When AI Costs More Than the Engineer • Hacker News Board

Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

#121

Post by eru » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 4:54 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #93

eru wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compare AI costs per-engineer-salary-dollar, because more expensive engineers probably need more expensive AI. Let's see how this works out in the long run. For a historical analog, more expensive engineers don't use more expensive computers (by and large).

> more expensive engineers don't use more expensive computers They don't? If you give your best engineers substandard hardware to work on, you're going to get worse output from them compared to if you give them more expensive computers to work with.

I agree, but good computers are so comparatively cheap and engineers so expensive that this logic applies to (nearly?) every one of your engineers, not just the most expensive ones.

Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

#122

Post by KolibriFly » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 6:56 AM UTC

The weakest part of the article is that the forecasts up to 2029 assume the current market structure will barely change. In three years literally everything can change, like prices, models, hardware, and how we actually use LLMs

Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

#123

Post by KolibriFly » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 7:01 AM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #24

Open-weight models are going to completely shatter these forecasts. It takes a little more effort – right now, probably won’t be true in three months – but you can achieve the same at 1/10th of the cost.

Everything depends heavily on the segment. Open-weight models already look good enough for a ton of internal tasks right now but there is always gonna be that small percentage of workloads where the last few percent of quality are totally worth the money.

I feel like the market is just gonna become way more mixed. Not like "everyone is switching to open" or "everyone is staying on frontier" but a mix of multiple models for different scenarios

Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

#124

Post by geon » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #86

jonatron wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples and oranges, or chalk and cheese. Why would you say apples and potatoes?

I read it as trying to indicate that it's even more different than apples and oranges. Not sure it succeeds in that, but I think that's the intent.

Correct

Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

#125

Post by HappMacDonald » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 7:34 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #86

jonatron wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples and oranges, or chalk and cheese. Why would you say apples and potatoes?

I read it as trying to indicate that it's even more different than apples and oranges. Not sure it succeeds in that, but I think that's the intent.

I'd have probably gone with "Apples and Orangutans"

Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

#126

Post by spiderfarmer » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 3:57 PM UTC

acka wrote: post #101

spiderfarmer wrote: post #4

I'm not a VC guru but in my opinion you can't include the time and money it takes to grow a tree and mine the iron to compare the time it takes to hammer in a nail with a hammer versus using your fist.

Your framing assumes that because the hammer is there, its manufacturing cost vanishes. In reality, someone had to pay that cost, and a holistic view has to decide whether building and maintaining that entire tool chain is actually cheaper than just paying humans to do the job. Often, we still choose the tool even when it raises true total cost per unit, because we value convenience or speed. That’s exactly what’s ha…

I don't buy a new hammer for each nail.

Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

#127

Post by geon » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 11:09 AM UTC

HappMacDonald wrote: post #125

danaris wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it as trying to indicate that it's even more different than apples and oranges. Not sure it succeeds in that, but I think that's the intent.

I'd have probably gone with "Apples and Orangutans"

Clever. Wish I had thought of that.

Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

#128

Post by ThunderSizzle » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #120

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is probably a backwards anti-pattern companies have built. Your most expensive engineer's time is most valuable, so if you give them standard issue which is half the speed, you are throttling the value you can get from your engineer. Not to mention the mental drain of your cursor barely being able to move due to all the bloated virtual networking systemization. It would seem to make sense to give more valuable…

Eh, computers are so (comparatively) cheap, that you can give all your employees top-of-the-line equipment by that logic. (Well, for this to make sense, you need good computers to be cheap, but the returns to diminish quickly after that. Which used to be the case until fairly recently: single core performance was pretty much capped, and after your whole compile is parallelised adding more cores to a machine didn't re…

Meh - our dev machines are over-provisioned cloud pc's from MS, that run as fast a laptop from 2005. And I'm sure they are paying a premium for the privledge.

My 10 year old desktop sitting next to me is a lot faster, but alas, I can't BYOD.