The Industrialization of IT

The thing about John Henry is that John Henry is dead . Here is some rough math: In San Francisco, entry-level software engineers make about $190,000 a year. Hiring someone costs more than just their salary; companies also pay for healthcare costs, payroll taxes, and other benefits. Conservatively, the fully-loaded cost of an employee is 30 percent higher than their take-home compensation, so the total cost to employ an engineer is about $250,000 a year. The best AI model for writing code is probably Gemini 2.5 Pro. For prompts that are under 200,000 tokens, Gemini costs $1.25 per million input tokens, and $10 per million output tokens. At these prices, a 50,000 token prompt that returns a 5,000 token response—which is about 5,000 lines of input code and 500 lines of output—costs a little more than 11 cents. If you sent a prompt to Gemini every 15 seconds for 24 hours, you would send 5,760 requests a day, and spend $648. If you did this every day for an entire year, you’d send over t ... Read full article.