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Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

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Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#411

Post by idopmstuff »

theptip wrote: post #390
bob1029 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think quantifying tokens used is analogous to quantifying the amount of sawdust generated on a construction site. Churning out useful code quickly is not solved by using more tokens per unit time. Most non-technical leaders can grasp this one and are likely more interested in the strategic game theoretical dynamics that are being forced by way of implied token consumption expectations (competition between developer…

To understand the token count thing - spending tokens is necessary and not sufficient to demonstrate that you are adopting AI. Where we were 6mo ago is that a lot of big orgs realized they were behind, and needed some way of measuring if the tools were usable at all. No sawdust at all on your job site, and you can tell nobody is cutting wood. Now that tooling is more mature, you can measure things like % of diffs AI-…

My feeling is it's not as bad of a metric as people think. Companies don't fully know the best way to use AI and things are changing rapidly, so you want people using a lot of tokens even on stuff that seems maybe kind of dumb on the surface, because if you find one useful thing and share it in the org that makes up for a lot of failures.

But I do think you also need to say, "To be clear, don't game the system. Any token usage that is even remotely justifiable as useful for the business is fine, and we will give you a lot of latitude. But if you're in the top 10% of token users, we are going to review your token usage, and if we find that you have a dozen agents perpetually running writing slam poetry, you're going to get fired."

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#412

Post by rixed »

gchamonlive wrote: post #339
harimau777 wrote: post #266

The comments I see recommending selective use of cheaper models doesn't match the reality I experience working in the industry. I have the constant threat hanging over my head of being fired if I don't churn out code quickly enough. I'm not willing to gamble with my livelyhood by using a less effective model. Saving money on tokens isn't something that's rewarded during performance reviews; particularly because it's…

> I have the constant threat hanging over my head of being fired if I don't churn out code quickly enough. And the tragedy is that this isn't sustainable, and we all involved deeply in tech know this. There is eventually going to be a big reality check the companies will have to pay, because you can't force creativity and quality, not even with AI, because actual intelligence lies with us at least for now and for the…

  the companies will have to pay, because you can't force creativity and quality
Most companies do not care about quality. _users_ who have to interact with that software will pay the price.

Exemple from one of the wealthiest company in existance, for one of its most strategic product: I was trying gemini-cli on some mcp servers just yesterday, with gemini-chat helping me configuring everything. In less than 10 minutes, I stumbled upon 3 or 4 different bugs. Eventually, even gemini-chat recommended that I throw gemini-cli in the bin and move on to another agent... That's the new norm.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#413

Post by rcleveng »

cwsx wrote: post #370
bob1029 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think quantifying tokens used is analogous to quantifying the amount of sawdust generated on a construction site. Churning out useful code quickly is not solved by using more tokens per unit time. Most non-technical leaders can grasp this one and are likely more interested in the strategic game theoretical dynamics that are being forced by way of implied token consumption expectations (competition between developer…

Suddenly, LoC returned

Slowly and then suddenly :)

""" Steve Ballmer In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 5OK-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing. """

From https://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#414

Post by gottorf »

generic92034 wrote: post #402
ninkendo wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re sitting under a tree in the rain and it gets soaked through and you start getting wet, finding another tree won’t help you. The whole industry is adjusting to the reality that the expected output of an engineer is much higher than it used to be. It’s not local to one company. You may find a better environment for the time being, but this is the direction everything is headed.

*the whole industry in countries without strong worker rights

American software engineers are paid commensurately more than equivalent roles in countries with strong worker rights. There is no free lunch.

Besides, it's probably counterproductive in the long run to think of strong worker rights as being opposed to the employer wanting higher productivity out of the worker.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#415

Post by locknitpicker »

harimau777 wrote: post #266

The comments I see recommending selective use of cheaper models doesn't match the reality I experience working in the industry. I have the constant threat hanging over my head of being fired if I don't churn out code quickly enough. I'm not willing to gamble with my livelyhood by using a less effective model. Saving money on tokens isn't something that's rewarded during performance reviews; particularly because it's…

> The comments I see recommending selective use of cheaper models doesn't match the reality I experience working in the industry. I have the constant threat hanging over my head of being fired if I don't churn out code quickly enough. I'm not willing to gamble with my livelyhood by using a less effective model.

I don't buy it. Old models such as GPT4.1 were faster than newer reasoning models, and their output was as good. Newer models end up wasting an ungodly amount of time with chain-of-thought steps which can be a complete waste of time if you have a structured prompt such as a plan or a spec.

My experience in the real world is that users have to ration requests, and x0 models actually tend to be used far more because expensive models are left for more complex tasks.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#416

Post by williamDafoe »

rebolek wrote: post #381
gchamonlive wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have the constant threat hanging over my head of being fired if I don't churn out code quickly enough. And the tragedy is that this isn't sustainable, and we all involved deeply in tech know this. There is eventually going to be a big reality check the companies will have to pay, because you can't force creativity and quality, not even with AI, because actual intelligence lies with us at least for now and for the…

How much creativity do you need to fix bugs in corporate code? Almost zero. It’s maintenance, not creative work. Nothing against it, it’s needed, but let’s be real, would anybody be really sad if this work is overtaken by LLMs? I certainly won’t be, let them do it.

IBM system/360 OS had more than 50,000 bugs which could not be fixed because fixing any single bug would introduce two new bugs. I fear that a lot of AI software systems will reach the same crapware state as IBM system/360 very very soon!

I know from personal experience that once you fix a bug introduced by Claude, Claude tries to recreate the bug every time he edits that code again!!

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#417

Post by williamDafoe »

rcleveng wrote: post #413
cwsx wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suddenly, LoC returned

Slowly and then suddenly :) """ Steve Ballmer In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 5OK-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we…

So many times in my career I have seen a problem that could be handled with two lines of code and a table lookup being handled with 40 lines of code and a switch statement. So the guy writing the 40 lines of codes switch statement would get paid 20 times more money!

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#418

Post by ben_w »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #386
visarga wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Especially as there has not been any new great revenue sources outside AI in recent years. Nobody can make a profit with AI. Any clever idea can be cloned with AI, competition makes it unprofitable. No moat, no arbitrage opportunity. "During the gold rush, the only people making money were the men selling shovels." We can definitely do amazing things with AI, and it makes us have superpowers, but so does everyone e…

The shovels are the datacenters. China and America are building them. Even after the valuations puff out, that infrastructure will remain as a massive competitive advantage to those economies.

I am not convinced this will be true. The big piles of GPUs make sense when the models will change multiple times before the hardware fails; but when there's no more money for rapidly training models, the best can be encoded as circuits in much more energy efficient hardware, rendering even the new power supply infrastructure for the data centres useless.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#419

Post by gradientsrneat »

Related: Microsoft-owned GitHub recently switched to token-based billing:

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilo...

Claude tokens are priced by GitHub at a disproportionately premium price compared to Gemini and OpenAI. I wonder why?

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#420

Post by willj »

generic92034 wrote: post #404
willj wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s too bad that, yet again, instead of the productivity gains leading to shorter work weeks, the benefits accrue to the companies. Just once I’d like to see productivity gains lead to more leisure time, not higher expectation.

Be careful what you are wishing for. All the leisure time you would want while having no job or money could be the future we are heading for.

Fair point. Though I don’t think time without money is really leisure time :)
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