Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale • Hacker News Board

Re: Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale

#81

Post by sejje » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:57 PM UTC

extr wrote: post #37

pizza234 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In our team's experience, the product of agents is generally The Homer (1). It does work, but it's vastly overengineered. When I personally want tight code, I have to spend a considerable amount of time adjusting it manually: - It needs to be trimmed down. In my experience, at least one agent I use struggles to produce minimalist designs, and it's very frustrating - I need to consider whether there are solutions base…

This was more true a few months ago but Fable has improved the situation considerably. Also just remember - minimalist code looks and feels great but customers do not read your code. I have caught myself many times providing "corrections" to abstractions that were already ~fine, just not perfect. The average SWE costs $200/hr. Careful you don't burn $50 worrying about code that will likely be rewritten or can be bett…

Also, you can probably think about it like this:

"Will I benefit from this code being minimalist before [date]", where [date] is whenever you think the agent will be good enough to come back and make the corrections you would make today.

Re: Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale

#82

Post by therealdrag0 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:57 PM UTC

sandeepkd wrote: post #51

ChoosesBarbecue wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... where in the article did they say they were using subscriptions? I'm fairly certain enterprises can't access subscription pricing in any case, they're all API costs (Anthropic doesn't support more than 150 on subscription pricing [0][1]). [0]: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9797531-what-is-the-e... [1]: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9266767-what-is-the-t...

Going through their harness (codex, claude) is subscription (app use) which is heavily? subsidized. Anyone using the enterprise plan are charged the API pricing, however the article is not clear if Databricks is using enterprise plan or not which is why added the following disclaimer > Unless Databricks has some agreement in place

They certainly have an enterprise plan?

Re: Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale

#83

Post by russellbeattie » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:57 PM UTC

dieselgate wrote: post #45

extr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was more true a few months ago but Fable has improved the situation considerably. Also just remember - minimalist code looks and feels great but customers do not read your code. I have caught myself many times providing "corrections" to abstractions that were already ~fine, just not perfect. The average SWE costs $200/hr. Careful you don't burn $50 worrying about code that will likely be rewritten or can be bett…

> The average SWE costs $200/hr This is a pointless quibble but the hourly rate claim is not true--it's like ~$60 in the USA [0]. Maybe you meant at a specific Org but this is important context when comparing "pricing" between human and AI. [0] https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/software-developer/u...

An MBA's rule of thumb is that a full time employee's hourly cost to a business is at least 1.5x to 2x times their salary depending on employer taxes, benefits, offices, travel, training, hardware, perks, etc.

Re: Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale

#84

Post by dude250711 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:59 PM UTC

First the mofos force you to use AI then they become stingy about it.

An AI-edited post by the way.

Re: Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale

#85

Post by gamblor956 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:59 PM UTC

extr wrote: post #16

I would be really curious to hear from devs at Databricks what the experience of development is like internally. I work at a small startup with essentially unlimited AI spend budget - the entire point is that I should be turning to it at every opportunity since our human labor is so expensive relative to tokens. So generally it's like: - Spend most time prioritizing/discussing what to do. - Once that's agreed, use Fa…

but I produce the output of 3 or 4 2022 engineers and probably at better quality.

Possibly, but the output of a 2022 engineer is about 1/10th of the output of a 2010 engineer, so it's an extremely low bar.

Re: Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale

#86

Post by Anon1096 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:01 PM UTC

sandeepkd wrote: post #51

ChoosesBarbecue wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... where in the article did they say they were using subscriptions? I'm fairly certain enterprises can't access subscription pricing in any case, they're all API costs (Anthropic doesn't support more than 150 on subscription pricing [0][1]). [0]: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9797531-what-is-the-e... [1]: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9266767-what-is-the-t...

Going through their harness (codex, claude) is subscription (app use) which is heavily? subsidized. Anyone using the enterprise plan are charged the API pricing, however the article is not clear if Databricks is using enterprise plan or not which is why added the following disclaimer > Unless Databricks has some agreement in place

Databricks is most certainly getting charged API pricing no matter what harness they are using. OpenAI and Anthropic models are so sought after right now that they set the terms even at the world's biggest companies, there is not a chance to get a special agreement for subscription pricing.

Re: Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale

#87

Post by gamblor956 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

extr wrote: post #32

reqo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME this works until it does not. This approach works well at the beginning of a greenfield project, but at the same time because it is so easy to add features, you will likely ship something that is way too over engineered. And that complexity will not amortize over next increments and will more likely lead to the entire project being a black box only fully understood by AI. However a more careful use of AI for targ…

Disagree. I operate this way inside a multi-million line legacy codebase.

"startup" and "legacy codebase" are diametrically opposed concepts.

And if you're saying (based on your other comments) that a 6 month window is enough to create a legacy codebase...that indicates a serious lack of experience or understanding as to what a legacy codebase is, or why they exist.

Re: Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale

#88

Post by pwendell » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:08 PM UTC

lbriner wrote: post #17

There are a surprising number of articles like this along the lines of, "we started using AI tools and ended up spending millions per year". On what planet do people start paying for things without keeping an eye on the costs and no-one notices until you have spent a crazy amount? I don't understand. You are either paying a fixed amount which you are happy about in-advance or you are PAYG in which case you would ball…

The issue is the growth rates can cause costs to drastically change quickly. If you have 1,000 employees and the average is spending $100/month you're at a $1.2M run rate. But suddenly a new model comes out that's twice as expensive, there are some changes to the harness (we found randomly Claude Code and other harnesses will make changes that drastically impact efficiency), and then maybe you have some organic user growth as well and BOOM suddenly you're at a $10M run rate within 60 days. And it's now impossible to forecast future growth.

It is true that this problem can be mostly managed by the techniques we mention here. Those are actually pretty difficult to set up at scale, so many companies (including us) we only really did this in earnest once we started to see those large cost oscillations.

The main reason we shared this here is to maybe help other companies get infrastructure in place before massive cost swings rather than after.

Re: Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale

#89

Post by Krei-se » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:08 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #85

extr wrote: post #16

I would be really curious to hear from devs at Databricks what the experience of development is like internally. I work at a small startup with essentially unlimited AI spend budget - the entire point is that I should be turning to it at every opportunity since our human labor is so expensive relative to tokens. So generally it's like: - Spend most time prioritizing/discussing what to do. - Once that's agreed, use Fa…

but I produce the output of 3 or 4 2022 engineers and probably at better quality. Possibly, but the output of a 2022 engineer is about 1/10th of the output of a 2010 engineer, so it's an extremely low bar.

also - as always with these claims there's no actual product / repo / whatever one could check.

I would love to see what these tools create but outside slop there's never: This works, is in production, here's the code.

Any day now.

Re: Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale

#90

Post by nujabe » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 9:09 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #87

extr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. I operate this way inside a multi-million line legacy codebase.

"startup" and "legacy codebase" are diametrically opposed concepts. And if you're saying (based on your other comments) that a 6 month window is enough to create a legacy codebase...that indicates a serious lack of experience or understanding as to what a legacy codebase is, or why they exist.

exactly. Usually legacy code forms when people lose context and confidence in parts of the codebase due to staff turnover etc and ppl avoid touching or enhancing those parts for long periods. Six months is a short time to accrue that much tech debt, its enough time where most of the people who created that "legacy" are probably still around. As you said indicates bigger problems.