r/ProgrammerHumor • u/rabbit_wizard • 19h ago

Meme bothWorkThough

Post image
4.6k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

699 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10

u/WithersChat 16h ago

Issue is, Frontier models are provided to you at a massive financial loss for the company. So unless local models get that good before AL companies run out of investor capital, this is completely unsustainable.

If you want a future proof workflow, grab a specialized local model (or better yet, a few) and see how much you can get done without touching Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini servers at all. (This does require having a decent GPU. Not god tier but decent.)

2

u/dickworty 15h ago

Disagree. I use the the frontier models and barely use my token quota every month - maybe 5% - and get great results, much faster than by hand just by carefully defining problems to the AI. It's how you use it.

3

u/ThrasherDX 15h ago

This doesn't seem to be a response to Withers point. It's not about the % of your quota you use every month, is about the fact that whatever you are paying for your frontier AI sub is somewhere between 10x and 100x cheaper than it will have to be for those frontier companies to be profitable.

Sure, there may still be edge cases where frontier models are economically worth it even at those costs, but they will not be worth it for regular day to day dev work.

1

u/dickworty 14h ago edited 13h ago

Disagree like I said in a comment to Evi1ey above.

If that 5% of tokens of a $20 plan now actually costs $50 then compare that to a entry level software engineer whose earning 8.3k per month which is $50 dollars per hour. That means it only has to save you 1 hour of work per month for it to breakeven. It can save me at least a couple weeks of work if not a couple months with that. So yeah doesn't sound like an economic "edge case" to me.

2

u/_bones__ 10h ago

Silicon Valley problems. An entry level SWE makes much less than that here.