The timeframe of 6 months is kind of a fantasy. Building a business or successful product takes way more than that. It’s a marathon not a sprint.

The outliers that you might see are one of the following:

- Someone with large following/authority built over many years.

- Burning cash in ads, mainly VC funded, not solo.

I’m writing this hoping it will help someone to realise reality and avoid falling for online traps that building a business is easy or can be done in months.

I like the idea and the clarity to explain the usage, my question would be: what kind of tasks it would be useful for?

Making a sentence out of a json

Reading comments, I’m curios why would someone spend thousands for LLM coding? What are you building to justify these skyrocketing token consumption?

I’ve been using AI coding since GitHub copilot was in beta, used all IDEs in the market, and had very few occasions when I passed the $20 subscription limit. And when I did, that was when I decided to move from cursor to CC and Codex, and still, using them everyday and didn’t have to go above my limits.

I've spent US$16 700 last month. I made an autoscaling K8s cluster for distributed compilation/caching on a large C++ project. I also heavily modified the build system to use a forked version of `siso` compatible with our environment.

That meant we can go from 17 minutes on 32 cores to 5 minutes on a few hundred. And because it's distributed compilation we don't have to provision each developer with an overpowered build system they won't be using most of the time.

It could also eliminate our CI backlog because autoscaling. Over a few hundred engineers building this codebase this probably a few thousand hours of waiting a week.

This took me about 2 weeks as someone who graduated 9 months ago. Most of the tokens were spent in several hour long debugging sessions relating to distributed systems networking and tracing through gRPC logs because the system wasn't working until it did.

I think I'd need several years of experience and 6 months as a full time engineer to have accomplished the same thing pre-AI.

Since I work at a semiconductor company near Toronto there's nobody around with the distributed systems experience to mentor me. I did it mostly on my own as a side project because I read a blog post. I literally wouldn't have been able to complete this without AI.

I'm sure the actual solution is terrible compared to what a senior developer with experience would've created. But my company feels like it's getting ROI on the token spend so far even though it's double my salary.

I think if you’re a professional and you’re actually coding for >4 hours per day it makes sense. Also if you’re one of those weirdos that likes to command an army of agents.

Well I’m a software engineer and code more than 4 hours per day.

But I do check the generated code, make sure it doesn’t go banana. I wouldn’t do multiple features at the same time as I have no idea how people are checking the output after that.

I like AI coding and it accelerated my work, but I wouldn’t trust their output blindly

This is my thoughts exactly.

It speeds up so much of what I do, simple tasks are amazing to delegate to AI and it leaves me with more time in the day to tackle the big tasks.

My general rule of thumb now is I never get AI to build the bones of something which I believe I will need to build something else on top of later. But if it’s some throw away dead end feature that won’t require me to build more tooling on top of in future I’ll happily spin up a cloud agent and use the result.

I've heard rhetoric like "we have to use LLMs to stay competitive now" which attempts to justify the cost

Reminds me of these "if you don't pay 200 dollars per month for AI you are NGMI" comments...

Read community note, its April fool

I forgot it's annoying internet day

Email data are not meant to be within your cloud account anyway.

I think you're also missing other offers coming with Google/Microsoft email such as office, no setup, no maintenance .. etc.

Totally fair, Google / Microsoft are the right call for most people. This is specifically for folks already running infrastructure on AWS who want to keep email data in the same account for compliance, data sovereignty, or just simplicity. Definitely niche, but that's who WorkMail served.

Plus, down the line, I'm sure folks want to work on their own AI agents with inbox access, and Bedrock would be a perfect fit.

> Plus, down the line, I'm sure folks want to work on their own AI agents with inbox access, and Bedrock would be a perfect fit.

I think you found your niche, this could be a pretty good setup for agents

There are many open source STT models that can run locally on Mac with good performance, such as whisper and Parakeet

> Amazon and Google have both been accused of similar practices, but they agreed some commitments rather than having a formal decision against them

Amazon is still full of fake reviews, it does not take a genius to spot them. And nothing happened. What would be the outcome of the investigation? legal paper saying we are committed to do better?

I hope it occurs to Google that they can use this feature to update the design of their websites and services

I wonder if they have been, the bugs in their UIs are increasing in frequency

> Gartner analyst Dennis Xu has half-jokingly suggested banning use of Microsoft’s Copilot AI on Friday afternoons, because he fears at that time of week users may be too lazy to properly check its possibly offensive output.

Aka: clickbait