False! Labor is the most expensive input in creating software, not joules of energy. Using AI is far far cheaper than expecting workers to synthesize all knowledge themselves.

Both workflows involve typing a very small number of characters and should take under 30 seconds. There's no difference in labor cost. However, the compute and energy costs of the tokens to solve the problem vs the tool call will be orders of magnitude in difference, even for trivial stuff like grepping. It gets worse as the problem gets more complicated and the tools more specialized.