Comment by eterm
21 days ago
> Light edits are about 10 cents
Some well-paid developers will excuse this with, "Well if it saved me 5 minutes, it's worth an order of magnitude than 10 cents".
Which is true, however there's a big caveat: Time saved isn't time gained.
You can "Save" 1,000 hours every night, but you don't actuall get those 1,000 hours back.
> You can "Save" 1,000 hours every night, but you don't actuall get those 1,000 hours back.
What do you mean?
If I have some task that requires 1000 hours, and I'm able to shave it down to one hour, then I did just "save" 999 hours -- just in the same way that if something costs $5 and I pay $4, I saved $
My point is that saving 1,000 hours each day doesn't actually give you 1,000 hours a day to do things with.
You still get your 24 hours, no matter how much time you save.
What actually matters is the value of what is delivered, not how much time it actually saves you. Justifying costs by "time saved" is a good way to eat up your money on time-saving devices.
If I "save 1000 hours" then that could be distributed over 41.666 days, so no task would need to be performed during that period because "I saved 1000 hours".
You could also say you saved 41.666 people an entire 24 hour day, by "saving 1000 hours", or some other fractional way.
How you're trying to explain it as "saving 1000 hours each day" is really not making any sense without further context.
And I'm sure if I hadn't written this comment I would be saving 1000 hours on a stupid comment thread.
2 replies →
I think one issue is that you won't always be able to invoice those extra 999 hours to your customer. Sometimes you'll still only be able to get paid for 1 hour, depending on the task and contract.
But the llm bill will always invoice you for all the saved work regardless.
(from a companies perspective, this is true). As a developer, you may not be paid by the task -- If I finish something early, I start work on the next thing.
So many people seem to be missing your point that I’m honestly wondering if you’re being trolled here.
Huh? What happens if you stop using your washing machine and go back to hand washing everything?
If you earn more than me, then if you value "time saved" then you should pay me to take my washing off me. Because then you can save even more of your valuable time!
The more of my washing you can take off me, the more of your time you can save by then using a washing machine or laundry service!
Saving an hour of my time is a waste, when saving an hour of your time is worth so much more. So it makes economic sense for you to pay me, to take my washing off me!
( Does that better illustrate my point? )