To rescue a flailing project that I took over when a senior hire ghosted a customer in the middle of a project, I got the 200$ Pro package from OpenAI (which is much less usable than Claude for our purposes; there were other benefits related to my client's relationship w/ OpenAI)
In the end, I was able to rescue the code part, rebuilding a 3 month long 10 person project in 2 weeks, with another 2 weeks to implement a follow-up series of requirements. The sheer amount of discussion and code creation would have been impossible without AI, and I used the full limits I was afforded.
So to answer your question, I got my money's worth in that specific use case. That said, the previous failing effort also unearthed a ton of unspoken assumptions that I was able to leverage. Without providing those assumptions to the AI, I couldn't have produced the app they wanted. Extracting that information was like extracting teeth so I'm not sure if we would have really had a better situation if we started off with everyone having an OpenAPI Pro account.
* Those who work in enterprise know intuitively what happened next.
> That said, the previous failing effort also unearthed a ton of unspoken assumptions that I was able to leverage. Without providing those assumptions to the AI, I couldn't have produced the app they wanted. Extracting that information was like extracting teeth so I'm not sure if we would have really had a better situation if we started off with everyone having an OpenAPI Pro account.
The hardest part about enterprise backend development is understanding the requirements. "Understanding" is not about reading comprehension, and "requirements" are not the written requirements somebody gives you. It's about finding out what requirements are undocumented and which parts of the requirements document is misinformation. LLMs would just dutifully try to implement the written requirements with misinformation and missing edge cases, not the actual requirements.
You dropped off the "non" part of that. It's the non-Unicorn software companies easily paying $120k for a seasoned software developer in the US.
Also, I noticed where our sources diverged. I was looking at household income. My bad.
> which is already way above even the EU for dev salaries
Maybe they're underpaid.
Either way, I was responding to the idea that only a FAANG salary would cost an employer $20k/mo. For US software developer jobs, it can easily hit that without being in FAANG-tier or unicorn startup level companies. Tons of mid-sized low-key software companies you've never heard of pay $120k+ for software devs in the US.
The median software developer in Texas makes >$130k/yr. Think that's all just Facebook and Apple and silicon valley VC funded startup software devs? Similar story in Ohio, is that a place loaded with unicorn software startups? Those median salaries in those markets probably cost their employer around $20k/mo.
If you get an employer match on 401k/HSA, the employer pays full healthcare premium, employer sponsored life insurance benefits, unemployment insurance, employer covered disability, payroll taxes, and all the other software costs, it wouldn't even take $200k in salary to cost $20k/mo. Someone could be making like $150k and still cost the company that much.
Sure, but ~$150k isn't exactly FAANG US salaries for an experienced software dev. That's my point. Lots of people forget how much extra many employers pay for a salaried employee on top of just the take home salary. Labor is expensive in the US.
I imagine a lot of people saw $20k/mo and thought the salary clearly had to be $200k+.
Do people really get that much value from these tools?
I use Github's Copilot for $10 and I'm somewhat happy for what I get... but paying 10x or 20x that just seems insane.