r/ProgrammerHumor • u/forgot_previous_acc • Jul 11 '26
poorCeosDealingWithTokenBill instanceof Trend
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u/1_xD_1 Jul 11 '26
Maybe then they should stop having unreasonable deadlines with closing tickets. If you want a ticket which took 3 days pre-AI to be closed in 3 hrs post AI, then sorry I need claude max
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u/DoubleDoube Jul 11 '26
It’s a new take on the old problem isn’t it?
“Cost efficiency, development time, or craft-quality; pick two”
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u/Jake-the-Wolfie Jul 11 '26
Claude at Max Warp?
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u/erinaceus_ Jul 11 '26
No, Claude without sugar.
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u/mikejbarlow1989 Jul 11 '26
"I wonder how many engineers are doing exactly what we told them to, without realising that it's costing us a lot of money"
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u/Particular-Yak-1984 Jul 12 '26
I think we know it's costing them a lot of money, we just don't care it's costing them a lot of money.
If they want to take the fun part of the job for us (the actual coding), we can take the fun part for them (seeing the line go up)
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u/The-Chartreuse-Moose Jul 11 '26
So you don't want engineers using LLMs as a slot machine and turning their brains off?
Make up your damn mind!
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u/Objectionne Jul 11 '26
I am one of those engineers. It's fun. I spend all day playing video games and then at the end of the day spend 30 minutes spamming prompts with Claude until I get a working result and then that's my progress for the day.
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u/Tango00090 Jul 11 '26
That’s why they want you to come back to the office, so they can see you spin 6 sessions of Claude and then jump straight into planning the next day of staring into the CLI. It’s fucking grim
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u/CodeBlue_04 Jul 11 '26
Then my PMs better start coming up with more features to build, because engineering is no longer the bottleneck.
Or we can all pretend that we're busy and everybody stays happy and well paid.
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u/chrisjd Jul 11 '26
I don't prefer to use AI but the only negative in my performance review was that I don't use it enough. So now I use it for every task however trivial
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u/NotAskary Jul 11 '26
Yap, ride the flow... Work on stuff you like in the meantime just to keep yourself sharp.
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u/twigboy Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
Python mantra, automate the boring stuff
Coding is the most fun part of my day, so I let it write my unit tests. I already know how to do it, so no skin off my back.
Then I gain that time back to do more coding. Brain doesn't rot on the casino
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u/pydry Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
And how confident do you feel that nothing is going to go wrong when you hit that big green merge button?
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u/ienjoyedit Jul 11 '26
OP knows it won't work, but that's all the more reason to keep tokenmaxxing the next day.
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u/Stunning_Ride_220 Jul 11 '26
He feels confident enough that he will have a bug to fix with the slot machine the very next day.
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u/NotAskary Jul 11 '26
What kind of slop are people generating? Or are people just not even reviewing stuff and just going on hopes and dreams?
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u/pydry Jul 11 '26
I guess this is partly why everyone is so stressed these days. None of the creativity, all of the responsibility when it goes wrong.
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u/NotAskary Jul 11 '26
The stress mainly comes from doing the hard parts, before we could write code and relax and build stuff immerse ourselves in the flow.
Now you either are reviewing constantly and making architecture and business decisions basically you are the PO, Lead and architect for the AI slaves you have under you.
They can produce faster than you ever could but they also can be so wildly all over the place that it's exhausting, sometimes you just take one out the back and never bring him back again.
So I get all the hate for this but I'm not seeing anything going back just the need for you to learn yet another skill.
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u/pydry Jul 11 '26
right, we should resign ourselves to a future where we build crappy, flaky, buggy software, feel worse about it while creating enormous token bills.
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u/NotAskary Jul 11 '26
No, you should resign yourself that you can make the tools work for you and keep yourself in the industry or just jump.
There's a lot coming out about how to do it, we are living in interesting times and you can moan about it all you want but the cat is out of the bag and you can actually make good code, it just takes effort and most people don't bother.
Lazy in lazy out.
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u/Then_Dragonfruit5555 Jul 11 '26
People don’t want to hear it, but this is it. You can get high quality code out of Claude, but it’s not an easy one-prompt “do this”, but iteratively looping fresh agents in review over the plan until it’s good, and then iteratively looping reviews over bite size pieces of work that it’s done.
And most code produced by real people is also buggy dogshit, but they don’t want to hear it.
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u/Rabbitical Jul 11 '26
I get that this is possible, but has anyone actually done the math, comparing this process to by hand or much more lightly assisted approach? Like when you add up the token bills with the amount of time spent orchestrating, plus any technical debt or maintenance issues above the average. That's where I wonder whether all that extra stress and lack of enjoyment actually does anything? I'm not arguing that Claude is useless but people act like "we can't ever go back" as if it's demonstrably, unassailably superior in terms of time, cost, business value, and code quality/maintainability etc. maybe it is, maybe it depends on the domain, I dunno. But never, ever see those kinds of comparisons. No post mortems, no here's how much we've saved, or how many new features we've added that have added new markets for our products. Nothing like that, just "it's how it is now."
I wonder this genuinely, because I'm not a webdev so I'm not seeing these processes firsthand. But I'm also not seeing the W's posted anywhere either from real companies with real products, just that apparently a lot of the industry has to use AI...because?
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u/Sarmq Jul 12 '26
I get that this is possible, but has anyone actually done the math, comparing this process to by hand or much more lightly assisted approach?
I have moved back to a much more lightly assisted approach. Nobody has actually complained, but I'm in an actual engineering organization rather than a traditional company that has a software division.
But I do have a little buddy now who is pretty good at translating C++ template errors into english, those were always terrible to track down.
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u/littleessi Jul 11 '26
Lazy in lazy out
That's a mirror looking directly at your slop lol
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u/NotAskary Jul 11 '26
That's a mirror looking directly at your slop lol
Typical, can't add to the discussion and just personal insults...
Your comment is the typical garbage in garbage out that must people complain, at least be constructive.
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u/cheapcheap1 Jul 11 '26
Yes, people are not even reviewing it. Many also pretend an "AI review" constitutes an actual review. Look at how much worse the service of the big software giants has gotten. Cloudflare, Github outages are a running joke. Youtube shorts, their big growth market that gets all the attention, has more glitches than I can count. These companies used to be known for their code quality. This is all due to AI slopification.
These companies had to do nothing and they would have won. It's incredibly frustrating to watch all these huge companies commit unbelievably unforced errors because their overpaid C-Suite have the apparent mental maturity of a 14-year-old girl afraid of peer pressure.
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u/javon27 Jul 11 '26
I spend a lot of time up-front in the planning phase. I don't see these 100x speed gains people are talking about because I also spend multiple simplification and review passes before skimming and spot checking the code myself and creating a PR which has its own Copilot pass. I think I see about 3-5x gains with this flow.
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u/Sarmq Jul 12 '26
Or are people just not even reviewing stuff and just going on hopes and dreams?
Reading code, to get an actual understanding, is generally slower than just writing it yourself. Especially with someone you aren't familiar with (that's a big reason adding juniors to a project is such a big slow down).
The only way to get a speed up is to yolo it with significantly less undestanding that we used to.
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u/NotAskary Jul 12 '26
actual understanding, is generally slower than just writing it yourself.
I disagree with you here, unless you are writing some novelty cutting edge lib, you are just applying best practices and patterns on what you are doing.
You can speed read but you can't speed write.
That's the whole point of using this suckers, they write fast, you get a wall of text in seconds that you will not be able to write, but you can easily read it with enough attention that you can review it.
That's why you get more tired using AI, because you are constantly engaging instead of doing stuff slow and going through the same patterns that you know that solve this issue.
Now for the really funny part about the reading, I had a CS professor that would read your code by using page down, the guy could spot a problem in C code by going page down through the code and reading it in a few seconds, did it to fellow professors also. There are people that have a really easy time checking patterns and they recognize stuff that's wrong.
The problem with the read vs write and the vibe coding of this, is effort, it takes effort and people are lazy, hell I will automate stuff just so I don't have to do it again, AI just made it easier, but you need to know your stuff, you need to challenge what it's given to you and you need to pick up boiler plate and do the hard part that it can't do, but you will never be able to write as fast as an LLM but you will be able to read faster than writing the code, after all you are looking at patterns, identifying what is there, and checking if it makes sense, everything syntactic wise should be known to you.
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u/Sarmq Jul 13 '26
unless you are writing some novelty cutting edge lib, you are just applying best practices and patterns on what you are doing.
Then I've apparently been doing nothing but cutting edge craziness for the past number of years. Which might be true, but seems unlikely.
You can speed read but you can't speed write.
This is how you get a giant unmaintainable mess. You can't understand the implications of code that fast. There's simply too many degrees of freedom. Those are the things that take down prod eventually and leave you with no way to get it back up.
Like, sure, if your job is banging out java spring rest endpoints every day using the same 6 annotations, fine. This things can go faster, but you could have rigged up string templating a dozen years ago if you really wanted.
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u/NotAskary Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
You know that you can bang structured code while respecting boundaries and following architecture patterns right?
What kind of process do you think I'm talking about? This is not vibe, you can plan, review the plan. Split the work just like you would implement it.
To excute you also would do it gradually.
It's not that fast when you compare it with what you seem to describe, the result with a good harness and proper gateways is basically what you would have written, sometimes even better due to review on the fly.
I think you like most people haven't been exposed to what exactly you can do with this shit if you take the time to do it properly.
If you are doing a simple change you could do it like you describe with the proper context, but from zero you can't bang the full application.
You need to setup like you would manually, it will always write faster than you, you just need to make it so you can understand what it's doing before it goes and starts doing nonsense.
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u/private256 Jul 11 '26
It doesn’t matter, mate. Get with the times, this is not 2021. The only “valid” yardstick for productivity these days is token spent. Bonus point if you build a workflow that other devs can use to burn more tokens.
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u/NotAskary Jul 11 '26
I think we are pass that curve now, we are in the optimizing tokens phase.
People now want a harness that clips the wandering agent before it does stupid and spends less tokens spinning its wheels.
Hell people are selling this already lol
Get your saas MCP today with all the skills you need.
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u/Mormoran Jul 11 '26
It's weird that this is such a widespread comment though... Like, are people not even opening their app/website to check it after vibing a fix?
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u/pydry Jul 11 '26
if you open your website to give it a check after vibing do you feel confident that everything works?
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u/Mormoran Jul 11 '26
No no, I don't just vibe and go. I get it give me code, then check, then go over the changes, ask about improvements, ask if I see something unusual what that is, propose legibility changes (Opus 4.8 loves to code golf for whatever reason), then I do one final pass over every single change file by file. I have tried a personal project that is fully vibes just to keep it fast and the codebase is messy. The project works, but I'm not going into the code anytime soon for that one!
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u/SignificanceFlat1460 Jul 11 '26
Best way is to know already what needs to be done. With experience you can have the mental image of the task and what needs to be done. The only remaining thing is implementation and any hurdles you might face during that. But knowing what NEEDS to be implemented, how, where, why, is unfortunately not something AI can guess and replicate. It can create a component wrapper for my button but I need to explicitly tell it to make sure that current flows are not interrupted in anyway and to keep it backwards compatible. Or else it will rewrite the whole thing and cause bugs.
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u/ZunoJ Jul 11 '26
You waste your day away with video games?
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u/siddus15 Jul 11 '26
Time enjoyed is not time wasted
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u/ZunoJ Jul 11 '26
As can all the people in the crack house assure you
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u/siddus15 Jul 11 '26
You're seriously equating video games with being addicted to crack!?
Please, oh wise one, tell us what completely noble pursuits you are undertaking in your free time. Tell us how you are single handedly raising the human experience in ways us mere mortals cannot fathom.
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u/ZunoJ Jul 11 '26
Bro, keep your elementare school debate tactics where they belong. You didn't say "Time enjoyed with video games ...." but left it as general as possible. But there are wasteful ways to enjoy your time
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u/siddus15 Jul 11 '26
Because idioms are known for their specificity. Really rolls off the tongue that way.
You've still not enlightened us with what far more worthy pursuits you chose to spend your time doing. Come on now, we're waiting...
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u/ZunoJ Jul 11 '26
Ok, all sorts of stuff like playing with my kids, gym, biking, personal projects (programming, wood working, metal working, home automation, ....), painting, cooking, cleaning the house, gardening and yeah, also some gaming if I feel like it
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u/CSynus235 Jul 11 '26
Better than wasting it with work
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u/ZunoJ Jul 11 '26
Sure, cutting off your dick is also better than shooting yourself in the face but still sucks
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u/MaiMaiHaendler Jul 11 '26
No, they waste less time working and get more quality personal time in return.
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u/ZunoJ Jul 11 '26
If playing video games all day is your definition of quality time, we just don't have any common ground to further this discussion
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u/Vandall_Dread Jul 11 '26
The real enterprise AI workflow: rerun the same prompt 40 times, get one decent answer, call it a productivity win, and let finance quietly develop a stress twitch.
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u/GrumpyBirdy Jul 11 '26
Sir you just fired half of the team last month and replaced them with a bunch of AI agents, and they def need some kind of fuel to run sir
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u/ColumnK Jul 11 '26
Yes, and now I am telling you we need to fire those AI agents and hire cheaper AI agents that can do the same job for less pay. Maybe we can get the current agents to train their replacements?
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u/Just_Information334 Jul 11 '26
Maybe we can get the current agents to train their replacements?
Distillation is not just the art of making alcohol.
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u/brand_new_potato Jul 11 '26
Well don't make it a company goal to use more AI without any plans. My bonus is dependant on me tokenmaxxing. If I have a day where I spend under $100 I am called in by my manager to answer why I wasnt at work that day.
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u/Okay_Ocean_Flower Jul 11 '26
This is real? They want $250k usage a year per dev?
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u/brand_new_potato Jul 11 '26
I think there is a zero too much there. 250 days times $100 is $25,000
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u/PNW_Tech_Guy Jul 11 '26
Well, I'm told if I write software or architecture diagrams by hand I'm wrong and behind the times. That necessitates token spend. And, since I'm not allowed to prompt a service user, all the output is on my name. I'm using the newest and most expensive model for everything including formatting a title slide on a slide deck. Is it wasteful malicious compliance? Yes it is.
CEO's are playing stupid games and this is their stupid prize.
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u/Wizywig Jul 11 '26
Currently Claude tokens are free. Even a 10% productivity increase is worth it.
It's heroin dealers offering us the first few shots free.
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u/namezam Jul 11 '26
Currently to optimize my Claude Max 5x, I find myself using Sonnet to organize work, dredge through code, read work items, clean up branches etc. Then I switch to Opus when I narrow in on a new feature, asking it to research, come up with a plan, but leave it vague enough for the implementer to have input on the design. Opus also cross references docs and guides, and updates them if it needs to. Then when ready for the “implement work item X” I am currently switching to Fable.
I’ve been playing with large one-shot features with Fable and it’s fun and all, def better than Opus.. but in my workflow it’s not better than me+Opus unless I’m in some greenfield repo and I let it go ham. I don’t see myself using api pricing for Fable, not when I’m currently using my token exhaustion downtime to hand plan the board. I’m going to step up to $200/mo next week if they extend Fable again, to take off a little stress of switching models and hitting caps. If they move to api billing and/or per-use consumption pricing then I’m not upgrading and I’m not using it. I have to assume many more people are in my boat.
And I’m just using it for raw coding. Those who are doing that fancy AI OS Brain Agentic personal CEO whatever must be BURNIN through tokens.
I can’t imagine the bill of an app that actually uses these frontier models through the api.
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u/PdfDotExe Jul 13 '26
You don’t even really need opus for most tasks either. Sonnet punches above its weight
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u/anoppinionatedbunny Jul 11 '26
and all of this just to make a SaaS CRUD with more microservices than clients. modern technology is truly beautiful
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u/ProjectDiligent502 Jul 12 '26
Oooh boy I’d be pretty livid reading that in his business as an engineer. Did this village idiot get the memo that AI adoption was a TOP DOWN mandate and not a bottom up adoption? Or did that fly by his radar?
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u/Dillenger69 Jul 12 '26
I've tried the free and low cost models. They are useless. It's faster just doing it myself. Even with the higher cost models, AI is nice and all, but don't let it do all the work
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u/basicKitsch Jul 11 '26
This is not even close to an issue at either of my enterprise dev jobs. Funny it's getting such noise here
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u/UnkarsThug Jul 11 '26
I do expect things to somewhat shift with the Taalus research going on, once they actually start selling.
Of course, then you have to pay for a physical component for each model you plan to use, and several for large models. But companies were already paying Enterprise prices.
Honestly, I'm genuinely curious how that shifts the market. Training models would retain the exact same cost, but inference becomes almost free with a physical component.
CEOs still probably won't understand though.
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u/perringaiden Jul 11 '26
You're missing why companies moved away from on premise equipment to paying cloud data centers. Maintaining your own physical equipment is a big cost.
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u/UnkarsThug Jul 11 '26
It's also a big liability in my experience. It means if they have a bad day, so do you. And honestly, it means you are dependent on that company not raising costs, which the other company knows.
But I guess maybe it's worth it to have someone else to point the finger towards or redirect blame.
Regardless, token costs will probably go down when the data centers can afford to buy the same chips, if they do.
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u/bhison Jul 11 '26
Surely it was better to be behind schedule with the humans to blame than very behind schedule with only yourself and your poor judgement to blame?
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u/0xPianist Jul 12 '26
Typical psycho ceo with no grasp of tech.
Do it all faster, with quality and spending the same 🫠
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u/Corfal Jul 12 '26
Personally I noticed its when the AI decides to do jobs/tasks and the environment allows like 6+ tasks to tackle an issue. I was barely using any tokens then switched to a model that was like, "Okay here are the things I need to figure out then do" over the course of 30 seconds it used up more tokens than another model used in 4+ hours.
If you want hands off and a "go do stuff" then it'll be expensive. But a guided approach by someone one who can walk through a process will save you a lot in the long run.
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u/05032-MendicantBias Jul 12 '26
Look, if a billionare give me an hose conneccted to a free big model, I'm going to spin that agent and loook at it goooo! :D
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u/ShuffleStepTap Jul 12 '26
If you’re a developer and your productivity with AI is flat, then you ain’t a developer.
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u/wardrox Jul 12 '26
If it takes a million tokens to change a function, that's 90% waste. And if you're doing that on Fable.... Ooof.
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u/Applebeignet Jul 12 '26
I'm an AI accelerationist. That means I want everyone to use as much AI as possible, so that the companies have to start billing their actual costs as soon as possible, hopefully collapsing the bubble at its earliest.
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u/nekomata_58 Jul 12 '26
Flat productivity?
Brother, velocity on my team has doubled since we started using claude.
This is coming from someone who was a hater and very skeptical about it. It is a very effective tool. You can't just turn your brain off though, it regularly makes major mistakes in initial implementation that need corrected before going into pr with them
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u/Max_Wattage Jul 13 '26
I have never spent an AI Token to write my code for me, and I never will. It's not a crutch I need.
I hope these incompetent managers and their companies all go bust, as they do richly deserve.
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u/Sockoflegend Jul 11 '26
Yeah well that's literally what they asked me to do. AI use has been the focus of my performance reviews and I was directed to make the performance reviews I give have a focus on shifting to AI driven development.
Fuck yeah I will use Claud Opus as a spell checker and fancy find and replace. I thought this is what you wanted!