Developer AI Token Costs Could Exceed Their Salaries in Two Years (infoworld.com)
- Reference: 0184148544
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/06/28/0519223/developer-ai-token-costs-could-exceed-their-salaries-in-two-years
- Source link: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4189176/ai-coding-token-costs-are-on-track-to-rival-human-payroll-2.html
> [2]According to Gartner , these costs will meet, or even exceed, the typical software engineer's monthly salary within the next two years. This is not only because developers are increasingly adopting generative AI and agentic tools, it reflects a trend toward consumption-based licensing models as vendors balance infrastructure investments with profitability...
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> Gartner senior principal analyst Nitish Tyagi explained that it's important to note that Gartner's prediction is based on a global average salary of $2,000 per month; it doesn't mean AI token usage will exceed all salaries. For instance, in the US, yearly pay rates can be six digits or more. However, that kind of spend is not out of the realm of possibility, Tyagi emphasized. "I have heard scary numbers like 'My developer consumed $20K last month,' or 'A business user consumed $32K'."
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> If these amounts sound shocking, that's the point. "The goal is to alarm the industry about the impact of token cost if it is not governed and controlled," he said... AI coding vendors have yet to deliver "mature, built-in cost optimization capabilities," Tyagi said, and prices will likely only continue to rise as vendors further build out their models while at the same time trying to remain profitable. Thus, enterprises struggle to forecast and control costs, and, because AI is moving so fast, many organizations lack the "maturity and frameworks" to determine ROI, he noted. Agent-driven workflows are difficult to govern, context windows become bloated, budgets are wiped out earlier than anticipated, and token spend becomes hard to justify....
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> "Without a governed engineering operating model, costs can escalate faster than the productivity gains these tools are designed to deliver," Tyagi said.
[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/4189176/ai-coding-token-costs-are-on-track-to-rival-human-payroll-2.html
[2] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-06-24-gartner-predicts-ai-coding-costs-will-surpass-average-developer-salary-by-2028-as-token-consumption-surges
Yep! 2k per month (Score:2)
So no one in the US then!
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This is really fucking stupid.
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> go woke, go broke
People keep saying this but is it actually true? What company actually went broke because of woke and specifically because of woke?
A week of bad PR maybe but beyond that? I think this is made up and there is evidence of the opposite direction as well but enough either way to make this more than just feel good rhetoric.
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It's not supposed to be true. It's "vice-signalling" - a way of signalling to fellow fascists that you're on the same side and signalling to non-fascists that they'd better keep quiet. However, you always get plenty of people who will believe their own propaganda.
pay peanuts get monkeys (Score:2)
I guess all you are going to get is a vibe coder if you're only paying $2k
Re: pay peanuts get monkeys (Score:2)
Sabina made a YouTube video explaining how good capable AI likely to be expensive since consumes high resources including development costs. The have and have nots gap likely to expand. There will be high, medium and low tier offerings depending on costs and demand. The average person will not need nor desire rocket surgery capability. Supply and demand will balance allocation of resources. Friction could arise as starting to see AI data centers taking resources from communities. Money usually talks and dow
Tooling exceeds Machinist Cost (Score:1)
Your telling me there are jobs that the tooling, equipment used far exceeds the payroll costs. If you the same programmer can be x20 more productive while efficient and have some standard of QA this is code industrialization.
Airplane crews are Shocked
Machinists are Shocked
Radiologists are Shocked
Tower Crane Operators are Shocked.
Trading Firm Analysts are Shocked.
Garbage Men are Shocked.
Concreate Drivers are Shocked.
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AI is opex, not capex though. You get to pay that cost every year. You are renting time on a machine not buying it. A well taken care of lathe lasts 70+ years, so the $50k you spend on it now pays dividends for as long as you keep it, and you can sell it used when you upgrade. The money on AI tooling is just gone. No machine shop would rent that lathe at $25k/yr
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> A well taken care of lathe lasts 70+ years, so the $50k you spend on it now pays dividends for as long as you keep it, and you can sell it used when you upgrade. The money on AI tooling is just gone. No machine shop would rent that lathe at $25k/yr
Yeah, somebody let slip that out larger organization is blowing $300k/mo on AI a while back when somebody else complained that our smaller section bought a nice server with a bunch of GPU for $50k. We get along just fine with our one-time purchase and really don'
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"If you the same programmer can be x20 more productive"
That's a big "if". Most studies show a 50-100% increase in code output at best, and code produced with AI assistance requires more rework. Measuring end-to-end, AI increased developer productivity by 10-30% or so. Sure, the tools are still improving, and developers are still learning how to use them to best advantage, but we're a long long way off from a x20 increase. That will likely require a breakthrough rather than incremental improvement of AI
Everything new is old again (Score:2)
Seems like we're circling back to [1]The Feeling of Power [wikipedia.org].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
Peddlers of doomsday machines (Score:2)
The peddlers of doomsday machines and their cronies are making random pseudo-predictions to market how scaaaary and all-powerful their doomsday machines are!
P.S.: send more venture capital to throw into the furnace plxplx
I'm shocked! (Score:2)
Shocked, I tell you! /sarc
It seems that at some point, some parasites end up feeding on others of their own kind.
I wonder what will happen to all the parasites when the non-parasite host at the bottom of the food chain is ultimately sucked dry...
Subsidies can't last forever (Score:2)
Investor funds and market-share-fights have been subsidizing the cost of AI for end-users. Even if the predictions in the article are exaggerated, the Day(s) of Reckoning will eventually arrive and there will be lots of WTFs.
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The Wall Street Journal had a story a weekend ago about how OpenAI and Anthropic are getting pressure to cut their prices, that will certainly ding their path to profitability and thus their stock prices (were it to come to pass). Apparently there are some Open Source AI thingies out there and the Chinese are always ready with a cheaper product. Some companies are starting to use them.
I suppose we'll get another Idiot-Gram from Project 2025, foghorned into the blathersphere by la Presidenta about how using
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> and the Chinese are always ready with a cheaper product.
Chinese gov't is likely subsidizing those also to gain market-share. So it's in the same boat, perhaps at a different pace though, as they don't have to care what Wallstreet wants
> Open Source AI thingies
Running on in-premises hardware? If cloud-based, the subsidization time-bomb may still play out.
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China builds tools that work instead of chasing bullshit. So their stuff is actually viable without trillionaires.
"The above statistics include all user requests from web, APP, and API. If all tokens were billed at DeepSeek-R1’s pricing (*), the total daily revenue would be $562,027, with a cost profit margin of 545%."
[1]https://github.com/deepseek-ai... [github.com]
[1] https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/202502OpenSourceWeek/day_6_one_more_thing_deepseekV3R1_inference_system_overview.md
Local LLMs (Score:2)
So just run your own inference infrastructure then?
A traditional "developer" laptop generally costs around $2000-3000 for high end engineers. An extremely capable inference laptop, otherwise doing the rest of the same jobs, is around $5000-6000. One time cost. Everything runs locally, which also solves the "do I trust LLM vendor?" issue.
Re: Local LLMs (Score:3)
You need a huge model to even come close to what you get from claude type tools. Then you also need a huge context window so a tool like claude can even work when you direct it to your local llm. That means your developer laptop needs like 128gb of ram and most of that needs to be allocated to vram from your apu. Unless you are doing some experimental setup where you can split between vram and normal ram without taking a perf hit. Either way though, you are going to be generating tokens quite slowly.
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You don't put 128 GB RAM in your laptop. You put 256 GB VRAM in your GPU server and let your developers access it. The more it is used, the better it can utilize batching, so it becomes more efficient than every developer running AI on their one machine.
I'm developiong C++ using superpowers locally... (Score:2)
... on a GPU that cost a couple of days' wages.
OpenAI et al are doomed when enough companies realize they are being ripped off.
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( That is, a couple of days' wages for someone on a more reasonable monthly salary than $2,000 )
I tried (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried hard in the last 2 months: I bought Claude, came up with a project I thought seemed reasonable: JS-based rich-text editor with plugin system. Existing solutions (CKEditor, TinyMCE, Quill, etc etc) are old, unwieldy, sometimes proprietary, and modern browsers have many newly supported features... My goal was an HTML web component of /
I tried to carefully prompt. Before coding I used Claude to help research the issues involved (dead standards, browsers handling edges cases differently, generated HTML questions, etc.). Claude was thoughtful and reassuring. I knew it would be more complex than Claude kept insisting, but that's OK. As usual with LLMs, at first I was more than impressed, I was blown away.
Still, bugs. That's expected. Fixes were easy and it was amazing how Claude understood the issues. But the more I tested, the more the bugs proliferated. Some issues activated Claude to rewrite whole architectural parts of the codebase, which broke dependencies. Fixing the dependent stuff introduced new bugs. I slowly had to learn more and more about the implementation specifics. More and more I had to audit the code changes, revert, try again. Soon I found myself questioning Claude's approaches in what seemed to be subtle ways. At times I was forced to really dig in, and the code – which looked so clean and organized – was a true spaghetti mess. Out-of-date comments. Repeated blocks of functionality with small differences. Convoluted back-and-forth paths across files, functions, classes. Each plugin had drifted to requiring its own long list of specialized one-off supporting worlds of code. Basic browser functions got overwritten with convoluted bespoke mish-mash slop with long interruptions of exceptions work-arounds and crazy shit.
Maybe the thing works. But the bugs are brutal! Everything is delicate! I've lost track of what the hell is going on.
But all of this was very familiar! It all looked like what USED TO happen to me before I got experience. What happened when I instructed programming newbies to take a crack without supervision. What happened when someone paid $5 to Upwork for something the boss thought would be easy.
We are not there yet. Not even close. It is 1998 and we are using for layout with the "100% td width" work-around.
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Claude should be your companion coder. Not THE coder. You're using the tool wrong. Let Claude do the mundane stuff. Your output should be at least 50% higher if you use the tool right.
Ditto: have to throw away 1/2 of what Claude does (Score:2)
I am mandated to use Claude by my employer. I'm grateful it's there, but no, I cannot fucking trust that stuff. I give maybe 5 prompts a day and at least one will have a major error. I have to completely discard over half of what Claude does. I've given up trusting it to write unit tests. I am glad I'm not paying for it and it gets more expensive with each version.
The only reason I am glad it's there is that when I prompt it something...it gives a wrong answer that usually leads me to the correct o
Cheap solutions get replaced by cheap solutions (Score:3)
India should definitely be worried that their entire "outsourced economy" is about to turn belly up.
software engineer's $2,000 monthly salary (Score:5, Insightful)
LMAO....Gartner senior principal analyst Nitish Tyagi explained that it's important to note that Gartner's prediction is based on a global average salary of $2,000 per month; What was he smoking to come up with that lowball # ???
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I'd expect that the AI people will do what pretty much everyone does. Price to market. Your AI expense in India will be 2K/mo, and as the summary said, in the US, 20-32K/mo.
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This is a GLOBAL average. For France the pay grade of 2 000 €/month (30 k€/year) would Junior level for a developer (look here for current job offers: as "developer", typical is 40 k€/year before taxes, remove 25% for taxes, then divide by 12: [1]https://www.apec.fr/candidat/r... [www.apec.fr] ). For Southern Europe 2000 € is considered a good salary.
[1] https://www.apec.fr/candidat/recherche-emploi.html/emploi?motsCles=developpeur
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But they won't get a developer below 60k.
Job adverts like this are "the company is showing presence" only. This are not real jobs.
No one would apply for such a job, the money you get would not pay the rent for a flat.
For Southern Europe 2000 â is considered a good salary.
a) that is not southern Europe
b) it is not a good salary
c) it is a joke
Do you have mental problems?
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Next year I will apply for such a job if in a location I like.
At the moment I making more but I plan to move towards my retirement place, then 2kE will be fine for me...
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As per statistics (and my argument), entry-level developer gets you 2 600 € per month in France [1]https://resoforces.fr/salaire-... [resoforces.fr]
For Southern Europe 2000 â is considered a good salary.
a) that is not southern Europe
b) it is not a good salary
c) it is a joke
It is an overall mid-career salary for Spain (Southern Europe).
[1] https://resoforces.fr/salaire-moyen-metier-france-tableau-csp
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Where in France are you existing on 2 000 €/month without state assistance?
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There are swaths of countries where the daily wage is US$5/day. Assuming their customers are earning US$2,000/month shows how rich a country must be, to join the digital economy.
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> LMAO....Gartner senior principal analyst Nitish Tyagi explained that it's important to note that Gartner's prediction is based on a global average salary of $2,000 per month; What was he smoking to come up with that lowball # ???
AI isn't replacing some senior engineers in your cushy little western office. It's replacing shitting meaningless tasks that you outsource to the lowest bidder. What's he smoking? He's smoking India. Senior engineer is earning at the high end 30LPA. that's 3,000,000 rupees. That is 32,000 USD / year or ~ $2500 per month.
That is a high end estimate of the most senior engineers. A mid level engineer is earning more like $1000 per month, and entry level engineer as little as $250.
One of my employees has the sa
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It sounds plausible, since there are plenty of people in poor countries where that would be a large salary. It would be nice if they could be more precise about the type of average though, I would expect a significant difference between the mean and the median here.