411–420 of 819 posts
Just to put this in context. If every company did this, all over the world, with that same limit, we are talking about something around $45B monthly in revenue for all AI companies to share.
If a worker doesn't use their AI/LLM budget, can they get a raise?
Just to put this in context. If every company did this, all over the world, with that same limit, we are talking about something around $45B monthly in revenue for all AI companies to share.
Are you saying there are only 30 million people employed in white collar jobs in the world?
Just to put this in context. If every company did this, all over the world, with that same limit, we are talking about something around $45B monthly in revenue for all AI companies to share.
45 billion / 1500 $ is 30 million workers. How did we arrive at 30 million?
I still have never hit a ceiling with my Claude Max $100 account, much less the Max $200 account. I'm not burning tokens needlessly, nor running it all day, but I do use CC almost daily. What are these devs doing that they are burning more than $1500 in tokens a month? Maybe it's just me, but I still find that I really have to "shepherd" the AI and work with it to get the results I want. And I read every line of code…
All the code gets summarized and fed into their manager's agent contexts, probably duplicated several times across levels and departments, with some generated back-and-forth emails pinging around the org chart, eventually generating 2-3 long-winded reports that nobody will read chock full of generated visualizations that can all get consolidated into a generated slide deck that they'll show (maybe, at some point) to a handful of humans with more money than a human brain can conceptualize to demonstrate all of the innovation they're doing.
I am increasingly convinced that many of these companies are dead trees whose only function is to burn money lest it fall into the hands of the peasantry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
oh come on, a paid shill? Simon is very fascinated by AI and at times he can be a little too optimistic but he is generally balanced and his perspective evolves over time which can be seen in his writing. Nerd who loves nerd things a little too much? Sure. Paid shill by Big LLM? Nah.
The issue is he’s not actually balanced at all. I’ve never seen him say anything negative about an AI product.
“I'm finding that coding agents can take me from a vague idea to a working solution, one with tests and documentation and that looks like a carefully considered project evolved over the course of many weeks... in less than an hour.
Even if the code is rock solid, there's a limit to how many projects like that I can sensibly care for - and if they're instantly abandoned, what value was there from creating them in the first place?”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/31/the-solution-might-be-...
Here is Simon questioning a fundamental belief held by the pro-LLM lobby. Would a paid shill question that?
Simon is, without question, an enthusiastic pro-LLM person. I disagree with what he says often, the product market fit post was a bad take. But I don’t believe he is shying away from sharing his thoughts when they’re not favorable to the industry.
Their wet dream was never automation. It was zero marginal cost labor. And that dream is starting to rot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem isn't really Uber, Microsoft or Nvidia, it's all the smaller none IT companies that also have developers on staff. They are screwed. $1500 per seat per month is just way to expensive, but they also can't afford to build and maintain their own on-premise solution. If Microsoft can't afford to run CoPilot for their own developer, what chance does any of their customers stand? If the large, well founded IT c…
It's an extra 18k a year for developer tools when they're paying how much a year per developer? Having software developers at all isn't cheap. Also, I don't believe you need to spend $1500 a month on a coding agent if you optimize usage at all.
For the employer those employees cost between 2945 - 7736 EUR per month based on https://kalkulatori.lv/lv/algas-kalkulators (income and social taxes).
So on the lower end that's (1500 USD ~ 1300 EUR) close to half the total expenses of such a developer, on the high end here around 15-20%. That's quite significant, depends on whether their productivity also improves (if that's what the orgs care about).
And we’re not even the country with the worst pay out there, but pay the same for tokens, cause regional pricing isn’t a thing!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“AI coding is a fad” is not just one big camp of similar-minded people. Different groups have to give up on their pre-existing beliefs in order to be ok with AI coding. Think of people who were very strict with variable names. People who pushed for multiple-levels deep of abstractions for a single API logic that’s not going to be reused. People who believed that coding is craft, rather than just a process to get to t…
What's an int vs a float vs a boolean? What's a function? What's a class? What's a variable ? You don't actually need to know the answer to those questions in order to vibe code. That's a lot of priors to update!
Often that started with the macro recorder. Then you worked out what that "recorded" code/sludge did, removed the crud you didn't need or want, improved the logic and so on. I bought books to understand it better. Now you can ask a (different) LLM "what is this? why is it used? How would I?" etc which is probably a faster learning curve than books, newsgroups and old school personal home pages with good info.
I would have been quite surprised when I first used a VBA macro in anger just how far I would go down the rabbit hole. C, asm, verilog, Linux were no part of what I originally signed up for!
Some people will specialise in the equivalent of recording macros and go no further. And this will be fine for code that gets it done but doesn't matter too much in the other dimensions (security, reliability, usefulness without the authors' support, etc.) Much like VBA utilities inside companies that were useful way back when. Other people will want what they produce to be better, even good, and they will learn about floating point [1] and all the rest, much as I did. Probably learn pretty fast too. [2]
[1] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.h...
[2] Working out how to write an excel vba webserver and using it to collect and and collate summary data from various divisions into reports was seedy as hell, solved the actual business problem (given ridiculous but intractable constraints) and isn't something you can record. We all have stories from a misspent youth that we're simultaneously ashamed and yet somehow proud of.
> I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI - which currently costs me just $100 per provider thanks to their generous subsidized plans for individual subscribers. Do we know that AI providers are going to keep these per-token prices, or eventually lower them because of competition from China? Many lower-budget individuals are now moving to China open weight mode…
One aspect Paul Kedrosky mentioned recently is the concept of „duration mismatch“. The price per token goes down over time (either because the AI vendor reduces due to competition pressure, or because customers are now incentivized to use older cheaper models). But datacenters are financed through debt, with the assumption their revenue increases over time. Quoting him: „[AI vendors are] paying for a fixed cost with…