We’re encouraged to use AI at work (I’m senior full stack and have been coding for 20 years) and honestly I’ve Ben experimenting a lot and other than menial work, doing stuff myself is still way faster when you have a large existing codebase. I spent probably £200 of tokens last week trying I get it to expand a lib in an elixir monolith I’m unfamiliar with, and add a controller to a large old Phoenix API. Couldn’t get it working. This week got some good rest and just did the whole thing myself in like a couple days.

I take it as a P = NP problem.

I either: a. spend money on a person and take money and time to specify the business problem to this person and take money and time to judge the results b. skip the person and just use the AI itself

The difference between the two is that I don't have some metaphorical hostage to execute in "b". If the task is trivial enough, I don't need a hostage.

What does that have to do with P = NP?

I’m willing to pay £20K less for someone who promises to never use AI.

AI can’t solve everything, but never using it isn’t the right answer.

Does 20k really make a difference in quality of hire?

Please don't nitpick over the exact number

(But yes, salaries in the UK are low. £20k is a lot to a lot of people)

In this case it's like 40%, so I would assume yes

You get what you pay for is a correlation with some causation and a lot of randomness.

True but we can agree on some level if we can agree generally a £30k junior is going to be worse than a £100k senior

Ymmv