Comment by legulere
3 hours ago
You could only conclude that if they would have dropped LLMs completely. It just means they see the benefit/cost optimum at a lower point than 100k/programmer.
I also doubt a longterm 2x multiplier for most developers.
Even if it was a net negative, you still might want to titrate the exit a bit just to prevent the total chaos of broken workflows. Can't really draw the conclusions you want to draw.
I don't think you need the LLMs to be completely dropped to indicate this. Even entry-level faang programmer salaries are in the 300k range, so the fact that LLMs aren't worth 100k/programmer does tell us something about the marginal usefulness. If the drop was motivated was motivated purely by price-per-output, it would indicate the LLMs are less useful than adding another 1/3 engineer. However, as discussed in other comments, there are other motivations as well, notably dogfooding homegrown tooling.