Right, I understand of course that AI usage and token costs are an investment (probably even a very good one!).
But my point is moreso that saying 1k a day is cheap is ridiculous. Even for a company that expects an ROI on that investment. There’s risks involved and as you said, diminishing returns on software output.
I find AI bros view of the economics of AI usage strange. It’s reasonable to me to say you think its a good investment, but to say it’s cheap is a whole different thing.
Oh sure. We agree on all you said. I wouldn’t call it cheap either. :)
The best you can say is “high cost but positive ROI investment.” Although I don’t think that’s true beyond a certain point either, certainly not outside special cases like small startups with a lot of funding trying to build a product quickly. You can’t just spew tokens about and expect revenue to increase.
That said, I do reserve some special scorn for companies that penny-pinch on AI tooling. Any CTO or CEO who thinks a $200/month Claude Max subscription (or equivalent) for each developer is too much money to spent really needs to rethink their whole model of software ROI and costs. You’re often paying your devs >$100k yr and you won’t pay $2k / yr to make them more productive? I understand there are budget and planning cycle constraints blah blah, but… really?!