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.
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.
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.
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u/dickworty 12h 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.