Staff Engineer here. Our CTO told us in March two things. One, if we didn’t get on board with AI then we would be unemployable in 3 months and two, we had to use AI for everything. Literally everything. I asked (as a senior engineer of 19 years) if that included simple bug fixes I see that take minutes vs 30+ describing the problem. The answer was “absolutely”. Our budget is $400K /month to Anthropic and we exceeded that 3 weeks into May
Yeah until CTOs start to realize that they spent the budget to double the workforce on tokens while producing nothing of lasting value. Nobody profits from LLM code except LLM companies.
Our budget is $400K /month to Anthropic and we exceeded that 3 weeks into May
Fucking hell, that’s so much money to burn on management’s AI addiction.
Have to wonder how your finance department feels about burning almost half a million a month.
Also, wild that management is telling you that not letting your skills degrade by handing everything off to an AI is what’ll make you unemployable.
They think once the ball is rolling, then they can phase out the humans.
They think that AI usage is like training a junior dev, that it starts out hopeless but over time can operate without the expertise.
They don’t realize that invoking AI doesn’t work that way, that the context window is the only accumulation of anything germain to your codebase, and that the model doesn’t evolve based on that interaction.
So they don’t care about the skills, they want to get to the point where they can toss a prompt into Claude and have it all taken care of, thinking that their employee usage of it somehow accelerates that outcome.
If they’re anything like my company’s executive team, they’re using AI to make their decisions too. They’re being spoonfed the issue isn’t AI underperforming, it’s you.
They’ll soon fire you first before capitulate on the notion their AI implementation sucks.
Ours said the same thing back in December. Our principal engineer said we had to start using the chatbot for all coding.
I’ve tried it but at some point it gets faster for me to do it myself 50% of the time. And some of the other times it’s just flat out wrong. The times it gets it right are great; but I hate feeling like I’m relying on a slot machine for my job.
I just started using it just to commit and for PRs to make it look like I’m using it all the time. Burns tokens and execs can’t tell the difference.
Towards the end of the month I just start generating mindless crap so I don’t get “dinged” for under-using AI.
The rest of the month I always set the model to the most expensive to try to naturally burn through my quota and get marginally less annoyed by the even worse suggestions from the default models.
Since burning through tokens really involves letting it invoke commands, I don’t really burn that much naturally since I don’t like reviewing and approving commands and I’m sure as hell not going to let it just run comands at will.
400k a month is quite a bit of GPU power. I do not understand why software companies aren’t at least offsetting their Claude usage with open source models running on their own hardware. It seems like a no brainer. Opus is really good but most tasks aren’t that complex and a smaller model will work just as well.
Sometimes I’m sad I quit software development as a job. So much room for malicious compliance with this AI bullshit. And if something goes wrong you can just blame it on the AI you were forced to use. The fun I could have had…
Studies have already shown that the moment you start relegating code to LLMs you kinda just start using them as a crutch even if you don’t need them.
Staff Engineer here. Our CTO told us in March two things. One, if we didn’t get on board with AI then we would be unemployable in 3 months and two, we had to use AI for everything. Literally everything. I asked (as a senior engineer of 19 years) if that included simple bug fixes I see that take minutes vs 30+ describing the problem. The answer was “absolutely”. Our budget is $400K /month to Anthropic and we exceeded that 3 weeks into May
It’s always the damn suits.
Pump those numbers, make them regret the decision.
Also that’s an insane budget for AI.
I’m doing my part!
Unfortunately “doing your part” is making the AI companies look like they have revenue just before IPO.
Yeah until CTOs start to realize that they spent the budget to double the workforce on tokens while producing nothing of lasting value. Nobody profits from LLM code except LLM companies.
That’s my hope anyway…
Fucking hell, that’s so much money to burn on management’s AI addiction. Have to wonder how your finance department feels about burning almost half a million a month.
Also, wild that management is telling you that not letting your skills degrade by handing everything off to an AI is what’ll make you unemployable.
They think once the ball is rolling, then they can phase out the humans.
They think that AI usage is like training a junior dev, that it starts out hopeless but over time can operate without the expertise.
They don’t realize that invoking AI doesn’t work that way, that the context window is the only accumulation of anything germain to your codebase, and that the model doesn’t evolve based on that interaction.
So they don’t care about the skills, they want to get to the point where they can toss a prompt into Claude and have it all taken care of, thinking that their employee usage of it somehow accelerates that outcome.
Oh look, finance has a friend in the other company. This is classic corruption: order shit from your friend’s business and pretend it was necessary.
That’s just a handful of enthusiastic interns, except that you aren’t investing in cultivating future talent…
Burn that budget. Make the CFO pull their hair out when they look at expenses vs revenue. For once, bean counters might save us from this BS.
If they’re anything like my company’s executive team, they’re using AI to make their decisions too. They’re being spoonfed the issue isn’t AI underperforming, it’s you.
They’ll soon fire you first before capitulate on the notion their AI implementation sucks.
The bean counters will maximize their personal profit. You think they can’t game the AI bubble?
but that would just cause the entire company to implode (scorpion and frog dot jpeg)
Gaming the AI bubble is difficult when you’re a customer.
Ours said the same thing back in December. Our principal engineer said we had to start using the chatbot for all coding.
I’ve tried it but at some point it gets faster for me to do it myself 50% of the time. And some of the other times it’s just flat out wrong. The times it gets it right are great; but I hate feeling like I’m relying on a slot machine for my job.
I just started using it just to commit and for PRs to make it look like I’m using it all the time. Burns tokens and execs can’t tell the difference.
Towards the end of the month I just start generating mindless crap so I don’t get “dinged” for under-using AI.
The rest of the month I always set the model to the most expensive to try to naturally burn through my quota and get marginally less annoyed by the even worse suggestions from the default models.
Since burning through tokens really involves letting it invoke commands, I don’t really burn that much naturally since I don’t like reviewing and approving commands and I’m sure as hell not going to let it just run comands at will.
400k a month is quite a bit of GPU power. I do not understand why software companies aren’t at least offsetting their Claude usage with open source models running on their own hardware. It seems like a no brainer. Opus is really good but most tasks aren’t that complex and a smaller model will work just as well.
Because no one ever got fired for buying IBM.
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Sometimes I’m sad I quit software development as a job. So much room for malicious compliance with this AI bullshit. And if something goes wrong you can just blame it on the AI you were forced to use. The fun I could have had…
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