7 ms·

>If you haven't spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement …What am I even reading? Am I crazy to

>If you haven't spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement …What am I even reading? Am I crazy to think this is a crazy thing to say, or it’s actually crazy?

delusional 7mo ago
It's crazy if you're an engineer. It's pretty common for middle managers to quantify "progress" in terms of "spend". My bosses bosses boss like to claim that we're successfully moving to the cloud because the cost is increasing year over year.
- FuckButtons 7mo ago
  Appropriate username.
- dexwiz 7mo ago
  Growth will be proportional to spend. You can cut waste later and celebrate efficiency. So when growing there isn't much incentive to do it efficiently. You are just robbing yourself of a potential future victory. Also it's legitimately difficult to maximize growth while prioritizing efficiency. It's like how a body builder cycles between bulking and cutting. For mid to long term outlooks it's probably the best strategy.
  - direwolf20 7mo ago
    Is this satire? Throwing money into a bottomless pit is the opposite of success. Growth is proportional to spend if and only if spend is proportional to growth. You can't just assume it's the case.
gassi 7mo ago
My favorite conspiracy theory is that these projects/blog posts are secretly backed by big-AI tech companies, to offset their staggering losses by convincing executives to shovel pools of money into AI tools.
- nosuchthing 7mo ago
  Slop influencers like Peter Steinberger get paid to promote AI vibe coding startups and the agentic token burning hype. Ironically they're so deep into the impulsivity of it all that they can't even hide it. The latest frontier models all continue to suffer from hallucinations and slop at scale. - Factory, unconvinced. Their marketing videos are just too cringe, and any company that tries to get my attentions with free tokens in my DMs reduce my respect for them. If you're that good, you don't need to convince me by giving me free stuff. Additionally, some posts on Twitter about it have this paid influencer smell. If you use claude code tho, you'll feel right at home with the [signature flicker](https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/1977103325192667323). + Factory, unconvinced. Their videos are a bit cringe, I do hear good things in my timeline about it tho, even if images aren't supported (yet) and they have the [signature flicker](https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/1977103325192667323). https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2483b84cd805b5d1accf3d0013dd https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2...
- coffeefirst 7mo ago
  Like this? https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creators-500000-and-more-to-promote-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creator...
  - simonw 7mo ago
    Provided the sponsored content is labelled "sponsored content" this is above board. If it's not labelled it's in violation of FTC regulations, for both the companies and the individuals. [ That said... I'm surprised at this example on LinkedIn that was linked to by the Washington Post - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/meganlieu_claudepartner-activity-7341094842136969216-_2Qs/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/meganlieu_claudepartner-activ... - the only hint it's sponsored content is the #ClaudePartner hashtag at the end, is that enough? Oh wait! There's text under the profile that says "Brand partnership" which I missed, I guess that's the LinkedIn standard for this? Feels a bit weak to me! https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1627083 https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1627083 ]
  - 7mo ago
davedx 7mo ago
Meanwhile, me > $20/month Claude sub > $20/month OpenAI sub > When Claude Code runs out, switch to Codex > When Codex runs out, go for a walk with the dogs or read a book I'm not an accelerationist singularity neohuman. Oh well, I still get plenty done
- siliconc0w 7mo ago
  same (at least for now, Codex seems to be much more token efficient)
- muyuu 7mo ago
  Different beasts on the API, the extra context left makes a huge difference. Unless there's something else out there I've missed, which at the speed things move these days it's always a possibility.
- chr15m 7mo ago
  The openrouter/free endpoint may make your dog unfit. You're welcome. Sorry doggo.
- carefree-bob 7mo ago
  My gemini subscription is all I need. It's like an interactive stack overflow that doesn't yell at you and answers your questions. I was working on a problem and having trouble understanding an old node splitting paper, and Gemini pointed me to a better paper with a more efficient algorithm, then explained how it worked, then generated test code. It's fantastic. I'm not saying it's better than the other LLMs, but having a little oracle available online is a great boost to learning and debugging.
nine_k 7mo ago
$1k per day, 50 work weeks, 5 day a week → $250k a year. That is, to be worth it, the AI should work as well as an engineer that costs a company $250k. Between taxes, social security, and cost of office space, that engineer would be paid, say, $170-180k a year, like an average-level senior software engineer in the US. This is not an outrageous amount of money, if the productivity is there. More likely the AI would work like two $90k junior engineers, but without a need to pay for a vacation, office space, social security, etc. If the productivity ends up higher than this, it's pure profit; I suppose this is their bet. The human engineer would be like a tech lead guiding a tea of juniors, only designing plans and checking results above the level of code proper, but for exceptional cases, like when a human engineer would look at the assembly code a compiler has produced. This does sound exaggeratedly optimistic now, but does not sound crazy.
- lbreakjai 7mo ago
  $250k a year, for now. What's to stop anthropic for doubling the price if your entire business depends on it? What are you gonna do, close shops?
  - drited 7mo ago
    By then perhaps it will be possible to continue with local LLMs
    - coldtea 7mo ago
      Don't hold your breath. Hardware, memory, disks, have been stalling for a good while.
      - nine_k 7mo ago
        Stalling? Not at all, the prices have been rising :-/
  - teaearlgraycold 7mo ago
    What’s to stop them? Competition.
PKop 7mo ago
It's not so much crazy as very lame and stupid and dumb. The moment has allowed people doing dumb things to somehow grab the attention of many in the industry for a few moments. There's nothing "there".
- dboreham 7mo ago
  When I see comments like this I wonder if the commenter has used LLMs for software development recently. (Genuine question).
  - PKop 7mo ago
    What's that got to do with burning thousands of dollars producing nothing of value, and a lot of useless code created by agents you turn loose while advocating not reviewing it? "Used LLMs" is a non-sequitur here. What did your agent build with you spending thousands of dollars and not reviewing the code? If you have something high quality to show that followed this process link it here, else what are you even talking about?
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
jaytaylor 7mo ago
I'm one of the StrongDM trio behind this tenet. The core claim is simple: it's easy to spend $1k/day on tokens, but hard (even with three people) to do it in a way that stays reliably productive.
sethev 7mo ago
Yeah, it's hard to read the article without getting a cringy feeling of second hand embarrassment. The setup is weird too, in that it seems to imply that the little snippets of "wisdom" should be used as prompts to an LLM to come to their same conclusions, when of course this style of prompt will reliably produce congratulatory dreck. Setting aside the absurdity of using dollars per day spent on tokens as the new lines of code per day, have they not heard of mocks or simulation testing? These are long proven techniques, but they appear bent on taking credit for some kind revolutionary discovery by recasting these standard techniques as a Digital Twin Universe. One positive(?) thing I'll say is that this fits well with my experience of people who like to talk about software factories (or digital factories), but at least they're up front about the massive cost of this type of approach - whereas "digital factories" are typically cast as a miracle cure that will reduce costs dramatically somehow (once it's eventually done correctly, of course). Hard pass.
- dimitri-vs 7mo ago
  Yeah, getting strong Devin vibes here. In some ways they were ahead of their time in other ways agents have become commoditized and their platform is arguably obsolete. I have a strong feeling the same will happen with "software factories".
xnx 7mo ago
This is some dumb boast/signaling that they're more AI-advanced than you are. The desperation to be an AI thought leader is reaching Instagram influencer levels of deranged attention seeking.
itissid 7mo ago
I am not sure why people are getting hung on the price, i.e. this: "They have the gaul to pitch/attention seek a 1$/day with possibly little/no product". The price can drop TBH and while there is some correlation on $/capita output. The more nuanced "outrage" here, how taking humans out of the agent loop is, as I have commented elsewhere, quite flawed TBH and very bold to say the least. And while every VC is salivating, more attention should instead be given to all the AI Agent PMs, The Tech lead of AI, or whatever that title is on some of the following: - What _workflow_ are you building? - What is your success with your team/new hires in having them use this? - What's your RoC for investment in the workflow? - How varied is this workflow? Is every company just building their own workflows or are there patterns emerging on agent orchestration that are useful.
- sieabahlpark 7mo ago
  [dead]
CTDOCodebases 7mo ago
The margins on software are incredibly high and perhaps this is just the cost of having maintainable output. Also I think you have to consider development time. If someone creates a SaaS product then it can be trivially cloned in a small timeframe. So the moat that normally exists becomes non existent. Therefore to stay ahead or to catch up it’s going to cost money. In a way it’s similar to the way FAANG was buying up all the good engineers. It starves potential and lower capitalised but more nimble competitors of resources that it needs to compete with them.
AlexCoventry 7mo ago
Presumably, organizations selling agentic coding APIs pay marketing people whose job is to boost this kind of article. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
goshx 7mo ago
Complete absurd, unless their goal is to clone every SaaS ever built.
az226 7mo ago
It is not crazy. Each engineer is very valuable. LLM tokens are cheap. You scale up inference compute, and your engineers can focus on higher order stuff, not reviewing incorrect responses, validating bugs, and what not. It’s shocking to me that there isn’t a $2,000 / $20,000 per month subscription tier for coding assistants. I’ve always in my mind called this ExecGPT since around 2021, but the notion was that executives have teams that support them to be high functioning and high leverage, responsible for quality of thinking and decision making, not quantity of work output. And the value/prop existed and continues to exist even as the models get smarter, even Opus 4.6.
- deaux 7mo ago
  > It’s shocking to me that there isn’t a $2,000 / $20,000 per month subscription tier for coding assistants. What would be the benefit for the providers in offering this over just having those people use the API? I don't think it makes any sense for them.
  - az226 7mo ago
    Most people don’t know how to build an effective harness that is well optimized and battle tested to work for a wide range of scenarios. But they can happily and easily use a finished service if they have the money for it.
    - deaux 7mo ago
      My questions asks about the benefit for the providers. The harnesses (Claude Code, Codex) already work with the metered API which is what all those potential "$20k subscription" customers are already using.
sethev 7mo ago
I do think it's a crazy thing to say, but not because of the amount. I mean, if putting in more money produces more value, why not $10,000 a day or a million? Does adding more tokens after $1000 stop working for some reason? Forget about agents or AI: the amount of money that it makes sense to spend on software engineering for a particular company is highly dependent on the specifics of that company. Perhaps for them this number makes sense, but it's kind of crazy to extrapolate that to everyone as some kind of benchmark. It would be far more interesting to hear how they place a value on the code produced. I have a harsher take down-thread, but the simulation testing (what they call DTU) is actually interesting and a useful insight into grounding agent behavior.

delusional 7mo ago

It's crazy if you're an engineer. It's pretty common for middle managers to quantify "progress" in terms of "spend". My bosses bosses boss like to claim that we're successfully moving to the cloud because the cost is increasing year over year.

FuckButtons 7mo ago
Appropriate username.
dexwiz 7mo ago
Growth will be proportional to spend. You can cut waste later and celebrate efficiency. So when growing there isn't much incentive to do it efficiently. You are just robbing yourself of a potential future victory. Also it's legitimately difficult to maximize growth while prioritizing efficiency. It's like how a body builder cycles between bulking and cutting. For mid to long term outlooks it's probably the best strategy.
- direwolf20 7mo ago
  Is this satire? Throwing money into a bottomless pit is the opposite of success. Growth is proportional to spend if and only if spend is proportional to growth. You can't just assume it's the case.

gassi 7mo ago

My favorite conspiracy theory is that these projects/blog posts are secretly backed by big-AI tech companies, to offset their staggering losses by convincing executives to shovel pools of money into AI tools.

nosuchthing 7mo ago
Slop influencers like Peter Steinberger get paid to promote AI vibe coding startups and the agentic token burning hype. Ironically they're so deep into the impulsivity of it all that they can't even hide it. The latest frontier models all continue to suffer from hallucinations and slop at scale. - Factory, unconvinced. Their marketing videos are just too cringe, and any company that tries to get my attentions with free tokens in my DMs reduce my respect for them. If you're that good, you don't need to convince me by giving me free stuff. Additionally, some posts on Twitter about it have this paid influencer smell. If you use claude code tho, you'll feel right at home with the [signature flicker](https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/1977103325192667323). + Factory, unconvinced. Their videos are a bit cringe, I do hear good things in my timeline about it tho, even if images aren't supported (yet) and they have the [signature flicker](https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/1977103325192667323). https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2483b84cd805b5d1accf3d0013dd https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2...
coffeefirst 7mo ago
Like this? https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creators-500000-and-more-to-promote-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creator...
- simonw 7mo ago
  Provided the sponsored content is labelled "sponsored content" this is above board. If it's not labelled it's in violation of FTC regulations, for both the companies and the individuals. [ That said... I'm surprised at this example on LinkedIn that was linked to by the Washington Post - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/meganlieu_claudepartner-activity-7341094842136969216-_2Qs/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/meganlieu_claudepartner-activ... - the only hint it's sponsored content is the #ClaudePartner hashtag at the end, is that enough? Oh wait! There's text under the profile that says "Brand partnership" which I missed, I guess that's the LinkedIn standard for this? Feels a bit weak to me! https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1627083 https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1627083 ]
- 7mo ago

davedx 7mo ago

Meanwhile, me > $20/month Claude sub > $20/month OpenAI sub > When Claude Code runs out, switch to Codex > When Codex runs out, go for a walk with the dogs or read a book I'm not an accelerationist singularity neohuman. Oh well, I still get plenty done

siliconc0w 7mo ago
same (at least for now, Codex seems to be much more token efficient)
muyuu 7mo ago
Different beasts on the API, the extra context left makes a huge difference. Unless there's something else out there I've missed, which at the speed things move these days it's always a possibility.
chr15m 7mo ago
The openrouter/free endpoint may make your dog unfit. You're welcome. Sorry doggo.
carefree-bob 7mo ago
My gemini subscription is all I need. It's like an interactive stack overflow that doesn't yell at you and answers your questions. I was working on a problem and having trouble understanding an old node splitting paper, and Gemini pointed me to a better paper with a more efficient algorithm, then explained how it worked, then generated test code. It's fantastic. I'm not saying it's better than the other LLMs, but having a little oracle available online is a great boost to learning and debugging.

nine_k 7mo ago

$1k per day, 50 work weeks, 5 day a week → $250k a year. That is, to be worth it, the AI should work as well as an engineer that costs a company $250k. Between taxes, social security, and cost of office space, that engineer would be paid, say, $170-180k a year, like an average-level senior software engineer in the US. This is not an outrageous amount of money, if the productivity is there. More likely the AI would work like two $90k junior engineers, but without a need to pay for a vacation, office space, social security, etc. If the productivity ends up higher than this, it's pure profit; I suppose this is their bet. The human engineer would be like a tech lead guiding a tea of juniors, only designing plans and checking results above the level of code proper, but for exceptional cases, like when a human engineer would look at the assembly code a compiler has produced. This does sound exaggeratedly optimistic now, but does not sound crazy.

lbreakjai 7mo ago
$250k a year, for now. What's to stop anthropic for doubling the price if your entire business depends on it? What are you gonna do, close shops?
- drited 7mo ago
  By then perhaps it will be possible to continue with local LLMs
  - coldtea 7mo ago
    Don't hold your breath. Hardware, memory, disks, have been stalling for a good while.
    - nine_k 7mo ago
      Stalling? Not at all, the prices have been rising :-/
- teaearlgraycold 7mo ago
  What’s to stop them? Competition.

PKop 7mo ago

It's not so much crazy as very lame and stupid and dumb. The moment has allowed people doing dumb things to somehow grab the attention of many in the industry for a few moments. There's nothing "there".

dboreham 7mo ago
When I see comments like this I wonder if the commenter has used LLMs for software development recently. (Genuine question).
- PKop 7mo ago
  What's that got to do with burning thousands of dollars producing nothing of value, and a lot of useless code created by agents you turn loose while advocating not reviewing it? "Used LLMs" is a non-sequitur here. What did your agent build with you spending thousands of dollars and not reviewing the code? If you have something high quality to show that followed this process link it here, else what are you even talking about?

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

jaytaylor 7mo ago

I'm one of the StrongDM trio behind this tenet. The core claim is simple: it's easy to spend $1k/day on tokens, but hard (even with three people) to do it in a way that stays reliably productive.

sethev 7mo ago

Yeah, it's hard to read the article without getting a cringy feeling of second hand embarrassment. The setup is weird too, in that it seems to imply that the little snippets of "wisdom" should be used as prompts to an LLM to come to their same conclusions, when of course this style of prompt will reliably produce congratulatory dreck. Setting aside the absurdity of using dollars per day spent on tokens as the new lines of code per day, have they not heard of mocks or simulation testing? These are long proven techniques, but they appear bent on taking credit for some kind revolutionary discovery by recasting these standard techniques as a Digital Twin Universe. One positive(?) thing I'll say is that this fits well with my experience of people who like to talk about software factories (or digital factories), but at least they're up front about the massive cost of this type of approach - whereas "digital factories" are typically cast as a miracle cure that will reduce costs dramatically somehow (once it's eventually done correctly, of course). Hard pass.

dimitri-vs 7mo ago
Yeah, getting strong Devin vibes here. In some ways they were ahead of their time in other ways agents have become commoditized and their platform is arguably obsolete. I have a strong feeling the same will happen with "software factories".

xnx 7mo ago

This is some dumb boast/signaling that they're more AI-advanced than you are. The desperation to be an AI thought leader is reaching Instagram influencer levels of deranged attention seeking.

itissid 7mo ago

I am not sure why people are getting hung on the price, i.e. this: "They have the gaul to pitch/attention seek a 1$/day with possibly little/no product". The price can drop TBH and while there is some correlation on $/capita output. The more nuanced "outrage" here, how taking humans out of the agent loop is, as I have commented elsewhere, quite flawed TBH and very bold to say the least. And while every VC is salivating, more attention should instead be given to all the AI Agent PMs, The Tech lead of AI, or whatever that title is on some of the following: - What _workflow_ are you building? - What is your success with your team/new hires in having them use this? - What's your RoC for investment in the workflow? - How varied is this workflow? Is every company just building their own workflows or are there patterns emerging on agent orchestration that are useful.

sieabahlpark 7mo ago
[dead]

CTDOCodebases 7mo ago

The margins on software are incredibly high and perhaps this is just the cost of having maintainable output. Also I think you have to consider development time. If someone creates a SaaS product then it can be trivially cloned in a small timeframe. So the moat that normally exists becomes non existent. Therefore to stay ahead or to catch up it’s going to cost money. In a way it’s similar to the way FAANG was buying up all the good engineers. It starves potential and lower capitalised but more nimble competitors of resources that it needs to compete with them.

AlexCoventry 7mo ago

Presumably, organizations selling agentic coding APIs pay marketing people whose job is to boost this kind of article. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

goshx 7mo ago

Complete absurd, unless their goal is to clone every SaaS ever built.

az226 7mo ago

It is not crazy. Each engineer is very valuable. LLM tokens are cheap. You scale up inference compute, and your engineers can focus on higher order stuff, not reviewing incorrect responses, validating bugs, and what not. It’s shocking to me that there isn’t a $2,000 / $20,000 per month subscription tier for coding assistants. I’ve always in my mind called this ExecGPT since around 2021, but the notion was that executives have teams that support them to be high functioning and high leverage, responsible for quality of thinking and decision making, not quantity of work output. And the value/prop existed and continues to exist even as the models get smarter, even Opus 4.6.

deaux 7mo ago
> It’s shocking to me that there isn’t a $2,000 / $20,000 per month subscription tier for coding assistants. What would be the benefit for the providers in offering this over just having those people use the API? I don't think it makes any sense for them.
- az226 7mo ago
  Most people don’t know how to build an effective harness that is well optimized and battle tested to work for a wide range of scenarios. But they can happily and easily use a finished service if they have the money for it.
  - deaux 7mo ago
    My questions asks about the benefit for the providers. The harnesses (Claude Code, Codex) already work with the metered API which is what all those potential "$20k subscription" customers are already using.

sethev 7mo ago

I do think it's a crazy thing to say, but not because of the amount. I mean, if putting in more money produces more value, why not $10,000 a day or a million? Does adding more tokens after $1000 stop working for some reason? Forget about agents or AI: the amount of money that it makes sense to spend on software engineering for a particular company is highly dependent on the specifics of that company. Perhaps for them this number makes sense, but it's kind of crazy to extrapolate that to everyone as some kind of benchmark. It would be far more interesting to hear how they place a value on the code produced. I have a harsher take down-thread, but the simulation testing (what they call DTU) is actually interesting and a useful insight into grounding agent behavior.