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Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

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Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#31

Post by the__alchemist »

unified101 wrote: post #26
the__alchemist wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a dumb question, but what are you doing/seeing others do that uses that many tokens? I find myself pressing the weekly caps on the $20/month plan only when I'm really having the LLMs go wild with the Xtra high effort on the newest/biggest models on abstract problems or where I don't really understand the problem well. (E.g. improving ML models, planning creative molecule synthesis pipelines, identifying subtle…

The retail account is about 200 to 300 dollars of api equivalent. Large companies disallow retail.

Ah! That may explain the entirety of my disconnect.

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#32

Post by Kirby64 »

pdhborges wrote: post #13
neaden wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also kind of odd because even a junior engineer has to cost a company around 10 grand a month in salary, taxes, and other costs. So if the company thinks it makes you 10% more effective it seems like it should be an easy choice. So either the companies are shooting themselves in the foot limiting spending or they aren't seeing the productivity boost.

10 grand a month for a junior is absolutely ridiculous in most of the world including large swats of the western world.

Fully loaded employee cost is typically around 2x their actual salary. Junior employees making only $60k/yr is absolutely nothing. It’s lowish even in most parts of the western world.

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#34

Post by izacus »

neaden wrote: post #22
pdhborges wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 grand a month for a junior is absolutely ridiculous in most of the world including large swats of the western world.

Between all the benefits, taxes, and the infrastructure the company needs costs rise pretty quickly.

No, they really don't, it's a ridiculous claim.

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#35

Post by sarchertech »

Avicebron wrote: post #19
sokoloff wrote: post #9

Rationing tokens on a spend level or count makes no sense to me. Why would I pay $10-20K/mo to employ a software engineer and then balk at a $500, $1000, or even $2000 monthly AI bill, assuming they were even vaguely trying to use the tokens productively? I’m not an AI-maximalist, but “work a few days with AI and the rest of the month without because of cost” sounds literally crazy to me. (If you think AI is low/zero…

I think in this future they don't think a software engineer is making that much, maybe a nice 50k a year, 65K after 10+ years on the job

Still doesn’t make sense if you believe that AI is making a meaningful boost to productivity.

If you are the kind of person who thinks AI will drive down the wages of software engineers that much, you have to think that it is at least a 2x multiplier.

$65k salary all in for a company is easily $100k. So spending anything less than $100k would be what you would aim for.

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#36

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

loki-ai wrote: post #24
sokoloff wrote: post #9

Rationing tokens on a spend level or count makes no sense to me. Why would I pay $10-20K/mo to employ a software engineer and then balk at a $500, $1000, or even $2000 monthly AI bill, assuming they were even vaguely trying to use the tokens productively? I’m not an AI-maximalist, but “work a few days with AI and the rest of the month without because of cost” sounds literally crazy to me. (If you think AI is low/zero…

this not making any sense to you is exactly why companies are implementing these caps: you lack the business acumen to understand how financial resources should actually be deployed.

Please consider rewriting this in a way that does not seem to unnecessarily attack parent. You are not wrong about the incentives, but you may not be right about the execution of the restrictions. I should know. I am living through it.

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#37

Post by skybrian »

I’m using Luna all the time now since it seems quite good enough for everyday programming and so that my $20/month ChatGPT subscription doesn’t hit the weekly limit.

It’s an artificial constraint. I could afford to spend more on my hobbyist programming but I choose not to.

I suspect that I’m adapting to the model by giving it more concrete guidance and guardrails. I read code more and I tell it to refactor code that I don’t like. Working within constraints isn’t all bad.

Re: Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?

#38

Post by goolz »

the__alchemist wrote: post #17
cebert wrote: post #2

I have similar concerns about this. The past year or so, software engineers have been encouraged by employers to adopt AI tooling and agentic coding. Now, many enterprises, including mine, are starting to crack down on token spend. I’ve learned how to fully embrace agentic tooling to do tasks like keeping up with vulnerability reports, initially triaging defects that come in, etc. It would be hard for me to do things…

Maybe a dumb question, but what are you doing/seeing others do that uses that many tokens? I find myself pressing the weekly caps on the $20/month plan only when I'm really having the LLMs go wild with the Xtra high effort on the newest/biggest models on abstract problems or where I don't really understand the problem well. (E.g. improving ML models, planning creative molecule synthesis pipelines, identifying subtle…

At least for myself personally: Opus 5 Ultra spreading out hundreds of subagents on specific tasks can gobble tokens like mad. Recently I did a custom OCR pipeline in a day and some Revit automation, extremely large datasets, but I definitely spent good money to make it happen so fast.

I almost certainly wasted tokens, but right now things are subsidized, so it works.

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