It was an innovation project, with an endowment of 200k. The task was to implement an llm based bot platform in a company with 700+ coworkers. After demoing MVPs, got 40k and access to experts I never needed to use. Deployed open source AWS solution, built customizations, landing pages, and data crawlers entirely solo using AI coding agents over ~3 months while working on other projects. Zero consultants, zero internal help. Would have easily burned the full 200k the traditional way.
So you still had to put in ~3 months of off and on again work, how many hours did it take you over those three months to configure everything yourself? Then figure about how much would you have had to budget out w/o the llm's help. Show me your math. Then of coarse you'd have to follow up w/ the company whether their "llm based bot platform" wasn't just a complete waste of their 200k in the first place for this to matter at all.
Do you think a developer's monthly salary is $70k? I think the winner is obvious, assuming his product is really worth something and he really had $200k budget for it.
