in, these people are going to be the thing that sets you apart. If some of them are particularly social or charming, let them sit in with you for meetings and watch them provide loads of value, for no added cost.

- If Claude or OpenAI is down, they will continue thinking. In fact, they will continue thinking even when off the clock! This is a neat little hack called "consciousness" where you get a lot of work for free!

- You can hire people who punch above their weight; not everyone you hire needs to be a 500k/year staff software prime engineer of doom, you can just spend some time and effort to hire good juniors/competent mediors who will think for themselves (gasp!) and get work done.

- You still get ALL THE BENEFITS OF AI!!!! They can use AI just like you can, or better!

- You get people who you can brainstorm with, which is distinctly different from LLMs because your employees are less likely to want to suck you dry in every sentence just to make sure you spend more tokens. Employees don't care if you love them, they care about the quality of their work if you manage them correctly and reward that.

- They are quite loyal if you treat them right; spend a little more on their well-being, and they will stick around, come in to work every day and deliver cool things with you.

- Humans can only manage, review and give tasks to so many agents. If you add more humans, you can handle more agents.

An expensive LLM and a lot of extra tooling gets you some of this, yes, but not all of it. With humans you can still do the expensive LLM and extra tooling if you end up making enough money anyway.