IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Phelps McManus · 2026-04-11T17:35:32-0400

Noodleface said:
Think about a place like nvidia where jensen said if your senior devs aren't using 250k tokens they shouldn't be employed. 250k tokens is more than we have allocated for our entire couple hundred developers. We get between 100-700 tokens a month.

Something is off on your scale or maybe you are taking about context sizes? I burn through a million tokens ($3 of Claude sonnet) in around 1-2 hours, and I am fairly diligent about clearing my context between prompts. If Claude says it is compacting, that means you hit the 50k context limit, which is eating up over 50k tokens on that one prompt (50k in plus whatever compacted version comes out). They have 1mil context models and I cannot imagine the burn rate for people who use them.

Kithani · 2026-04-11T18:13:28-0400

I burned so many Chuk E tokens on TMNT back in the day

Noodleface · 2026-04-11T18:19:24-0400

Phelps McManus said:
Something is off on your scale or maybe you are taking about context sizes? I burn through a million tokens ($3 of Claude sonnet) in around 1-2 hours, and I am fairly diligent about clearing my context between prompts. If Claude says it is compacting, that means you hit the 50k context limit, which is eating up over 50k tokens on that one prompt (50k in plus whatever compacted version comes out). They have 1mil context models and I cannot imagine the burn rate for people who use them.

Maybe there's a layer of abstraction at my site I'm not privy too. Makes a lot more sense now lol

Khane · 2026-04-11T18:57:18-0400

Kithani said:
I burned so many Chuk E tokens on TMNT back in the day

This is not far off from what the future of AI is going to be. Once everyone is completely dependent on it, and most companies have replaced people who actually know how to do the job without it with outsourced, low-cost, low-IQ workers.

ShakyJake · 2026-04-11T19:41:32-0400

Khane said:
This is not far off from what the future of AI is going to be. Once everyone is completely dependent on it, and most companies have replaced people who actually know how to do the job without it with outsourced, low-cost, low-IQ workers.

I'm not so sure. Unless AI becomes good at mind-reading, it takes real skill to craft effective prompts and steer the AI correctly to get the result you want. We have some Indian contractors that appear to be using AI for their code and it's a weird mess.

Khane · 2026-04-11T19:58:42-0400

ShakyJake said:
I'm not so sure. Unless AI becomes good at mind-reading, it takes real skill to craft effective prompts and steer the AI correctly to get the result you want. We have some Indian contractors that appear to be using AI for their code and it's a weird mess.

That won't stop executives that dont understand it from outsourcing, which is already happening en masse.

TJT · 2026-04-11T20:59:52-0400

Absolutely.

Leadership has not and may not ever realize that AI is an amazing productivity booster when you already know your desired output. You are just using AI to write it 50x faster than you could ever dream of doing. In addition to writing up docs and tests because that shit sucks and devs have always been loathe to do it. With AI commenting, docs, unit tests, are all automatic now.

I think its going to take a few years to understand the negative impact of having retards with very little experience in the actual thing using AI to bridge the gap. A decade from now its likely a lot of teams out there wont even have some old dev who knows the ins and outs of C from writing it for 20 straight years. It will be the blind leading the blind.

A good analog to this is the touchscreen generation. The young bucks today who grew up on the iPhone and such have famously terrible comprehension of basic computer technology. To the extent of not even knowing what a file directory is as they simply expect some app to handle all of that for them. Something like installing a printer driver is so alien to them they do not even know where to start. While printer drivers are kinda archaic today you still have to deal with drivers in general at times. You will have this same behavior, but for software engineering.

Noodleface · 2026-04-11T22:27:31-0400

TJT said:
Absolutely.

Leadership has not and may not ever realize that AI is an amazing productivity booster when you already know your desired output. You are just using AI to write it 50x faster than you could ever dream of doing. In addition to writing up docs and tests because that shit sucks and devs have always been loathe to do it. With AI commenting, docs, unit tests, are all automatic now.

I think its going to take a few years to understand the negative impact of having retards with very little experience in the actual thing using AI to bridge the gap. A decade from now its likely a lot of teams out there wont even have some old dev who knows the ins and outs of C from writing it for 20 straight years. It will be the blind leading the blind.

A good analog to this is the touchscreen generation. The young bucks today who grew up on the iPhone and such have famously terrible comprehension of basic computer technology. To the extent of not even knowing what a file directory is as they simply expect some app to handle all of that for them. Something like installing a printer driver is so alien to them they do not even know where to start. While printer drivers are kinda archaic today you still have to deal with drivers in general at times. You will have this same behavior, but for software engineering.

If I continue my example the reason I was able to get that code ported in 20 minutes and spend a few hours making it 100% solid is because I knew both what I was doing, but more importantly exactly what needed to be done. I'm sure some execs eyes are gonna light up when they hear what I did and they'll think dollar signs.

sliverstorm · 2026-04-11T22:49:47-0400

At my company, there are two pretty direct policy shifts (one good, one mixed in my view):

A. Offshoring as a model is dead in the water. Great.

B. Leaders have already determined that the multiplier you get from Claude is exponential to the base talent of the team member using it. E.g. a mediocre dev with Claude is 2x the mediocre output, but a good/great dev is 4x, and it's 4x an already great output. See Noodle's point above. This is having a few downstream impacts:

Net reduction in headcount.
Increased desire to aggressively "reskill" (fire/hire) for quality. Get rid of 3 okay people, hire 2 good ones for +25% wage = overall productivity increase, cheaper.
Overall impact in my estimation is that traditional junior/entry level jobs are probably going to evaporate even more quickly than they did due to offshoring--or at least, the expectation from an "entry level" position is going to dramatically change.

At least in my org, I don't think I will ever hire a fulltime human for "junior dev work" ever again.

Phelps McManus · 2026-04-11T23:29:26-0400

sliverstorm said:
[*]Overall impact in my estimation is that traditional junior/entry level jobs are probably going to evaporate even more quickly than they did due to offshoring--or at least, the expectation from an "entry level" position is going to dramatically change.

At least in my org, I don't think I will ever hire a fulltime human for "junior dev work" ever again.

It does not help that work ethic amongst younger employees is generally pathetic. Like how can you work on the same boring project for 3 straight months? Especially with AI to help you plow through tough debugging problems, I do not have much sympathy for people who can’t demonstrate productivity.

TJT · 2026-04-12T05:16:36-0400

sliverstorm said:
At my company, there are two pretty direct policy shifts (one good, one mixed in my view):

A. Offshoring as a model is dead in the water. Great.

B. Leaders have already determined that the multiplier you get from Claude is exponential to the base talent of the team member using it. E.g. a mediocre dev with Claude is 2x the mediocre output, but a good/great dev is 4x, and it's 4x an already great output. See Noodle's point above. This is having a few downstream impacts:

Net reduction in headcount.

Increased desire to aggressively "reskill" (fire/hire) for quality. Get rid of 3 okay people, hire 2 good ones for +25% wage = overall productivity increase, cheaper.

Overall impact in my estimation is that traditional junior/entry level jobs are probably going to evaporate even more quickly than they did due to offshoring--or at least, the expectation from an "entry level" position is going to dramatically change.

At least in my org, I don't think I will ever hire a fulltime human for "junior dev work" ever again.

This creates a problem though. If you don't hire junior devs to learn how do you get the superstar devs you want? Everyone has to start somewhere.

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IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

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Noodleface

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Khane

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TJT

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sliverstorm

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