Comment by cwyers
4 days ago
My employer can't go out and get me three actual people to work under me for $30 a month.
EDIT: You can quibble on the exact rate of people's worth of work versus the cost of these tools, but look at what a single seat on Copilot or Cursor or Windsurf gets you, and you can see that if they are only barely more productive than you working without them, the economics are it's cheaper to "hire" virtual juniors than real juniors. And the virtual juniors are getting better by the month, go look at the Aider leaderboards and compare recent models to older ones.
That's fair but your experience at the job is also part of the compensation.
If my employer said, "Hey, you're going to keep making software, but also once a day, we have to slap you in the face." I might choose to keep the job, but they'd probably have to pay me more. They're making the work experience worse and that lowers my total compensation package.
Shepherding an army of artificial minions might be cheaper for the corporation, but it sounds like an absolutely miserable work experience so if they were offering me that job, they'd have to pay me more to take.