Humans:
$160k / 9 months = $600/day
AI Software Factory: $4172 / 2 days = $2086/day
This seems unsustainable, unless you're also generating 3x the revenue.
AI Software Factory: $4172 / 2 days = $2086/day
This seems unsustainable, unless you're also generating 3x the revenue.
One caveat to the number for DB2 is that it doesn't consider review costs. We weren’t reviewing the hospital’s code during that sprint. Since we’re still confirming correctness for Db2, a more accurate comparison would add the human time to verify this.
I’m not going to claim this tripled our revenue. But revenue is also a function of time to deliver too. When a missing feature in the migration tool is what’s blocking a customer’s migration or a deal, shipping it in days instead of months can move revenue directly if it means the customer doesn't choose a different alternative.
If its work that was blocking an existing deal, I can see this playing out in your favour. Whereas, if you were trying to negotiate a deal where you wanted the customer to pay x$ for a feature you have yet to develop, you might now have to charge lesser.
In any case the way to think of this is not "/day".
The reason is simple. If you buy 1000 barrels of oil, you buy 1000 barrels of oil not 17.4 days of oil. There is now a disconnect between work done and time. Infact you would be sane if you said "that result I can get in 2 days for $4172, if you can get me that same result in 1 hour, I'd pay $8344". See where this is going?
Yes a lot of thought work is now a commodity, and if you want the commodity faster (last minute booking, uber to come quicker etc.) you pay more not less. Value being $/hour is over.
[1] The ? acts as both a question and a regex.
I dont think this is comparable to buying a barrel of oil at all. A software factory like this, I'm assuming is going to be run 24/7.
I get what you're saying, but thats assuming someone's buying their software at the faster pace as well, which we don't know.
For some jobs the employee comes out top, for others the tokens. This landscape will continually shift. However definitely the "per hour" is just some intermediate part of the value calculation can can't be directed compared.
If there were a way to pop out the next Lovable with $160k tokens and you can have that land in 4 hours, would you pay. Well yeah someone would, just like they'd buy $160k of oil if they needed it. It would be even better than paying $80k to an employee who took 6 months.
Now one could say that the same feature that a customer would've paid $1M for was done in $4k instead of $160k. But buyers are going to demand much more as they see this kind of pace. You'd be able to charge maybe only $10k, because your opportunity cost goes down since you only spent 2 days; you can't keep the same margins that you needed to in order to justify spending 9 months on it. I think it gets very complicated and we're yet to see these economic effects.
I get more intelligence and mileage out of few tens of euros on their APIs than I would've got out of Codex+Claude 200$ subscription in June.
If you don't see the downward trend that's a you problem.