It's not just the GPUs that I was referring to, but also the time spent in test runners locally and in CI. There's also the possible runtime cost of extraneous abstractions, but that's beside the point I was getting at.
Thoughtful developers do take money, but so too does shitty code that reaches a point LLMs struggle to maintain. Having both- with the thoughtful developers in charge- is better than just throwing more LLMs at it and hoping for the best.