You could hire twelve senior engineers in Europe for that kinda money
oh shit, I thought it’s per year initially, I am considered a senior dev in a lot of setups (8yoe), worked remotely for European companies (hence European standards on code quality), hold PhD yet my monthly salary didn’t cross 4k yet, you can hire an army of me with this.
In some countries in Europe, we’re used to stating revenue monthly instead of yearly !
European standards on code quality
Is that a thing? I worked for a mostly-Finnish company for a couple of years and their code base wasn’t any better than anybody else’s.
It could be just my biased view/experience.
I worked for a chinese startup in Beijing and we barely employed git or reviews, massive projects had 0 tests, we put 0 thoughts on architecture, just stop when it works.
I joined an established European company after that and the difference was huge, I had to relearn everything, proper code reviews, follow best practices, you don’t stop when it works, you stop when it works, it’s well tested (extensive business tests plus at least one required integration test for every change you make), iterated over the architecture a few times to have something simple to understand and clean.
I was also a contractor for another very new European startup where the process was not as robust but still better than the first one.
Money laundering?
My company is going wild like this too. I mean, it makes sense - more AI use means code is being written faster and thus we’re making more money.
But they go weirdly quiet when devs ask if AI has actually been speeding up the time to get a finished product in front of customers. You know, the only metric you should care about?
I mean, it makes sense - more AI use means code is being written faster
This AI you speak of - is it in the room with us right now? Because if you mean to say LLM slop machines, then “code is being written faster” does not imply the code is in any way useful.
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That’s an… interesting correlation they’re making, more code = more money. I know it’s not you personally making that comparison, but man is it strange. That’s a very business school way of thinking.
What good is “more code” from the LLMs, if I have to scrutinize it for bugs and vulnerabilities? More code only means more surface area, more points of failure. And of the AI I’ve tried, every single one writes far far far too much code. And all that time in code review, QA, user acceptance testing, that absolutely does not make the company more money - it costs them more money, in paying for labor. And it doesn’t get the product to the end user faster anyway.
I’m just ranting and this a minor point, but speed is also not the only metric I would care about. I’d also care about making sure the user doesn’t experience many bugs - preferably no bugs at all. The classic engineer’s triangle still holds: “Fast, Cheap, and Good: choose 2.” And AI seems to pick “Fast” twice. XD
More code only means more surface area, more points of failure. And of the AI I’ve tried, every single one writes far far far too much code. And all that time in code review, QA, user acceptance testing, that absolutely does not make the company more money - it costs them more money, in paying for labor. And it doesn’t get the product to the end user faster anyway.
Duh, just have the LLM do code review, QA, and testing for you! And then blindly ship it to production once that’s done.
Tokenmaxxing
But add another employee or 2, or God forbid increase benefits and they burn you at the stake.
I would love another season or two of Silicon Valley to roast the latest techbro bullshit.
It was an incredibly prescient show, too
Mike judge always delivers.
Never thought anyone could be so proud of sheer incompetence
good business is when bankruptcy
“Here’s why:”
…
Is it because you’re dumb?
It’s cause he’s a bot account doing marketing for Anthropic
It’s to “Swan AI”, so I assumed they were happy about the invoice because they’re reselling that service to suckers for a lot more than that.
Scamming as a Service
That phrase alone should land you in prison.
With a four person team spending over a million annually (potentially) on AI tokens is morbidly stupid.
Man, if the robots tried to take over this guy would really just drop to his knees and suck robot dick, wouldn’t he?
Export the data, dissolve the LLC, leave the bill unpaid and start a new LLC using the data, repeat.
I don’t think these AI companies have enough funding to take legal action without their part of the house of cards collapsing.
This is the kind of snake eating its tail chaos I’m here for.
That’s insane. A company I work at leverages AI heavily across sales, product, engineering, etc.
Company of 50ish.
Nobody I know at our size or smaller uses it as heavily as us. I realize that’s subjective.
We’re sub $20k/mo.
This person is not using a tool correctly. They’re probably burning on inference. Probably inflated rules and context. Probably shipping slop and then fixing slop with slop. Absolute garbage.
From their website it looks like they’re “reselling” so, that’s my best guess as to why their bill would be so high
You could have bought a small house with that kind of money 😅
In London, you might be able to buy a shed with that 😅
this whole industry is completely unsustainable
In my school, kids who said “I’m proud of an invoice” got kicked in the balls and it was good for them in the long run.
