At one point my boss asked why my AI usage was lower than other team members. I instantly knew what to do. Every session is now run at ultracode effort. My automated PR review bot averages like $80 in usage per PR review.
Oh and my favorite: Use 5 independent subagents to review code change and summarize the findings, and for any finding determine if they are real concerns
-Claude, burning my company's money.
And the planet... While I experience some schadenfreude when reading these comments from programmers, I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end.
When AI use starts to be a line item cost on public companies' financial reports + Anthropic and OpenAI have IPOed and have to file financials too + they kill their growth-hack monthly all-you-can-eat plans.
The entire house of cards falls down when the success metric shifts from "Are you using AI?" to "What return value are you getting for the money you're spending on AI?"
Some smart companies / departments are going to be able to demonstrate stellar AI ROI, but I'm going to be shocked if the bulk of current demand isn't revealed to be naked. Mostly because middle management is always stupid about adopting and using new technology.
Just a bit after anthropic and openAI unload the "value" of their companies into retail investors.
AI companies are running out of money to subsidize those queries, and worse are needing to show a profit. All while they are having a harder time to raise more money as investment.
If nothing changes, things should become more rational soon.
... now... IMO, I place the odds of nothing changing very low...
I'm not too proud to admit that this whole thing scares me though. I fail to see how anything will get better.
I’ve sadly had the same thoughts lately to cash out my 401k and say farewell to software development. I’m hanging in for a little longer, I think the AI/greed fever breaks sometime soon (months not years).
Eg by doing that I was able to develop non-essential features which increased our quality of life for devs last month without going through our PO who'd need to price it - because that does let's you create changes in an incredibly hands off manner with miniscule amount of time investment if you already know what you want to achieve, and how the end result should be...
Admittedly, that's a pretty narrow usecase which is rarely the case- but if it is...
It's interesting that LLM barely had any vetting period or experimentation phase. Suddenly everyone was supposed to test it in production, it seems.
Get ready for that promotion!
Yes, all developer-focused AI subscriptions have been cancelled, and only AI features tacked onto existing subscriptions are part of the AI strategy (eg: Jira+AI, Confluence+AI, Analytics suite du jour+AI, Microsoft Copilot Pro (SHUDDER), etc etc etc.)
Yes, it is virtually impossible to get any additional spending approved.
Yes, there is no more Claude, there is no more Codex, it is all gone now. The AI hype occurs only in company-wide emails about commitment to modernization (with AI), reorganization (with AI), and consolidation (with AI), where no actual strategy is proposed other than what the management consultants advise (with a caveat that there is no budget for anything other than AI features that are tacked onto existing subscriptions at no additional cost.)
2. Your responsibility doesn't end because your manager says so.
3. It's not just about the employee who actually burns the tokens, but also about the rest of it: the idiocy up to the top, and the irresponsibility of the companies offering the service.
Then pretend it was 5 million nails a day from a newly invented nail machine gun. This also has no provable and substantial benefit. Build a house that way and it will quickly be more nail by mass than everything else combined.
I'm sounding a bit like a broken record, but the only political system with a proven track record in modern society is still social democracy: educate the people so they don't bash each other's heads in, distribute wealth and power better, and regulate the markets. It unfortunately died through the unholy matrimony of material well-being and social media.
Similar issues exist in communism too. It doesn’t mean you can just go “but communism” to dismiss me when I raise an accurate and valid critique of the system Ford operates in.
The really stupid thing is that shareholders are also rewarding useless burns of their money. It's capitalist Stakhanovism.
There's so, so much mechanically simple but time consuming refactoring that should be done but nobody ever does that because there's never enough free time. Or even various utility scripts and at least finding out of date docs (or writing very basic ones where none exist, though it'd be hard to get them not to feel like slop writing). Or figuring out what additional custom linter rules would be useful, how to improve the CI pipelines and so on.
If I had the Anthropic Max 20x subscription, I could make a large part of the technical backlog disappear (relatively safely).
What's the rush? Friday will still come at the same speed, and it's unlikely you will receive an increase in pay to account for your increase in productivity.
Most of the tasks you have listed you could do with Haiku, GPT mini, or DeepSeek Flash.
An Anthropic Max 20x subscription is considerable overkill for this sort of task.
Updated version: Tokens expand to exceed the budget available.
Fantasy: automated productivity
Reality: automated bullshit makework and bureaucracy
The AI initiative there is a lot more in "let's try to find ways that this can be useful" instead of "let's use this to the maximum extent".
So far it has been a mostly positive experience. We could figure out ways where it saves time instead of burning money in a token pit.
The only downside is that code reviews are becoming the bottleneck. Every PR still needs a human reviewer, and that is not changing. The influx of PRs increased slightly, the rate of reviews not as much.
Quoting the host of the recurring Quiz Broadcast sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look: "Books mention 'hope'. What was 'hope'?"
They can do what works, or they can fail. Large enough companies with enough inertia can do really dumb things for a while, but even giants fall.
Are you saying companies have to mandate AI everywhere?
Or are you saying the exact opposite, as your second sentence suggests?
I haven't heard of AI mandates in small companies, only in big ones.
That is essentially not an argument in any direction.
Trust without verification though, we're waiting for AI's Challenger disaster equivalent.
> The latest layoffs across all tech companies. So far in 2026, there have been 421 layoffs at tech companies with 157,807 people impacted (882 people per day). In 2025, there were 783 layoffs at tech companies w/ 245,953 people impacted (674 people per day).
Perhaps that's where it gets interesting.
We still need the humans, there are no cases for novel useful work I can think of, or have seen, where humans are no longer required.
I think objections to the Theory of Evolution and some objections to the feasibility of Artificial Intelligence have many similarities. Most people (because of their world view) assume an “intelligent” Designer is mandatory for organisms to evolve and for nature to work. They assume the nature is “random” and directionless by itself. Only a higher (supernatural) intelligence (God) can give it a “direction”. So “intelligence” is basically an external, supernatural and unexplainable (since its above our nature we don’t have access to it) phenomenon.
The exact same argument applies to AI. But instead of atoms and DNA we have bits and activations. AI is random and directionless. Only a superior intelligence (a human) can give it a direction. Like nature, a computer can’t have intelligence by itself. Intelligence is external, supernatural/supercomputational and unexplainable. You can’t compute it, you can’t understand it, you can’t replicate it.
This is because human intelligence, like God’s intelligence, lives in a supernatural realm. Some people even believe that it’s the same thing as (or a copy of) the divine intelligence. Some others don’t believe that but still have trouble accepting their human intelligence is not a unique phenomenon and not something above this mundane world.
There, I said it. I think without this warning most of the debate and “philosophical” arguments against AI are useless. They are more like wishful thinking, shaped with the world view of the person. It’s about belief and not technical feasibility.
From the technical perspective, most of these rehired Ford folks will be replaced again in a few years. This was about overestimating the short-term effects of the automation. But in the longer term Ford will indeed have much less humans.
BTW, this new trend of “extracting the knowledge of skilled senior workers to replace them” deserves its own name. This is not a good thing for humanity, but this is exactly what they are doing.
Some people have not learned that velocity at small scale without global synchronisation is just thermal agitation.
"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."
- US Navy SEALs
Unfortunately the only phone line was answered by an AI bot who stubbornly refused to move the booking, simply telling us there was no availability within an hour of our booking.
Fortunately my partner was passing so was able to go in and speak to someone is person who was happy to move our booking back 2 hours. Lunch and drinks for our party must have come to several hundred pounds.
I'd estimate our party was between a third or maybe half of all the customers there. Had we chosen to book elsewhere I bet someone would still be patting themselves on the back about how clever they were to save a few minutes a day on actually answering the phone to actual customers.
Value is measure in generalized labour, since that the universal measure of human effort. The genealized amount of time a human being must spend to produce something from its parts. Generalized labour is also what's bought from labourers. You don't pay them to do something specific, you pay them to labour in general.
This contrasts against specific labour, which is whats actually required in the moment. Generalized labour power must be the right kind of specific labour to actually produce anything of value.
The AI leaders have been told that AI is labour. To the extent that it currently is, which I believe is only the case because the market hasn't adjusted, it's not the right specific labour to male anything valuable.
It seems to me that the text is saying that generalised labour produces value, but then only specific labour produces actual value. What is the difference between actual value and value in general? Is some value somehow more valuable that other? Are we even speaking the same language? Is this just making shit up as you go along and hope nobody notices because the general idea is appealing?
And yes, this does mean they view us workers as somewhere between slaves and robots, replicable by a token predictor.
I’m sure they’re having a great time, and getting filthy rich doing it, but I don’t enjoy having my livelihood attached to the consequences of their repeatedly-stupid-behaviour.
You just have to get the input coefficient right. The least amount of acceptable quality with the least amount of costs is the sweet spot. /s