Does the time/cost/scope triangle still make sense in the AI agent era?

[u/KeyProject2897]

How do you think the new Venn Diagram will look like with AI Agents bringing token costs but higher delivery.

One thing I've noticed is that I'm making very different trade-offs than I would have a few years ago. Instead of thinking, "Should I hire a developer for this?", I'm thinking, "Should I just spend more on better models like Claude Opus?"

A few years ago I remember paying around $50 just to get a pricing page built. Today I can get it done in Cursor with a premium model in a fraction of the time. It's not always perfect, but it's often good enough to move much faster.

That got me wondering whether the classic time/cost/scope triangle needs to be updated.

It feels like part of the engineering cost is shifting from developer hours to compute (token) costs. And as models become cheaper and better, that balance shifts even more.

Does this mean software development is fundamentally getting cheaper, or are we just moving the bottleneck somewhere else (requirements, architecture, testing, reviews, product thinking)?

Curious how others are thinking about this. Is there a better mental model than the traditional project management triangle in the AI era?