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TS Tarun Sachdeva On devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development

“I think engineering and software is the ultimate form of leverage. To only focus on the cost associated with a task is probably not the best form of engineering management, at least at this level of fidelity. I often find myself looking at the cost associated with a task and then just not looking at it, because it's kind of unfair. Sometimes those dollars are spent in learning.”

devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

“I think engineering and software is the ultimate form of leverage. To only focus on the cost associated with a task is probably not the best form of engineering management, at least at this level of fidelity. I often find myself looking at the cost associated with a task and then just not looking at it, because it's kind of unfair. Sometimes those dollars are spent in learning.” — Tarun Sachdeva, devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development

Context

A host had described a coding harness that shows a dollar amount per session, and a feature that ended up costing $400. Tarun argues against managing engineering at per-task cost granularity and explains why Traces doesn't surface token counts by default.

Transcript

devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development Around 36:50 into the episode
Tarun Sachdeva

…you can get to here. That, you know, it's, it's really up to you as an engineering leader or manager or developer to act on that in some way, shape, or form. Like, you know, it's a question on whether or not that's data you should use to change something or it's just interesting to observe. So

Andrew Lisowski

yeah, the coding harness I use at work recently added a dollar amount to each like session. And seeing that dollar count go up as I like iterate more and more, I'm like, oh, this will just be like a nice little feature I can fire off. And it was like $400 later. Sheesh.

Tarun Sachdeva

Yeah. Yeah. You know what? I think this is like a really interesting conversation that you're bringing up, man. Like, I think the idea of attaching dollars to every task at that level of granularity is, you know, for engineering is not like, you know, unless you can also attach the like the dollars that that could potentially generate.

Andrew Lisowski

Yeah.

Tarun Sachdeva

Right. Is not a complete view of the story, right? Like, I think it's, it's really, I think engineering and software is a, it, it's a, it's the ultimate form of leverage. Andrew Lisowski to only focus on the cost associated with a task is, I think, probably not the best form of engineering…

Andrew Lisowski

Yeah, just on time savings alone. Like if I prompted $400 away, but I saved three months of my own life like going down different paths and finding like the dead ends. Like it's kind of hard to quantify that upfront. There's a lot of, yeah.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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