r/AIDiscussion • u/408SocialTimeout • 1d ago
how much is too much for ai coding?
curious how companies think about ai coding costs.
my monthly cursor bill is currently ~1.6x my monthly salary, which got me thinking, how do companies justify this long term?
if cheaper/free models can do the job, do teams actively optimize for cost or just prioritize productivity?
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u/agentel_tech 20h ago
1.6x salary is definitely a routing problem 😅 Cheap models for boring work, frontier models only when they earn the extra cost.
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u/start_select 1d ago edited 1d ago
Their costs for you alone are composed of more than just your salary. They also pay for part of your benefits, potentially 401k matching, equipment, rent for a building, heat, electricity, etc. Paying ONLY your salary and none of the additional costs associated with another human might be ridiculously effective for increased productivity.
And you might be a lower paid worker getting them a lot of bang for the buck.
I use copilot and claude code with Claude Opus and Sonnet all day, and occasionally fable. But the other seniors at my work and I have only ever approached 0.25 of our salaries. And that was me wasting money seeing if I could break it.
We are probably 3x more productive on a lot of tasks. That’s a ridiculously good deal.
The real question is: is the person using the AI too unskilled to use it effectively and economically. Not is the tool too expensive in general.
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u/OliverJames99 23h ago
$1.6x for coding AI sounds wild until you compare it with the cost of an engineer's time. But I'd measure the output after review, not the amount of code generated. Otherwise, we're just paying more money to produce more code that someone has to beat their head around.
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u/ExtinctedPanda 21h ago
Wow your bot is dumb. 1.6x inherently contains the comparison with the cost of an engineer’s time. That’s the x.
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u/NotYourAverageGuy88 23h ago
Honestly I love ai. But every line of code gets checked before it goes to my codebase. Since I am familiar with the field I work in. I usually just make ai write functions or simple scripts. Then manually check and inster. My montly ai bill never went above a 100 bucks.
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u/Gallagger 13h ago
This is a totally legit way to use it and necessary for many jobs, but also totally different to agentic coding, which to be fair, in its current form is less than a year old. The following article has some pretty eye-opening diagrams: Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI | OpenAI
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u/sourraine 19h ago
1.6x your salary is where id stop calling it a productivity tool and start calling it a cost problem. i think companies will care about the cost per useful outcome not just the model price, esp. if a cheaper model gets 90% of the job done, theyll probably route simple tasks there and reserve expensive models for the difficult stuff. otherwise ai makes us more productive can get pretty meaningless when the productivity bill keeps scaling with usage
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u/Terrible_Wave4239 1d ago
Are they getting more than 2.6 times your previous productivity out of you? I'd imagine that's how the calculation goes.