Is AI Cheap Enough to Replace Developers?

The article contrasts high public benchmark scores (e.g., Claude Opus 4.8 at 88.6% on SWE-bench Verified) with much lower results on private codebases (no model clears 47% on the private commercial set), and notes that the two top-scoring models, Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5, are unavailable after Anthropic suspended public access under an export control directive. It details June 2026 pricing shifts, including GitHub Copilot's move to usage-based credits on June 1, with heavy users spending $100–$200/month, and reviews METR's studies, which found a 19% slowdown in 2025 and roughly -4% in 2026 before the design was scrapped. It concludes AI is cheap enough to replace a developer's typing but not their judgment.