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To be fair, the cost of software development has always been fairly unpredictable. What may be different is that the cost used to be roughly proportional to man-hours spent, while now the number of agents running in parallel may be less predictable.
The cost per month is 100% known and always has been. What has been variable is the rate of delivery. AI is different and can be substantial in countries with lower wages.
> To be fair, the cost of software development has always been fairly unpredictable.

Yes, but in a "oops this is gonna take another two months to finish" kind of way, not the "oops this is the 12th time this month 8 developers have burned $2K in tokens in a single day and no one really knows how it happened" kind of way.

We’re all being given belt-loaded machine guns and tossed on to Planet K. We used to pay for the salaries of soldiers, now we have an Ammo Budget.
A belt loaded spinwheel machine gun, where there are some chances the next bullet is a dummy round, or goes in the wrong direction. And everytime you reload a new soldier is in charge of the gun
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