Parallelismen is not cheap, in the end it costs the same. It is one resource for a long time vs many resources for a short time.
Agent parallelism is cheap in the same way tapwater is cheap — that is, you pay exactly for what you use at a given moment, no more and no less.
Humans are a lot more expensive, it takes ~a year to find, interview, hire, onboard and offboard an employee, while an agent can be spun up for 10 seconds, do its work and vanish back into the ether.
Agents are lambda functions where humans are bare-metal servers that you have to rack yourself.
Sure, I completely agree with that, but we totally went off-topic. The questions was whether the correct measure is wall-clock time or compute-time and for that the difference in difficulty to add another agent or add another employee is irrelevant. And to reiterate my point, compute-time is what delivers the results and also is what you pay for, so that is what counts. That you can squeeze that compute-time into a shorter amount of wall-time by utilizing more resources in parallel is also important but unrelated to the fact that compute-time is what delivers the results.
We didn't go off topic at all. You introduced the analogy to hiring a large number of people. That is the right analogy. But the reason that the conclusion is different in the two cases is that it is much cheaper to run a large number of agents in parallel than it is to hire a large number of people. Your analogy illustrates the article's point rather than contradicting it.
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It is very cheap relative to hiring people (you introduced the analogy to a company hiring a large number of people).