I would be really curious to hear from devs at Databricks what the experience of development is like internally. I work at a small startup with essentially unlimited AI spend budget - the entire point is that I should be turning to it at every opportunity since our human labor is so expensive relative to tokens. So generally it's like:
- Spend most time prioritizing/discussing what to do.
- Once that's agreed, use Fable 5 High + 5.6 Sol XHigh come up with a design + plan. Agree on the high level plan. (Usually this just comes down to choosing where the change belongs on the spectrum between minimal patch <-> full redesign)
- Use Opus 5 or Sol Med to execute
- Auto-fix bugs and CI until green + thermonuclear review skill x3.
- Manual interrogation of change/nits
- Come up with QA plan and have Codex Computer Use execute on it
- Manually spot check the final result (usually a sizable diff, thousands of lines, complete feature E2E, etc)
I probably spend like $80 a day at least but I produce the output of 3 or 4 2022 engineers and probably at better quality. So it's easily worth it. Would I save money by switching to GLM 5.2 and such...perhaps? IDK. At our scale it's not worth the time spent building the eval harness to actually understand the performance tradeoff.
In our team's experience, the product of agents is generally The Homer (1). It does work, but it's vastly overengineered.
When I personally want tight code, I have to spend a considerable amount of time adjusting it manually:
- It needs to be trimmed down. In my experience, at least one agent I use struggles to produce minimalist designs, and it's very frustrating
- I need to consider whether there are solutions based on higher-level assumptions, that AIs typically miss
- I need to check whether there are off-the-shelf solutions - AIs like to reinvent the wheel
IMO, software production has become a mass-produced commodity in every sense - it's much more expensive to produce software manually, but the quality is not the same.
It took me a few seconds of deliberating if The Homer was a reference to baseball or "The Odyssey" and then realized there was a footnote
> software production has become a mass-produced commodity in every sense - it's much more expensive to produce software manually, but the quality is not the same.
This was more true a few months ago but Fable has improved the situation considerably.
Also just remember - minimalist code looks and feels great but customers do not read your code. I have caught myself many times providing "corrections" to abstractions that were already ~fine, just not perfect. The average SWE costs $200/hr. Careful you don't burn $50 worrying about code that will likely be rewritten or can be better abstracted when that's actually needed.
This is a pointless quibble but the hourly rate claim is not true--it's like ~$60 in the USA [0]. Maybe you meant at a specific Org but this is important context when comparing "pricing" between human and AI.
How is this not true? Taking a Senior SWE @ ~$200K, even just the base salary cost / 2080 working hours is $100/hr. Fully loaded employer cost + accounting for non-coding time gets you to upper 100s easily.
Even for a junior making $100K, I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so.
Edit: Fine, "Senior" is not "Average". But naive salary is not the true numerator.
IME this works until it does not. This approach works well at the beginning of a greenfield project, but at the same time because it is so easy to add features, you will likely ship something that is way too over engineered. And that complexity will not amortize over next increments and will more likely lead to the entire project being a black box only fully understood by AI. However a more careful use of AI for targeted surgical changes is far more ”productive” in the long term IMO.
Something isn't clear about the size of your codebase here and the level of reliability your customers expect, as a reader of your comments. Clarity there will help.
My observation has been:
- Initial greenfield work by an LLM is fast and very effective with minimal or no human oversight.
- Subsequent work ends up being over engineered and very verbose. Assumptions are made that aren't suited to the problem at hand (for example I find Fable is extremely regex happy where structured data would work much better from a readability perspective.)
- Once code bloats beyond a certain point due to unguided LLM usage, complexity is high enough that only LLMs can operate on the codebase with any economical amount of time.
- Rinse repeat and your code ends up unclear about any state that's not explicitly being tested and verified in QA loops
For some of our products this has been fine, for others it's been problematic. An understanding of your size and reliability requirements will help make the conversation more productive.
What is the point of working at a startup if you’re dealing with millions of lines of legacy code ? Isn’t the whole point of startups to create & innovate with a clean slate and modern tools?
Do you have issues with performance at the moment? Right now I tend to find that it produces absolutely terrible design patterns and especially performance. I mean maybe I don't know exactly what area you're looking at but yeah for us we tend to find it's terrible wrt dB/caching/scaling and often any performance improvements it proposes end up actually shooting itself in the foot and being worse than before but it's not very good at testing in an organized way to even notice it made it worse despite repeated prompts to do so I mean if I prompt it to test performance in a handheld structured way (it is very bad at finding out what performance to test and why) before making changes I can usually figure it out but it usually takes insistence on the specifics to really ensure a good solution that will actually fix the problem
Are you using the SOTA models at very high reasoning during planning? IME that makes a LOT of a difference. I‘d also never let them just rip into the architecture, but always push back and ask for alternatives first. Once the overall plan is nailed, not that much can go wrong. Provided it’s a reasonable change set and not a 20k LOC PR.
Performance is better than ever. It's never been more practical to set up wildly complex synthetic test environments and measure perf wins. Plus the models will find every possible algorithmic/design improvement.
It actually gives me quite an uncanny feeling, bulldozing over years of human optimization work with a newer, "perfect" design. Like bringing an AK-47 back to the middle ages.
Yes 100%. This morning I casually prompted Codex to drive the browser to complete extensive performance testing in-situ that would have literally been weeks of work before. Probably in reality it just wouldn't have been done, and performance guarantees would have been attempted up front via more careful design.
In this case the design was also AI generated, and there were limited wins to be found because the design was already superb.
Keep the decision-making and execution separate. Use the high IQ models to chat about the design and make them drive subagents to do the actual work. "Chat" style threads are actually quite cheap. Where it gets expensive is having Fable 5 output thousands of lines of implementation where 95% of it was already overdetermined and there were only a few important judgement calls.
I actually have no doubt that I could replace my Opus 5 Low/Medium subagent profiles with Grok 4.5/GLM 5.2/Deepseek v4 Flash and perf would probably be pretty similar.
On top of that - highly recommend adding accurate cost counters to your statusline. You can't improve what you don't measure! (Or even have any intuition about).
Are you at least conversational in the subject matter? You're gonna have a good time just by paying attention and adjusting your workflow. If you're getting a lot of back and forth with it, its asking a lot of planning type questions, stop, step back, rethink the whole feature, and start again from the beginning with everything more fleshed out.
If you are in a brand new field, there's no way to bridge that divide. The issue is you don't know what is good or bad, or whether what you have learned is good or bad. You're in a sports car and you don't know how to drive much less what's track and what's field.
You can spend a lot of effort getting good at prompting towards writing tests and E2E tests to at least verify your app does what you expect it to, regardless of experience.
There are a surprising number of articles like this along the lines of, "we started using AI tools and ended up spending millions per year".
On what planet do people start paying for things without keeping an eye on the costs and no-one notices until you have spent a crazy amount? I don't understand. You are either paying a fixed amount which you are happy about in-advance or you are PAYG in which case you would ballpark how much it costs.
Otherwise it reads a bit like a fake problem, because it didn't really happen, you just foresaw it (as you should) and added a few guide rails.
Not only this, but perhaps even more nefarious is that AWS gives lots of startups $100k+ in credits. This feels generous when you get it. In reality, it means that (unless you are in a compute intensive startup) you can go for months or years before you hit this, but by the time you do, you already have very solid monthly spend.
Initially, you picked the Multi-ZA RDS db.t3.2xlarge instance because you figured "eh i have credits anyway". Two years later, someone looks at this and says "hey, this is expensive and I bet we can do everything we need on a machine half the size". But then they think "if i downsize it and that works, i'll get a thumbs up emoji on a slack thread. If i downsize it and it causes problems, i'll draw the ire of the whole team. I better leave it alone." And the truth is... by the time your company hits the end of those credits, you're probably at the point where that savings isn't gonna do much. Or maybe you are out of business.
And that is how almost every successful company that uses AWS eventually ends up paying six-figures or more annually.
1. Codex, Claude and others try to switch models being used at their level itself to manage the cost and outcomes
2. Now company like data bricks develops one more layer on the top of it to do the same task, of finding the base harness and applicable model
Companies like Codex and Claude are focussing/investing heavily on to ensure that people are using their harness directly or instead use APIs. Unless Databricks has some agreement in place they are violating the TOS and openly publishing an article about it. Would be interesting if openAi or Anthropic come back and claim for the API usage prices and all the savings go away.
... where in the article did they say they were using subscriptions? I'm fairly certain enterprises can't access subscription pricing in any case, they're all API costs (Anthropic doesn't support more than 150 on subscription pricing [0][1]).
Why would it matter if foreign companies analyzed DoorDash data? Pizza deliveries to the Pentagon is all I can come up with, but that's publicly available at https://www.pizzint.watch/
I would bet my entire Polymarket balance ($0) that some military contractors have already asked AIs on the public Internet to design software for them.
This approach seems fundamentally predicated on being able to evaluate coding agents on your own code by having domain specific evals. With that knowledge, you can trust the routing logic is actually improving/maintaining perf while reducing costs.
Without the insight into agent performance, any changes like this feel like a gamble to save $$ at the cost of developer productivity
I'm actually working on building generic repo-specific benchmarks at https://stet.sh ;)
> Rapidly adopting newer, more efficient models delivers the largest cost wins of any technique.
I think the more interesting lever is the fourth they mention: token efficiency.
> By the time costly LLM inference occurs, the user's initial statement accounts for only a negligible fraction of the data fed into the AI system, meaning costs are dominated by context the user did not explicitly include.
I think there’s still lots of low hanging fruit in regards to monitoring and improving agent work. Look at your sessions. Look at how much time and context is being spent on, say, a web search returning dozens of results when one good single-pager doc would’ve been better.
These seem like the obvious tweaks akin to "using a cheaper hosting platform". I think the real savings come from careful context control for programmatic agents, careful tool awareness and usage to reduce thrashing, distilling workflows into deterministic processes and, moat importantly, adding friction and boundaries for non-technical users who tend to burn tokens making insane asks like "analyze all documents and give me a summary".
I've tested Omnigent superficially, attracted to its thinking around policy, governance, sandboxing, and ui. But it's still alpha at present. I forked its Polly model and got working a somewhat more complex multiagent workflow that I've also modeled in Sandcastle and Gas City but the agent broke after the next update which I would have needed to patch to maintain functionality. Subjectively I also noticed individual models seemed to be performing somewhat worse when wrapped in the platform's framework, presumably due to the extra context introduced (token use was measurably higher). Promising project that I'll revisit when it's further along and I do not doubt the outcomes Databricks claims in committedly dogfooding it.
Really? Because removing it from my company has saved us over 2 million a year and we were able to speed up processing. The chargeback model for databricks is predatory at best.
I think you’ve misunderstood the article. It’s about how Databricks reduced their own costs, not about how adopting Databricks will reduce anyone else’s costs.
- Spend most time prioritizing/discussing what to do.
- Once that's agreed, use Fable 5 High + 5.6 Sol XHigh come up with a design + plan. Agree on the high level plan. (Usually this just comes down to choosing where the change belongs on the spectrum between minimal patch <-> full redesign)
- Use Opus 5 or Sol Med to execute
- Auto-fix bugs and CI until green + thermonuclear review skill x3.
- Manual interrogation of change/nits
- Come up with QA plan and have Codex Computer Use execute on it
- Manually spot check the final result (usually a sizable diff, thousands of lines, complete feature E2E, etc)
I probably spend like $80 a day at least but I produce the output of 3 or 4 2022 engineers and probably at better quality. So it's easily worth it. Would I save money by switching to GLM 5.2 and such...perhaps? IDK. At our scale it's not worth the time spent building the eval harness to actually understand the performance tradeoff.
When I personally want tight code, I have to spend a considerable amount of time adjusting it manually:
- It needs to be trimmed down. In my experience, at least one agent I use struggles to produce minimalist designs, and it's very frustrating
- I need to consider whether there are solutions based on higher-level assumptions, that AIs typically miss
- I need to check whether there are off-the-shelf solutions - AIs like to reinvent the wheel
IMO, software production has become a mass-produced commodity in every sense - it's much more expensive to produce software manually, but the quality is not the same.
(1) https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer
> software production has become a mass-produced commodity in every sense - it's much more expensive to produce software manually, but the quality is not the same.
Agreed.
Also just remember - minimalist code looks and feels great but customers do not read your code. I have caught myself many times providing "corrections" to abstractions that were already ~fine, just not perfect. The average SWE costs $200/hr. Careful you don't burn $50 worrying about code that will likely be rewritten or can be better abstracted when that's actually needed.
This is a pointless quibble but the hourly rate claim is not true--it's like ~$60 in the USA [0]. Maybe you meant at a specific Org but this is important context when comparing "pricing" between human and AI.
[0] https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/software-developer/u...
Even for a junior making $100K, I have a hard time believe their time is worth less than $75/hr or so.
Edit: Fine, "Senior" is not "Average". But naive salary is not the true numerator.
And this is how I find out I'm woefully underpaid.
How does a “small startup” end up with a multi million line “legacy” codebase? Something not mathing
My observation has been:
- Initial greenfield work by an LLM is fast and very effective with minimal or no human oversight.
- Subsequent work ends up being over engineered and very verbose. Assumptions are made that aren't suited to the problem at hand (for example I find Fable is extremely regex happy where structured data would work much better from a readability perspective.)
- Once code bloats beyond a certain point due to unguided LLM usage, complexity is high enough that only LLMs can operate on the codebase with any economical amount of time.
- Rinse repeat and your code ends up unclear about any state that's not explicitly being tested and verified in QA loops
For some of our products this has been fine, for others it's been problematic. An understanding of your size and reliability requirements will help make the conversation more productive.
What is the point of working at a startup if you’re dealing with millions of lines of legacy code ? Isn’t the whole point of startups to create & innovate with a clean slate and modern tools?
- Suggest a better approach that makes the AI say, “That’s much simpler. And you’re right. My original plan was over-engineered.”
It actually gives me quite an uncanny feeling, bulldozing over years of human optimization work with a newer, "perfect" design. Like bringing an AK-47 back to the middle ages.
Opus and I wrote a parallelized test harness and labeled groundtruth in around 2 hours.
In 2022 that would've likely been all I did for a couple sprints
In this case the design was also AI generated, and there were limited wins to be found because the design was already superb.
I actually have no doubt that I could replace my Opus 5 Low/Medium subagent profiles with Grok 4.5/GLM 5.2/Deepseek v4 Flash and perf would probably be pretty similar.
On top of that - highly recommend adding accurate cost counters to your statusline. You can't improve what you don't measure! (Or even have any intuition about).
Are you at least conversational in the subject matter? You're gonna have a good time just by paying attention and adjusting your workflow. If you're getting a lot of back and forth with it, its asking a lot of planning type questions, stop, step back, rethink the whole feature, and start again from the beginning with everything more fleshed out.
If you are in a brand new field, there's no way to bridge that divide. The issue is you don't know what is good or bad, or whether what you have learned is good or bad. You're in a sports car and you don't know how to drive much less what's track and what's field.
You can spend a lot of effort getting good at prompting towards writing tests and E2E tests to at least verify your app does what you expect it to, regardless of experience.
> I probably spend like $80 a day
This doesn’t sound like “unlimited”, I spend more than this out of pocket per day and I have a strict budget.
On what planet do people start paying for things without keeping an eye on the costs and no-one notices until you have spent a crazy amount? I don't understand. You are either paying a fixed amount which you are happy about in-advance or you are PAYG in which case you would ballpark how much it costs.
Otherwise it reads a bit like a fake problem, because it didn't really happen, you just foresaw it (as you should) and added a few guide rails.
This is how AWS made its fortune.
Initially, you picked the Multi-ZA RDS db.t3.2xlarge instance because you figured "eh i have credits anyway". Two years later, someone looks at this and says "hey, this is expensive and I bet we can do everything we need on a machine half the size". But then they think "if i downsize it and that works, i'll get a thumbs up emoji on a slack thread. If i downsize it and it causes problems, i'll draw the ire of the whole team. I better leave it alone." And the truth is... by the time your company hits the end of those credits, you're probably at the point where that savings isn't gonna do much. Or maybe you are out of business.
And that is how almost every successful company that uses AWS eventually ends up paying six-figures or more annually.
1. Codex, Claude and others try to switch models being used at their level itself to manage the cost and outcomes
2. Now company like data bricks develops one more layer on the top of it to do the same task, of finding the base harness and applicable model
Companies like Codex and Claude are focussing/investing heavily on to ensure that people are using their harness directly or instead use APIs. Unless Databricks has some agreement in place they are violating the TOS and openly publishing an article about it. Would be interesting if openAi or Anthropic come back and claim for the API usage prices and all the savings go away.
[0]: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9797531-what-is-the-e...
[1]: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9266767-what-is-the-t...
I would bet my entire Polymarket balance ($0) that some military contractors have already asked AIs on the public Internet to design software for them.
Without the insight into agent performance, any changes like this feel like a gamble to save $$ at the cost of developer productivity
I'm actually working on building generic repo-specific benchmarks at https://stet.sh ;)
I think the more interesting lever is the fourth they mention: token efficiency.
> By the time costly LLM inference occurs, the user's initial statement accounts for only a negligible fraction of the data fed into the AI system, meaning costs are dominated by context the user did not explicitly include.
I think there’s still lots of low hanging fruit in regards to monitoring and improving agent work. Look at your sessions. Look at how much time and context is being spent on, say, a web search returning dozens of results when one good single-pager doc would’ve been better.
https://www.databricks.com/blog/introducing-omnigent-meta-ha...
https://github.com/omnigent-ai/omnigent