Even the $200 claude max monthly subscription is peanuts compared to salary cost.

Tell that to the company that I was just at that cut Intelij licenses as cost cutting measures.

If they really want to cut cost, fire the worst dev on the team and use that money to give everyone a Codex subscription.

Or better yet, fire the managers or bean counters that think decreasing everyone’s productivity is good for long term savings.

I’m reminded of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

Fire the middle management, HR, and etc that have been enthusiastically using AI to do their jobs for the past two or three years already. 90% of them can be replaced by an agent with access to an email account.

Tbh, if companies want to use AI to lay off and cut costs, that's exactly where they should be doing it, not engineering.

How much bloat and bureaucracy bottleneck is sitting in middle management whose favorite past time is wasting everyone's time on meetings that could have been an email? HR? Not the execs, but the HR drones that do nothing but answer employee questions about policy, could have already been replaced with not even an AI, just an old school chatbot, a long time ago.

Instead of cutting engineers, cut the non-tech jobs, flatten the structure.

Oh they laid people off so they could outsource more to India. Despite the managers reminding them, the cost is 1/3 the cost but 3x slower. American devs were 5x more productive overall.

Amazes me that people pay 20k a month for a dev rather than paying 2k a month for one in Poland or 1k a month for one from India

There’s obviously a benefit of paying higher rates for US programmers, but does that benefit change when llms are thrown into the mix

2k in Poland you say...

My experience with outsourcing over 20+ years (Russia, Romania, India, South America) is that you just move money around when you do it.

It takes more planning, more specification, more coordination, more QA. The quality is almost always worse, and remediation takes forever. So your BA, QA and PM time goes way up and absorbs any cost savings.

YMMV.

Sounds like an LLM, tbh. Using Claude also takes more planning, more explicit specification, prompting, more manual review, more QA.

Makes no sense because LLMs makes it far less worth it to outsource developers.

Exactly, the $20 codex is so good value it’s irresponsible to not give it to everyone. Claude code $20 is otoh pointless, the limits are good enough for 10 mins of work twice per business day.