The problem is that people expect to get the output of 100 people with a $20 subscription by spawning multiple agents. This is unrealistic. I'm using 2 codex plus account and able to manage a repo with 265-300k lines of code.

The point is - if its the same or more expensive per month than a real human employee - why pay for AI ?

Human retain knowledge, product knowledge, can pick up more work often for the same money. And having many of them means your business wont go down if provider suddenly bumps API pricing.

How much is the average pay for a junior developer in US? Its definitely much costlier considering PF and other benefits. Just the math. if you use it efficiently it's much cheaper than hiring a permanent staff. You can maintain a lean team and do all the mundane boilerplate coding with AI.