Inexpensive AI Agents Threaten Entry-Level Coding Jobs

Zhang says that his business earns money on each individual conversation after excluding certain general costs, but he refused to comment on the overall profitability of the startup. With 100 million dollars collected Running capital, including Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, Decagon has the flexibility to prioritize growth on profitability. “That we can priced more, it’s always like a” What if? ” “, He said. “But in general, we are quite happy at the moment.”

“So cheap”

Erica Brescia, Managing Director of the Redpoint Ventures investment company, had an epiphany on the prices of AI agents last month. The price of $ 250 on the new Google IA Plan has surprised it. “All this is so cheap,” she recalls. “It is disproportionate for the value that people get.” She thought that a price of at least double would make sense. (The same week, the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, said Stratechery That he would hire an AI agent per $ 100,000 per year “in the blink of an eye”. ))

Previously, Brescia worked as a chief of the GitHub exploitation, who helped establish the AI ​​price mark. Github’s Copilot coding assistant began to $ 10 per month in 2022months before the beginnings of Chatgpt. Brescia says Github went with a price that would attract a critical mass of users. The objective was to collect data to improve the service, and GitHub’s parent company, Microsoft, did not bother to take a loss on the new tool to get there. In reality, a price 100 times higher would now better reflect the value that the co -pilot provides software developers, estimates Brescia. (Kyle Daigle, responsible for the exploitation of Github, told Wired that the objective of the company is to support, not to replace, the developers and that “the price reflects a commitment to democratize access to powerful tools”)))

Today, Copilot is booming at $ 21 per month. And similar tools have followed his example, notably ZED, who received $ 12.5 million in Redpoint and others. In May, the company began to invoice a minimum of $ 20 per month for a code editor assisted by AI that it built from zero.

ZED CEO Nathan Sobo expects the IA companies to take more over time because current price models are not durable. But compared to humans, he wants to keep the agents of affordable AI so that everyone can use them to increase their work, develop better software and create new jobs. “I want as much intelligence at my disposal at a cost as low as possible,” he says. “But for me, included in this area is potentially a junior engineer using this technology, ideally at a cost as low as possible.”

The Zhang de Decagon feels the same thing about AI coding tools. “Could we pay more?” But “$ 2,000?” Probably not ”. He adds “the hunger of good engineers is infinite”.

AI entrepreneurs suggest that agents could order higher prices if they were easier to configure and more reliable to use. For example, Nandita Giri, a senior software engineer who worked at Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, says that she would pay thousands of dollars a year for an AI personal assistant. “But strict conditions apply – you cannot be frustrated by using it,” she said.

Unfortunately, this day feels far. As a personal project, Giri has tried to develop an AI agent who could prevent psychological exhaustion. “It has just canceled all my meetings,” she says. Certainly a solution, but not ideal.

Now, some companies are hiring “AI architects” to help supervise agent systems and reduce blunders. The question is who will occupy these roles in the future if workers at the start of their careers are cut off from opportunities today. Simon Johnson, economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, does not expect companies to take into account the social cost of career disruption in pricing decisions. He suggests that governments reduce payroll taxes for entry -level roles to encourage hiring. “The good lever to be drawn is the one that reduces employers’ costs,” says Johnson.

Arrigoni chooses a third path. At Loti AI, he prioritized priority for hiring junior engineers and did not use AI coding tools. If the apocalypse comes, “I don’t want to be at fault,” he says.