Cline very visibly displays the ongoing cost of the task. Light edits are about 10 cents, and heavy stuff can run a couple of bucks. It's just that the tab accumulates faster than I expect.
> You can "Save" 1,000 hours every night, but you don't actuall get those 1,000 hours back.
What do you mean?
If I have some task that requires 1000 hours, and I'm able to shave it down to one hour, then I did just "save" 999 hours -- just in the same way that if something costs $5 and I pay $4, I saved $
My point is that saving 1,000 hours each day doesn't actually give you 1,000 hours a day to do things with.
You still get your 24 hours, no matter how much time you save.
What actually matters is the value of what is delivered, not how much time it actually saves you. Justifying costs by "time saved" is a good way to eat up your money on time-saving devices.
If I "save 1000 hours" then that could be distributed over 41.666 days, so no task would need to be performed during that period because "I saved 1000 hours".
You could also say you saved 41.666 people an entire 24 hour day, by "saving 1000 hours", or some other fractional way.
How you're trying to explain it as "saving 1000 hours each day" is really not making any sense without further context.
And I'm sure if I hadn't written this comment I would be saving 1000 hours on a stupid comment thread.
It's like this coupon booklets they used to sell. "Over $10,000 of savings!"
Yes but how much money do I have to spend in order to save $10,000?
There was this funny commercial in the 90s for some muffler repair chain that was having a promotion: "Save Fifty Dollars..."
The theme was "What will you do with the fifty dollars you saved?" And it was people going to Disneyland or afancy dinner date.
The people (actors) believed they were receiving $50. They acted as if it was free money. Meanwhile there was zero talk about whether their cars needed muffler repair at all.
I think one issue is that you won't always be able to invoice those extra 999 hours to your customer. Sometimes you'll still only be able to get paid for 1 hour, depending on the task and contract.
But the llm bill will always invoice you for all the saved work regardless.
(from a companies perspective, this is true). As a developer, you may not be paid by the task -- If I finish something early, I start work on the next thing.
If you earn more than me, then if you value "time saved" then you should pay me to take my washing off me. Because then you can save even more of your valuable time!
The more of my washing you can take off me, the more of your time you can save by then using a washing machine or laundry service!
Saving an hour of my time is a waste, when saving an hour of your time is worth so much more. So it makes economic sense for you to pay me, to take my washing off me!
> LLMs are now being positioned as "let them work autonomously in the background"
The only people who believe this level of AI marketing are the people who haven't yet used the tools.
> which means no one will be watching the cost in real time.
Maybe some day there's an agentic coding tool that goes off into the weeds and runs for days doing meaningless tasks until someone catches it and does a Ctrl-C, but the tools I've used are more likely to stop short of the goal than to continue crunching indefinitely.
Regardless, it seems like a common experience for first-timers to try a light task and then realize they've spent $3, instantly setting expectations for how easy it is to run up a large bill if you're not careful.
