This isn’t black and white. There will always be some junior hires. No one is saying replace ALL of them. But hiring 1 junior engineer instead of 3? Maybe…and that’s already happening to some degree.

It wasn’t, but now it is.

I was just ballparking the salary. Say it’s only 100x. Does the argument change? It’s a lot more money to pay for a real person.

Yeah but a Claude/Cursor/whatever subscription costs $20/month and a junior engineer costs real money. Are the tools 400 times less useful than a junior engineer? I’m not so sure…

I mean yeah? I wasn’t counting in detail, it’s an estimate.

Previously you got 500 requests a month and then it’d start charging you, even on “auto.” So the current charging scheme seems to be encouraging auto use so they can use cheaper LLMs when they make sense (honestly a good thing).

I’ve primarily use claude-4-sonnet in cursor and was surprised to see a message telling me it would start costing extra above and beyond my subscription. This was prolly after 100 queries or so. However, switching to “auto” instead of a specific model continues to not cost anything and that still uses claude-4-sonnet when it thinks it needs to. Main difference I’ve noticed is it’s actually faster because it’ll sometimes hit cheaper/dumber APIs to address simple code changes.

It’s a nice toy that does improve my productivity quite a bit and the $20/month is the right price for me, but I have no loyalty and will drop them without delay if it becomes unusable. That hasn’t happened yet.

BG3 being DRM-free and playable indefinitely also demonstrates that you can have plenty of success and not break your own product to do so.