Excerpt from a Precursor Ventures discussion predicting that developer compute consumption (token/compute costs) will grow faster than wages, potentially leading to developers incurring compute bills that exceed their salaries — e.g., a $250,000-paid developer generating $500,000 in compute costs while doing work equivalent to many people. The piece explores economic tensions arising from AI-driven compute demands.
The one thing he said that I do think is definitely going to happen is that you're going to have developers who will end up spending more in tokens than they're paid in salary. Like their. Their compute consumption will exceed their. Because I think their compute consumption will grow faster than their wages. So at some point, those two lines will. Those two lines will cross. And I think that will be interesting when you have a person who's paid, let's say, $250,000 a year, who's generating a $500,000 compute bill, but that person might be doing the work of what would have previously taken 10 people.
