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I know people at medium size companies where they are tracking AI costs very carefully. They are pulling back to levels under $100/week in AI spend per engineer, encouraging use of lower quality, lower cost models, etc.

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You can run models near 24/7 per developers at that price with judicious choice of subscriptions, so that's not really saying much.

Most people don't yet have mature enough setups to fully exploit that level of use.

With open models, perhaps. But $100/week isn't going to get you 24/7 use of Claude Sonnet.

$100/week will get you both a higher tier of Claude and significantly more tokens with GLM5.1 or Kimi, both of which are competitive in a decent harness (for Kimi that means their own CLI - it works well in that, but has a lot of quirks that requires special treatment). Just slightly more will get you all three.

Enterprise accounts pay per token.

Of all the companies I've done work for over the last couple of years, only one have used an enterprise account.

I don't doubt you, but $100 is approximately the cost to company of one hour of dev time. If companies end up being willing to spend only 2% of their dev budget on AI, this bubble is not going to last long.

I agree. $100/week is absurdly low if you want to allow for any real experimentation and productive use of these tools.

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