More developers. Not fewer. While many companies treat AI as a replacement for software engineers, we at Wolkk. deliberately go the other way.
NVIDIA VP Bryan Catanzaro recently put it well: in his team, the cost of AI compute has long exceeded the cost of the highly qualified people using it. So AI is not a cheap substitute — it is an expensive multiplier. And multipliers only unfold their value when someone truly masters them.
Tokens vs. Humans
The “tokens vs. humans” framing that circulates online is mostly satire — but it points at something real. If a single engineer can burn through more money in inference than they cost in salary, then the scarce resource is no longer compute. It is judgment: knowing which problem is worth solving, which generated answer is wrong, and which shortcut will cost you a production incident six months from now.
Spending more on tools while cutting the people who operate them is the one strategy that reliably destroys value. You end up with faster output and slower outcomes.
Why We Hire Engineers With Real AI Experience
That is exactly why, for months now, we have been hiring exclusively tech experts with hands-on AI experience. Not prompt enthusiasts — engineers who have shipped production systems and who use AI the way a senior developer uses any powerful tool: aggressively, and with a review step.
- They know when a generated implementation is subtly wrong, not just syntactically valid.
- They design the data model and the privacy model themselves, then let AI accelerate the rest.
- They treat generated code as a draft, never as a decision.
- They measure the cost of a workflow — tokens included — instead of assuming it is free.
The Combination Makes the Difference
- Top remote developers from Indonesia at significantly lower cost than local hires.
- AI tools for maximum productivity, used daily and deliberately across the whole delivery process.
- Result: a factor of 5–6x in cost and speed compared to local teams.
Neither half works alone. Cheap capacity without AI fluency is just cheap capacity. AI fluency at local rates eats the savings before they reach your budget. Put them together and the economics change category.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A dedicated Wolkk team ships more scope per sprint, not because anyone types faster, but because the mechanical parts — scaffolding, boilerplate, test fixtures, first UI drafts, migration scripts — collapse from hours to minutes. The saved hours go straight back into the parts that actually decide whether a product survives: edge cases, security, observability, and maintainability.
And because the team stays with the product, it accumulates the context that no prompt can reconstruct: why that integration is fragile, which customer depends on that legacy endpoint, what broke last December.
Human With AI — and Global
The future of software development is not human or AI. It is human with AI — and it is global. Teams that combine excellent engineers with excellent tooling, wherever those engineers happen to live, will simply outbuild teams that pick only one of the two.
That is the bet we are making, and it is why we keep hiring more developers. Not fewer.