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.
Just a bit after anthropic and openAI unload the "value" of their companies into retail investors.
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.
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...
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
Updated version: Tokens expand to exceed the budget available.
Fantasy: automated productivity
Reality: automated bullshit makework and bureaucracy