As a mostly non-programmer it got me a lot done.

With about 5-10h over the weekend using free tier Claude and ChatGPT I managed to put together a scraper for a particular thing on a website I’m interested, grab the item images, do an initial pass with local OCR, if it hit some keywords, run openCV to crop for better OCR and dump the hits for further investigation.

Nothing particularly advanced but it would have taken me a horrendous amount of time without it to be half as good, like it did when I built a similar scraper 10 years ago.

Neither were very good code quality i’m sure.

> giving Claude to a bad programmer gives bad results.

On average, the output is still better than what a bad programmer would produce.

The issue is there’s non linearities involved. Although I don’t know I would use the open claw guy, but let’s take Isaac Newton. You can’t sum up people and arrive at an Isaac Newton worth of talent. He’s singular, unique, and irreplaceable at what he did. There were others similarly outsized in their ability to change things, and there are today as well. But you can’t funge talent at some level with more people - in fact as we know there’s a rapidly diminishing return on people investment.

Finally in some ways agentic workflows magnify the power of the individual who is adept at harnessing them, they don’t have to argue (much) with the agents to effect their ideas. I’ve found a lot of very bright engineers spend their days fighting to be heard by managers and peers who can’t / won’t understand them. By unshackling them from trying to debate down idiots, they deliver way way more, and of the right things, than they otherwise could have.

I feel like using $1.3M/year is a wild outlier. A $200/month Max sub is a pretty cheap way to get quite a lot of benefit.

The $1.3 million doesn't mean much. The article stated he could've switched to a significantly cheaper option and cut the bill to $300k. That's still a lot but since he worked for the company that sells the tokens it isn't as though they were paying the retail cost.

For those who, like me, had to do a double take on that number: https://www.businessinsider.com/openclaw-peter-steinberger-a...

Yes, $1.3M in token cost in less than 30 days and some days were even off-peak, if you can call it that with that insane scale that likely hides quite a lot of tokens in the lower bars.

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159227

I honestly believe that most Silicon Valley developers could have their pre-AI output replaced by 10 dollars/day in Gemini 3 pay as you go spend.

I don't think existing companies will bite that bullet, but I think you'll see AI native companies in five years with like, a baffling small number of people.

Maybe smart to convince everyone else to fire and slow down while you hire and speed up. I don't think it is actually planned, but perhaps smart in hindsite.