Larridin priced the AI-native engineer - $920 a month in tokens, 11.8x the output

Nobody has a defensible number for what an engineer should burn on AI, so the budget goes to whoever argues loudest in the room. This is four weeks of billed spend matched against code that actually merged.

- Median engineer: $213 a week, roughly $920 a month
- Top decile: $911 a week, about $3,900 a month
- The deeply AI-native cohort hits 11.8x output at around $1,300 a week
- The low-AI cohort tops out near 1.9x no matter what it spends

Use it as a budget anchor and nothing more: cohort sizes and company names are withheld and the vendor sells the diagnostic, so the shape of the curve is the finding here, not the exact multiples.

https://larridin.com/data

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