Why $200/day of LLM tokens is the easiest ROI: a $500k engineer costs $2,000 per day
peterjliu · x · 2026-09-25
YuchenjUW argues a $500k engineer costs $2,000 per working day, so $200/day of LLM tokens yielding 20% productivity gains is one of the easiest ROI in a company — the expensive thing is underutilized engineers, not tokens. peterjliu adds there's no reason to cap token spend: $5k/day can make sense.
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