Its not complicated. People have become extremely insulated away from what the real work looks like of a dev over the years.

The reality os starkly contrasted to public perception.

Most software developers heavily use LLMs now. They sucked 5 years ago, we're meh 3 years ago, decent 2 years ago, but over the past year and a bit have rapidly become genuinely more efficient when used right and skillfully than doing about 90% of your work load by hand.

Bits and pieces still require doing it by hand, but the vast majority of work for the average dev now is via moderating an LLM (with skill) to success.

Unfortunately a fuck tonne of devs lack that "with skill" part still, and what this comes out as is them costing their companies tremendously more money to do the same job.

A loooot of companies (stupidly) hedged their bets that if they just gave their devs wild west access to using LLMs without training they'd magically just "figure it out" along the way.

Which is nonsense, why would a dev feel compelled to conserve tokens or improve efficiency with zero incentive?

So now companies are scrambling as they realize their devs, who just spent 12 months going hog wild with LLMs, still havent learned how to use them well and in dact have developed arguably worse poor habits that they now need to unlearn

Thats where the industry is at now largely.

Meanwhile companies like the one I work at predicted this as a natural thing and we're preparing for it long in advance. When token prices shot up we already had set ourselves up with lots of training so the price increase was not nearly as noticeable.

I think when Im fully optimized out on a project I only spend about $10~$15 a day, despite going full steam for 5 hrs or so.

And despite that my productivity is probably higher than unskilled devs who burn through 10x~20x that. I get more work down in way less time and way less tokens.

Training and the resource/knowledge pool go a long way here. It cannot be understated