Comment by simonw
19 days ago
If that team is producing 4x what they would be producing without LLMs then spending 2x their salaries on tooling sees financially rational to me.
(I know, that's a very big "if".)
19 days ago
If that team is producing 4x what they would be producing without LLMs then spending 2x their salaries on tooling sees financially rational to me.
(I know, that's a very big "if".)
There is no mention of a productivity increase anywhere in this piece. 2x? Maybe, but at this price you can hire another very senior engineer, and have both be 50% more productive with a $200/month AI spend.
Measuring productivity in software development is notoriously hard, but the demos I saw them give when the team of three people had been working together for three months showed more work then I would ever expect from a team of that size over that amount of time.
They already had their own custom agent harness and digital twin imitations of Jira and Slack and Okta and a bunch of other custom tooling.
It looked to me like way more than a 2x or 4x thing.
Opus can one-shot a simple Jira clone in under five minutes. I haven’t seen any of their work, but this “digital twin” story sounds like a marketing play.
I agree that productivity is very subjective too, in my experience a team of three developers with a solid plan could build a lot in three months even before AI.
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There are many ways "producing" can be quantified (LOC, PRs, features) such that 4x production does not correlate to a 4x in value of the product (quality, revenue).