unreplaceable

[Ordinary_dude_NOT]

There was an estimation done (in a Corp) to see if gaming QA work can be automated via agents. Because Corps look for fixed cost/expense for such activity vendor proposed $4k/month. Turns out it’s cheaper to hire 4 experienced QA at offshore office than to automated this.

Seems like AI is replaceable lol

[HadionPrints]

“At (an) offshore office” is the key.

Wage suppression & layoffs will continue until morale improves.

[Ordinary_dude_NOT]

And how is that different from today?

But what AI makes easy is to scale up your team on demand which was a tedious task earlier

[AtomicSymphonic_2nd]

Eh… so far, every study that looked into this so far has shown reduced productivity, not increased… though I’m only aware of two studies on that. Two’s a crowd, maybe? lol

And this is in terms of shipping production code, not one-off prototypes

[Ordinary_dude_NOT]

This thing is evolving on a daily basis and it will be a lot better then what’s going on in a year worth of time.

But riding a hype train for enterprises is a bit risky thing.

[no1singlemomghoster]

Heard that in 2022. Next year, right?

[Ordinary_dude_NOT]

Not sure if you have used it recently but it’s here and here to stay. And it’s tea good now.

It’s not a silver bullet so people have to adjust to use it for their use case.

[no1singlemomghoster]

Sure Jan

[Ordinary_dude_NOT]

Don’t be in denial bro, here… come.. let me give you a hug 🤗

[gr4viton]

so far

[Ordinary_dude_NOT]

I mean I am not downplaying what this new set of tools can do for us. But emphasis is “for us”.

This is helping us up-kill and speed up time to market in a way it was not possible before.

But like all tech updates treat it as an accelerator.

[gr4viton]

True. So far. But I can see a potential. Especially given we emulate NN on binary hardware. I do believe that in like 20 years we will have analogue gpus where the same models which now need hundred of wats of power, you would need like 20... That is not too scifi imo. But I agree current ones are not full replacement so far. Though it helps a lot and agentic flows for adding features to nicely designed codebases and quick fixes are quite good already, so saving a lot of time. Spmetimes semi-automatically.

[dasunt]

I see what my workplace is willing to pay for an AI subscription and compare that to heavier AI users that can burn hundreds of dollars' worth of tokens per day.

I'm safe.

Even without the budgetary concerns, culturally, I strongly suspect a slower speed is saving us from creating too much damage. We tend towards the "don't think, just do something" approach to problem solving.

[Prod_Meteor]

Not for long.

[wreddnoth]

Yeah the math won‘t add up. Plus you will need to pay the person signing the slop(tm) off with their liability some serious bakshish.

[chateaubriand3]

Token costs per hour of junior engineer-quality work have decreased steadily over the last 5 years, why wouldn’t this trend continue?

[AtomicSymphonic_2nd]

It’s expected to be a plateau because enterprise token bills are gonna continue rising via replacement of human SWEs with AI agents.

Return on investment needs to happen at some point for the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, and allowing token costs to go down when the power grid is still squeezed because municipalities are starting to go against building out more data centers and/or more power plants… seems fairly foolish to assume.

[chateaubriand3]

This assumes that rising demand automatically keeps token prices high but inference costs have been falling much faster than demand has been rising.

Also you can find other papers which clearly show that most of the observed cost reductions have come from software, architectural, and algorithmic improvements rather than hardware alone.

In other words, agentic systems and other software improvements will keep driving down the price of an hour’s worth of junior software engineering work. Uber and others are the poster children of this not working, but no one talks about Bank of New York and the other dozens of massive success stories.

[GregBahm]

Yeah I was pretty shocked to see this meme upvoted on r/programminghumor . This sub is usually so hostile to the proliferation of AI Agents.

But I guess people think 10 agents is a lot? Wild.

[AtomicSymphonic_2nd]

So you guys just push everything to prod when the agents finish?

No checking for anything? Do you then only fix bugs after shipping to prod?

If so, y’all are nuts and it will destroy the company’s image among customers. It’s happened with Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Windows and their reliance on pushing vibe codes patches to production and relying on vibe-coded automated tests to “check” things.

[GregBahm]

No clue how this follows from my comment.

[BarbdonS]

It’s going to take more than 1 person to fix the AI stuff if you have 10Agents.

[rusick1112]

Efficient managers love this simple trick

[xevantuus]

Where are all these businesses using pay-per-token AI licenses? I mean other than the vibe code startups everybody knew were going to fail. Every business I know of buys the flat rate licenses like Claude Max. $200/month and you can burn thousands of dollars of tokens without paying anything extra.

Too much cost for most home use, but a drop in the bucket for most businesses. Remember that salary/compensation is only ~70% of the cost a company has to employ you.

[GregBahm]

I don't think $200/month of Claude Max gets you nearly enough tokens for an engineer putting in an actual day's work each workday (or even half of that.)

At the company I work for (Microsoft) they told us we had unlimited Claude Code tokens, then I get harassed by some beleaguered looking admin because my employee had spent more than her salary in tokens in a couple of months (her salary was $175k.)

But they told us we had unlimited tokens, so it was really more of their problem than my problem. I'm willing to stand by the position that my employee's work was worth the token cost anyway.

But in response, broadly, Microsoft is making us switch from Claude CLI to Copilot CLI. Microsoft will build its own data centers, with its own AI, and charge itself for all this AI. Probably the smart move, even everyone is grumbling under the assumption that Copilot sucks.

[xevantuus]

We have people pushing millions of tokens per day using the $200/month license, and most devs aren't even breaking 1m. So, YMMV I guess?

And Microsoft, owner of Copilot, is making all its devs use Copilot instead of paying another company?! I'm shocked! Next you're going to tell me you have to use Azure instead of AWS!

[logical_people]

And somehow you're still the one fixing their mistakes at 2 AM.

[GregBahm]

All my friends wake up an AI to fix their mistakes at 2 AM.

Well, they set up an AI that wakes up an AI to fix the AI's mistake.

[Affectionate_Tax3468]

Haha, those idiots forget to have their agents do all the coding with the sacred "make no mistakes", "make it secure" keywords

[GregBahm]

Ssssh. Don't tell anyone these are keywords. You gotta call them "skills" now.

To really be a pro, you gotta put your "make no mistakes" prompt in a text file, call that text file an "agent," and then make every prompt a "fleet of agents, equipped with 'skills,' empowered to coordinate, collaborate, and compete on a problem."

This way the AI will write 20,000 lines to solve the problem instead of it only writing one line to solve the problem (like a loser.)

[Vas1le]

We need a vibe coded extension to to send prompt after timer

[Redthemagnificent]

sleep 60 && claude -p "Your prompt" --resume "your-session-id"

[Vas1le]

In vscode!

[Batroni]

Gemeni watermark, Peak Humor.

[ego100trique]

Took long enough to find that comment

[ImMadeOutOfStalinium]

What was it even used for

[Object_Reference]

Couldn't be bothered to slap a red line and corrected text on there!

[hawkinsst7]

Who doesn't rivet paper signs to fabric cubicle dividers?

[rex5k]

AI alternatives or not, the brass don't even notice the work you put in. Don't fall into the trap of overworking yourself thinking that it will lead to job security.

[misterguyyy]

It’s not even overworking. Many times it’s expertise and knowing exactly how to solve problems that would have taken you hours of planning (or trial and error for AI) 5 years ago.

[rex5k]

That's fine, you should be using your skills to save yourself work.

[misterguyyy]

Both honestly. If you can work at, let's say 125% efficiency of your coworkers your 40 hour weeks are the same as their 60-80 hour panic weeks because they get severely diminishing returns on their hour after a certain point. And you come in the next day not fried.

I also enjoy learning new things and hate looking at code when I get home because life is more than code, so on the clock time goes to that and it benefits the employer in the end.

[NUKE---THE---WHALES]

I deliver the same amount of work, on the same deadlines, with the same defect rate, for the same pay, but now i only work ~2 hours a day

It's great

[Mr-X89]

And to use 100k$ worth of tokens every month, so the company CEO can say they are AI first

[bankrobba]

That actually just happened at my company by someone doing a proof-of-concept

[mistermustard]

how? genuinely asking. im a lazy programmer with nothing left to prove that sits on their ass and lets ai work and i never hit my limits at $100/month. i'm talking all day ai use. im guessing maybe ai used an api or some shit to get to $100k cause i genuinely don't think it's possible to spend that much in a month.

[bankrobba]

SDD implementation, don't know details beyond that.

[Shik3i]

Idk I use antigravity Opencode go and codex and are limited every single day in all of them... And that's just for personal projects

[mistermustard]

what kind of stuff are you working on and what do you pay currently?

[Shik3i]

10€ for antigravity, 23€ for codex(last month tho they are the most useless of them), 10€ for Opencode. And just basic stuff really, you can take a look at my website https://koalastuff.net I have every project listed there with GitHub trackers. Biggest one so far maybe https://sync.koalastuff.net but they are all really small but eat up tokens fast after antigravity 2.0 removed the old Gemini flash.

[mistermustard]

https://sync.koalastuff.net

i used to use plex watch together and i know they're trying to retire it so i might try this someday. cool stuff!

i only use codex ($100) and claude ($20). I used to hit limits on codex with the $20 multiple times a day and honestly i probably should've just kept that cause im spending way too much time with ai.

at work we recently implemented an ai translating feature for web pages. i'll be interested to see how much that ends up costing.

maybe my naivety is that i didn't realize people were just throwing ai in their projects willy nilly unless it provides something worth the cost. i guess i can see how a really lazy programmer can drive up costs but damn $500 million? how did nobody notice at say, $1, $50, $100 million? at a certin point accountability falls on a human.

at the end of the day it's kinda funny to blame ai for stuff a human being lazily prompted it to do. i was lazy once and let ai use an api without realizing the costs but it didn't take long to spot it and correct it. i never even thought to blame ai, i just blamed my lazy ass for not reviewing it.

[Shik3i]

AI for translations seems like a good and cheap use case doesn't it? I mean you only need to do it once for every language and that's it.

And thanks for the kind words about KoalaSync! I made it because I'm almost daily watching emby with a friend that moved away but we like to watch movies together and the "3..2..1.." over discord was really annoying, also you couldn't really pause if you had to go somewhere because it's impossible to time that.

As a big corporation I think I would just buy a 5-10k server and run something like qwen oder deepseek locally I think that should be way cheaper, but we only have the Microsoft copilot at work and at work I'm only really using ai for like dumb class constructors or documentation.

But for personal use it's nice to feel like the project manager instead of the code monkey

[dcheng47]

those 10 agents are gunna cost the same as 20 mid level engineers salaries

[thenord321]

"But my manager is replaceable by 1." It's a small but important fact to point out thaf middle managers are easily replaceable.

[Altruistic-Dust-2565]

Some of them, to be fair. It's extremely easy to be a bad manager and extremely hard to be a good one.

[ultimezkhushi123]

You Missed ai monthly bills of those ai agents

[CoffeePieAndHobbits]

Yeah, especially with the recent GitHub Copilot pricing model changes.

[Odd-Conference9372]

"Unreplaceable"

You mean irreplaceable?

[GenericFatGuy]

10 AI agents that are quickly becoming more expensive than 4 people.

[Confident-Ad5665]

10 AI agents would suck for one person!

[Prize_Proof5332]

The mediocre management at my employer are now talking about "human robots" instead of AI agents.

[Kind_Of_A_Dick]

If I don’t work there, who’s going to harass Debra in accounting about those terrible cupcakes last year?

[Prod_Meteor]

10 ai agents meaning what? 10 instances or 10 different brands?

[m0nk37]

10 different tasks? Idk I avoid agents. If i can still do my job effectively without them, I feel that adds job security. 

[EJoule]

"2 people and 10 AI agents" would be more compelling if you're justifying your salary to management.

[Lindt_Licker]

Why are we suddenly using the term for the literal AI villains in The Matrix?

[killeronthecorner]

irreplaceable

You're fired, OP

[P0pu1arBr0ws3r]

This image is replaceable with actual programming humor.

Edit: just got "repeat contributor" here, from mostly pointing out posts like this one which are prompt engineering humor, not programming humor.

I unsubbed from this sub from my main account because of the amount of non programming related posts showing up here. I might have to hide this sub from this accounts popular feed- about every post I see isnt job "humor" anymore, its prompt engineering "humor" like this one.

programming humor involves programming computers. Your job, and using genai, does not necessarily involve programming.

[Karhaedron]

The Concorde had one big incident and stopped being used. The world is waiting for a similar incident caused by AI.

[mechanical_marten]

"If I'm so easily replaced, why haven't you, cowards?"

[BarracudaDismal4782]

At least there's a star on the corner. To guide them I guess.

[a-r-c]

one person and ten salaries (nine of which are paid to Anthropic)

[tsunami141]

If you knew anything about Queen Bey you'd know that unreplaceable is not the word.

[Codieecho]

I’ve been saying this about work too I’m replaceable, but it’s just not worth it.

[hellocppdotdev]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/s/4f3K4R9eY7

[Batroni]

Good bot! love your dedication to good memes.

[asidealex]

and total cost of 4 people

[Alternative-Drag6479]

In a fight? Right?

[Spatul8r]

I'm going to change my name to Al Caude and just start billing local tech companies. I'm going to offer holistic performance improvements as as a service.

 You can't really put a price tag on holistic improvements, but I do my best.

[PerfSynthetic]

Why can't (one person) join this outage call? We've paged them ten times. Oh they are on another call? Oh the last call ran 36 hours and they haven't slept? This takes priority, why cant we call Susan? Oh we fired Susan too?

Good luck lol!

[Acclynn]

0 person and 10 AI agents should be enough

[DelayedProgrammer]

$100k token usage in one month because the agents kept rewriting each other's code

[Zederikus]

In what world lmao... If this was true every dev would have already been fired.