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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but the cheap parallelism is (part of) the point he's making.

Parallelismen is not cheap, in the end it costs the same. It is one resource for a long time vs many resources for a short time.

Agent parallelism is cheap in the same way tapwater is cheap — that is, you pay exactly for what you use at a given moment, no more and no less.

Humans are a lot more expensive, it takes ~a year to find, interview, hire, onboard and offboard an employee, while an agent can be spun up for 10 seconds, do its work and vanish back into the ether.

Agents are lambda functions where humans are bare-metal servers that you have to rack yourself.

Sure, I completely agree with that, but we totally went off-topic. The questions was whether the correct measure is wall-clock time or compute-time and for that the difference in difficulty to add another agent or add another employee is irrelevant. And to reiterate my point, compute-time is what delivers the results and also is what you pay for, so that is what counts. That you can squeeze that compute-time into a shorter amount of wall-time by utilizing more resources in parallel is also important but unrelated to the fact that compute-time is what delivers the results.

We didn't go off topic at all. You introduced the analogy to hiring a large number of people. That is the right analogy. But the reason that the conclusion is different in the two cases is that it is much cheaper to run a large number of agents in parallel than it is to hire a large number of people. Your analogy illustrates the article's point rather than contradicting it.

But the difference is always there, hiring the first guy is more difficult by the same factor as running the first agent. The relevant comparisons are between one agent and a thousand agents (original setting) and between one guys and a thousand guys (analogy). In both cases the costs will be a thousand times higher and you can achieve a thousand times more in the same amount of time, so the correct measure is time times number guys or time times number agents. The difference between adding one guy and adding one agent is irrelevant for my point and that is also pretty obvious as that crosses the boundary between original setting and analogy.

You might want to make a separate point about the cost difference of getting more done by hiring more people or running more agents, but that is a different point.

No, the article is about what can be accomplished now vs what could be accomplished previously. That it is much cheaper to run thousands of agents at once than to have thousands of employees is directly relevant to that question.

But this part of the discussion is not about the article per se but the way I calculated things.

It is very cheap relative to hiring people (you introduced the analogy to a company hiring a large number of people).

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