> But just go ahead and give the latest models (Opus 5.5 / Astra 6 as of today) another try. See what they are capable of and read the code which they produce.

Well, for one, they're capable of draining our (or companies') wallets.

I resolved a huge merge conflict for $60 today. Opus 5.5 did a great job and spent just 1h 16min on this. I could probably run six such sessions today, if I disregarded the need to read and understand the code.

This money has to come from somewhere and my concern is that it will be from decreasing the number of people hired and/or their salaries.

At the same time I firmly believe people who had a tendency to produce tech debt will keep doing that, regardless how brilliant LLMs will become. Unscrewing this is going to cost a lot of money.