Do this exercise: Take your company's market cap and divide it by the total number of lines of code in the company's repo. You'll discover that don't need that much code to create value. For Google (somewhat publicly somewhat known), this is something like $2000 per line of code. Your company is probably not too different, certainly within an order of magnitude.
So let's assume 1 line of correct code is approximately 10 tokens and $1000 of value. If you could theoretically write the correct code, $10 per 1M output tokens should get you $100K worth of value, or 10000x return! Obviously, thought experiment, very theoretical limit no one can achieve, doesn't include thinking tokens, etc, but it's worth thinking about how much your code is actually moving the needle.
Maybe I'm doing things wrong, but I don't need that much code and I don't spend that much time producing code (maybe 1000 lines in a productive day), because the bulk of my time is spent researching, testing, evaluating, thinking, etc to find out how to write only very valuable code. 1000 lines is laughable compared to what tokenmaxxers do, but over the course of a month that's a 200-300K codebase and anyone who has worked on something of that size knows it can support a sizeable business.
So let's assume 1 line of correct code is approximately 10 tokens and $1000 of value. If you could theoretically write the correct code, $10 per 1M output tokens should get you $100K worth of value, or 10000x return! Obviously, thought experiment, very theoretical limit no one can achieve, doesn't include thinking tokens, etc, but it's worth thinking about how much your code is actually moving the needle.
Maybe I'm doing things wrong, but I don't need that much code and I don't spend that much time producing code (maybe 1000 lines in a productive day), because the bulk of my time is spent researching, testing, evaluating, thinking, etc to find out how to write only very valuable code. 1000 lines is laughable compared to what tokenmaxxers do, but over the course of a month that's a 200-300K codebase and anyone who has worked on something of that size knows it can support a sizeable business.