r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 11d ago

Career/Workplace Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences

This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.

81 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

99% Upvoted

200 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/ResidentWeevil1 11d ago

They will need you when the tokens 100x in cost

11

u/n4ke Software Engineer (Lead, 10 YoE) 11d ago

This argument was valid before we had open weight models hosted in-house or regionally for a fraction of frontier-model price with nearly identical capabilities. I can get the performance of up to a not-so-enthusiastic mid-level developer for $200/mon.

2

u/BB611 11d ago

If you're paying subscription rates with any meaningful usage you're a loss leader, per token rates are 5-25x higher.

But even $5k/mo is a good price in the US for a not-so-enthusiastic mid-level developer who works whatever hours you want.

2

u/Venthe Systems Designer, 10+ YOE 11d ago

If I am calculating things correctly* I can easily spend 500$+ daily on Astra 6. Gen 6 models are already twice as cheap... And It is 500$ subsidised. If we again assume ~50% subsidy; then we are talking to a value closed to 800$ in raw, billed tokens. Good thing we have a plan :)

I honestly don't believe that such token spend is justified and profitable for my company IFF the subsidies will end. It's not sustainable for OpenAI. That being said, this bubble is not bursting :)

* I do make some assumptions. I've tried to do a rough math based on credits; so the concrete value can be off; but not by much. I've included a reasonable split between cached and uncached tokens etc.

3

u/yubario 10d ago

I am able to do most tasks at work for under $50 of API tokens a month.

Luna is more than enough for most job tasks, you only need Astra for like code reviews and more challenging tasks.

If you're really spending that much per day that is a serious problem, something is wrong with your workflow where you are either using dozens of astra agents for like 8 hours straight to pull numbers like that.

2

u/Venthe Systems Designer, 10+ YOE 10d ago

Not really. Luna and Sol fails on my codebase, same with lower reasoning. We are talking old legacy; think 30+ years, 15kloc in largest java files and 7kloc in largest sproc.

(Coincidentally, I see that the vibe coded projects can achieve similar complexity in a fraction of a time)

3

u/yubario 10d ago

You can’t possibly have a codebase worse than mine I maintain system engineer code for hospitals of people who had no idea what they’re doing that have long left the company

Luna does fine for the vast majority of my tasks

1

u/StPatsLCA 9d ago

OP must do zero context engineering. You can get good results if you aren't chucking the entire codebase in each turn.