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- Hacker News
- Honestly if people are still willing to pay $300/hr consistently, you’re probably doing something right
Most clients care more about results/reliability than whether every line was typed by hand.
by mujib77 - Do you have demand for 8h/day, 5days/week?by owebmaster
- $300/hr does not sound cheap for coding it sounds cheap if clients are paying for deep experience reliability and business understanding on top of the code.
- With LLMs, if you use them well, you don't just get faster. You also get better test coverage and more reliable code. So you end up delivering more for the same hours (Alex Hormozi defines this really well, worth a read). $300/hr penalizes you for all of that. I switched to project-based, $8-12K per build, because a dashboard delivered in 2 weeks is worth more than one delivered in 8by del-catta
- Buyer side perspective: i'm 18, shipped a product this year. the rate was never what i was looking at. it was whether the person could tell me what something would cost before they built it. a dev who scopes accurately at $300/hr beats one at $150/hr who doesn't every time. the llm thing is a separate question. the code either holds up or it doesn't, how it got there is a methods question not a morality one.by launchseed
- Over 20 years of experience in full stack and mobile here. I'll do it for $200/hr and even use LLMs where useful so half the time is needed.
Unless you are a very well known expert in a certain niche, who the hell is paying $400/hr?
by Lionga - >> I also know which code I could write with LLMs but I never check in LLM code. I could, but that would be cheating. I spend the hours writing code by hand.
Spoken like someone who charges by the hour.... you are incentivised to do things the slowest possible way...
Now, of course, slow might be better, or fast might be better, but you frame fast as "cheating" not as "inferior"... which is ... interesting..
by bruce511