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Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

blog.alaindichiappari.dev

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Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#61

Post by cfiggers »

sokoloff wrote: post #9

Rationing tokens on a spend level or count makes no sense to me. Why would I pay $10-20K/mo to employ a software engineer and then balk at a $500, $1000, or even $2000 monthly AI bill, assuming they were even vaguely trying to use the tokens productively? I’m not an AI-maximalist, but “work a few days with AI and the rest of the month without because of cost” sounds literally crazy to me. (If you think AI is low/zero…

This sounds roughly similar to, "If eating steak is nutritious and tastes good, why would you not eat an 8oz sirloin for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for an entire month?"

"Too much of a good thing" does exist. Someone might feel that it takes time for their organization to "metabolize" the rapid additions made by coding agents. That seems quite reasonable to me. Your comment seems to argue a false dichotomy.

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#62

Post by cebert »

pdhborges wrote: post #55
jdrek1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were talking about what it costs the company, not just the salary. There are taxes, insurances, equipment costs, etc. 10k might be a bit too high, but it's far from "absolutely ridiculous" amounts of being too high. An employee with a 5k salary can easily cost the employer 7-8k

I took into account all of that. Still ridiculous.

In the US, it’s really difficult to live a middle class lifestyle if you’re not making at least low to mid 100k. I don’t see any starting software salaries at good companies below 100k even in the Midwest.

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#63

Post by cebert »

pdhborges wrote: post #56
Kirby64 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully loaded employee cost is typically around 2x their actual salary. Junior employees making only $60k/yr is absolutely nothing. It’s lowish even in most parts of the western world.

You have people in Spain and Portugal hiring juniors at 25k per year.

The software market has trimodal salary distributions.

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#65

Post by pdhborges »

cebert wrote: post #62
pdhborges wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took into account all of that. Still ridiculous.

In the US, it’s really difficult to live a middle class lifestyle if you’re not making at least low to mid 100k. I don’t see any starting software salaries at good companies below 100k even in the Midwest.

Sure in the US. But people are throwing token caps in 500, 1000, 2000 dollar range here. That is a very significant expense on top of salary, taxes and benefis. It's only justifiable if they observe 20% 30% or more productivity increases across the board.

If you have huge salaries, yeah sure 500 dollars its okay even if you only get 5 10% more productive.

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#66

Post by veeti »

sokoloff wrote: post #9

Rationing tokens on a spend level or count makes no sense to me. Why would I pay $10-20K/mo to employ a software engineer and then balk at a $500, $1000, or even $2000 monthly AI bill, assuming they were even vaguely trying to use the tokens productively? I’m not an AI-maximalist, but “work a few days with AI and the rest of the month without because of cost” sounds literally crazy to me. (If you think AI is low/zero…

Forward thinking employers should use these limits with a holistic perspective. It's obviously time to take a deserved coffee break if you've token maxxed too much. Maybe take Friday off, AI now allows us to accomplish in four working days what used to take five.

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#67

Post by Kirby64 »

pdhborges wrote: post #56
Kirby64 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully loaded employee cost is typically around 2x their actual salary. Junior employees making only $60k/yr is absolutely nothing. It’s lowish even in most parts of the western world.

You have people in Spain and Portugal hiring juniors at 25k per year.

You can also get cheap devs in Central or South America or Eastern Europe too. Doesn’t make it untrue that large parts of the world have junior devs much more expensive than that.

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#68

Post by pdhborges »

Kirby64 wrote: post #67
pdhborges wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have people in Spain and Portugal hiring juniors at 25k per year.

You can also get cheap devs in Central or South America or Eastern Europe too. Doesn’t make it untrue that large parts of the world have junior devs much more expensive than that.

What large parts of the world? Some places in Canada, the US, an handfull of countries in Europe, Autralia plus a few hotspots in SEA?

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#69

Post by Kirby64 »

pdhborges wrote: post #68
Kirby64 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also get cheap devs in Central or South America or Eastern Europe too. Doesn’t make it untrue that large parts of the world have junior devs much more expensive than that.

What large parts of the world? Some places in Canada, the US, an handfull of countries in Europe, Autralia plus a few hotspots in SEA?

> What large parts of the world?

The software development world and ecosystem. I’d say all of the US, major parts of Canada, and major parts of Europe constitute a large part of software developers.

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#70

Post by deadbabe »

jtfrench wrote: post #41
deadbabe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if people had said one day computer programs had to be more memory constrained because everything uses too much RAM. Madness. We'd never see 128GB of RAM.

This is actually how Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google recommends doing thought exercises to challenge assumptions (watch is recent YX Startup School talk). The end goal isn’t “128GB of RAM”, the goal is “useful effective software”. If for whatever reason RAM was an immovable constraint, a different tech tree would emerge.

The tech tree where we develop tech to have tons of RAM is better and leads to more opportunities than the tech tree where everything is built for only a handful of GB of RAM. We may never have had LLMs if we didn’t go down the first path.
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