> I expect it to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of an experienced dev because that’s the alternative
But there's two ways this could be true: Frontier models costs rise, or (more likely) experience dev costs fall
Opus on enterprise pricing is not exactly cheap.
> I expect it to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of an experienced dev because that’s the alternative.
That's only true if a single company owns the frontier, otherwise the alternative is "a rival frontier model" and the cost will be the marginal price of the compute + amortized training costs.
In a way, that’s the situation today. You can pay an experienced developer $$$$ to do it right, or you can outsource it and pay $$ but pay extra for more layers of review, have lots of unfixed bugs and more tech debt.
You are proposing that instead we pay the frontier model to clean it up. If it can, I expect it to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of an experienced dev because that’s the alternative. That’s the way the frontier AI companies will extracting the value of the work from you.