Thread

1. rdli · 1791060574 · focus · HN ↗

   It’s a really good model. Over the past few days, I give Opus some general directives to basically speed up our CI, and telling it I care both about billing minutes and wall clock time. I told it to create a plan after analyzing everything in our CI, run the plan by a Fable subagent, and then focus on low-risk, high-reward changes.

   9 hours later, I had 12 PRs ready to be merged, and the net result is CI time has dropped from ~10 minutes to ~4 minutes, and billing minutes have dropped around 60%. Less than an hour of my attention.

   1. chewchewchew · 1791060895 · focus · HN ↗

      9 hours?!

      1. rdli · 1791061182 · focus · HN ↗

         Yes. It spawned multiple subagents to run different experiments to benchmark a lot of different things, reviewed CI logs from past runs, etc. In the end, there were changes to what/how we cached, various code quality checks, speeding up test runners, and many other things.

         1. Tade0 · 1791063459 · focus · HN ↗

            I dare not ask about the cost, having burned $60 on a task running for 1h 16min once.

            1. dan-robertson · 1791066355 · focus · HN ↗

               If you compare the cost to the price of dinner or whatever else you spend disposable income on, it can seem high but if you compare the cost to employing an engineer (don’t forget costs for payroll taxes, office space and equipment, etc) and consider the fact that the models often seem to be much faster than even expert humans, the costs don’t seem so terrible.

               1. Tade0 · 1791098553 · focus · HN ↗

                  My concern is that there might come a time when this cost is passed onto employees.

                  Suppose everyone starts moving faster thanks to LLMs and it becomes an expectation to use them. Budgets aren't infinite, so one of the two has to happen:

                  1. People get laid off.

                  2. Costs are shifted onto employees - either through lower salaries or having them bring their own subscriptions. I don't even make $500 a day!

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