Developer AI Token Costs Could Exceed Their Salaries in Two Years
6 127"Enterprises may soon be paying as much for their developers' AI token usage as they do for their salaries," writes InfoWorld: According to Gartner, these costs will meet, or even exceed, the typical software engineer's monthly salary within the next two years. This is not only because developers are increasingly adopting generative AI and agentic tools, it reflects a trend toward consumption-based licensing models as vendors balance infrastructure investments with profitability...
Gartner senior principal analyst Nitish Tyagi explained that it's important to note that Gartner's prediction is based on a global average salary of $2,000 per month; it doesn't mean AI token usage will exceed all salaries. For instance, in the US, yearly pay rates can be six digits or more. However, that kind of spend is not out of the realm of possibility, Tyagi emphasized. "I have heard scary numbers like 'My developer consumed $20K last month,' or 'A business user consumed $32K'."
If these amounts sound shocking, that's the point. "The goal is to alarm the industry about the impact of token cost if it is not governed and controlled," he said... AI coding vendors have yet to deliver "mature, built-in cost optimization capabilities," Tyagi said, and prices will likely only continue to rise as vendors further build out their models while at the same time trying to remain profitable. Thus, enterprises struggle to forecast and control costs, and, because AI is moving so fast, many organizations lack the "maturity and frameworks" to determine ROI, he noted. Agent-driven workflows are difficult to govern, context windows become bloated, budgets are wiped out earlier than anticipated, and token spend becomes hard to justify....
"Without a governed engineering operating model, costs can escalate faster than the productivity gains these tools are designed to deliver," Tyagi said.
6 comments
software engineer's $2,000 monthly salary (Score: 5, Insightful)
by bsdetector101 ( 6345122 ) on Sunday June 28, 2026 @07:57AM (#66213912)
LMAO....Gartner senior principal analyst Nitish Tyagi explained that it's important to note that Gartner's prediction is based on a global average salary of $2,000 per month; What was he smoking to come up with that lowball # ???
Re:software engineer's $2,000 monthly salary (Score: 5, Informative)
by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Sunday June 28, 2026 @09:20AM (#66213958)
This is a GLOBAL average. For France the pay grade of 2 000 €/month (30 k€/year) would Junior level for a developer (look here for current job offers: as "developer", typical is 40 k€/year before taxes, remove 25% for taxes, then divide by 12: https://www.apec.fr/candidat/r... [www.apec.fr] ). For Southern Europe 2000 € is considered a good salary.
Re:Tooling exceeds Machinist Cost (Score: 5, Informative)
by Compholio ( 770966 ) on Sunday June 28, 2026 @10:46AM (#66214062)
Yeah, somebody let slip that out larger organization is blowing $300k/mo on AI a while back when somebody else complained that our smaller section bought a nice server with a bunch of GPU for $50k. We get along just fine with our one-time purchase and really don't see the need to rent servers.
We ran into something similar where we were looking at the cloud compute cost for a project that we could buy a better server every month for the price we were paying and had a bunch of folks trying to keep us in the cloud. At the end of the day it always boils down to that they don't want to have employees to maintain the physical infrastructure and it's mind-blowing how much people are willing to blow on renting this stuff.
Re:Subsidies can't last forever (Score: 5, Interesting)
by gtall ( 79522 ) on Sunday June 28, 2026 @10:09AM (#66214006)
The Wall Street Journal had a story a weekend ago about how OpenAI and Anthropic are getting pressure to cut their prices, that will certainly ding their path to profitability and thus their stock prices (were it to come to pass). Apparently there are some Open Source AI thingies out there and the Chinese are always ready with a cheaper product. Some companies are starting to use them.
I suppose we'll get another Idiot-Gram from Project 2025, foghorned into the blathersphere by la Presidenta about how using Chinese AI could turn the users into Chinese eating Chinese food or Ohio pets, or using Communist AI that doesn't have an upfront price. Those sneaky Antifa operatives will stop at nothing to screw White America. They've already destroyed the reflecting pool, they'll be coming by your homes to pee in your pools as well.
I tried (Score: 5, Interesting)
by jamienk ( 62492 ) on Sunday June 28, 2026 @10:42AM (#66214054)
I tried hard in the last 2 months: I bought Claude, came up with a project I thought seemed reasonable: JS-based rich-text editor with plugin system. Existing solutions (CKEditor, TinyMCE, Quill, etc etc) are old, unwieldy, sometimes proprietary, and modern browsers have many newly supported features... My goal was an HTML web component of /
I tried to carefully prompt. Before coding I used Claude to help research the issues involved (dead standards, browsers handling edges cases differently, generated HTML questions, etc.). Claude was thoughtful and reassuring. I knew it would be more complex than Claude kept insisting, but that's OK. As usual with LLMs, at first I was more than impressed, I was blown away.
Still, bugs. That's expected. Fixes were easy and it was amazing how Claude understood the issues. But the more I tested, the more the bugs proliferated. Some issues activated Claude to rewrite whole architectural parts of the codebase, which broke dependencies. Fixing the dependent stuff introduced new bugs. I slowly had to learn more and more about the implementation specifics. More and more I had to audit the code changes, revert, try again. Soon I found myself questioning Claude's approaches in what seemed to be subtle ways. At times I was forced to really dig in, and the code – which looked so clean and organized – was a true spaghetti mess. Out-of-date comments. Repeated blocks of functionality with small differences. Convoluted back-and-forth paths across files, functions, classes. Each plugin had drifted to requiring its own long list of specialized one-off supporting worlds of code. Basic browser functions got overwritten with convoluted bespoke mish-mash slop with long interruptions of exceptions work-arounds and crazy shit.
Maybe the thing works. But the bugs are brutal! Everything is delicate! I've lost track of what the hell is going on.
But all of this was very familiar! It all looked like what USED TO happen to me before I got experience. What happened when I instructed programming newbies to take a crack without supervision. What happened when someone paid $5 to Upwork for something the boss thought would be easy.
We are not there yet. Not even close. It is 1998 and we are using for layout with the "100% td width" work-around.
Ditto: have to throw away 1/2 of what Claude does (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Sunday June 28, 2026 @11:31AM (#66214102)
I am mandated to use Claude by my employer. I'm grateful it's there, but no, I cannot fucking trust that stuff. I give maybe 5 prompts a day and at least one will have a major error. I have to completely discard over half of what Claude does. I've given up trusting it to write unit tests. I am glad I'm not paying for it and it gets more expensive with each version.
The only reason I am glad it's there is that when I prompt it something...it gives a wrong answer that usually leads me to the correct one. It's pretty useless for the languages I know well. It's too unreliable to save me time. The only benefit is for languages and platforms I know nothing about. I will admit, when it speeds the process along greatly. Although even then, like Regex, which I used like 4x a year....it'll write a TERRIBLE RegEx that's 100 characters long, but it works and it jogs my memory well enough to fix it down to a 20 character RegEx like a how someone who isn't a moron would have written it. It also allows me to be braver in technology I don't work with...for better or worse. As they say...nothing is more dangerous than a guy with "a little" knowledge...and access to really sharp tools!