llm/9db4e77f-8dd5-46da-972e-40d33f3399ef/topic-12-3371cbeb-edcf-4b27-966f-6b4725df9a90-input.json
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Corporate Adoption and Budgeting # Anecdotes about colleagues burning through massive amounts of API credits with varying degrees of success, and the disconnect between management's desire for AI productivity and the reality of review bottlenecks.
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1. > shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups?
Here's the dirty secret: 1 person AI coding enabled startups don't want their customers to know that they are 1 engineer AI coding startups so they do not expose it or share that info. There is still a lot of negative sentiment associated with this.
I know 3 such founders; none would advertise to their customers the extent of their AI usage. There is also a consideration that if they advertise their 1 eng status and success, it might attract other competitors or the customers might think they can do it themselves (maybe possible, but not for 95% of them since some tech know how is still required) or customers would see it as a business risk.
All 3 have blown me away with what they are doing. All 3 have real, paying customers. (They occasionally reach out for some higher order architecture questions)
2. > I might spend 10 minutes doing a task with AI rather than an hour (w/o AI), but trust me - I am going to keep 50 minutes to myself, not deliver 5 more tasks
It's wild that you just outright admitted this. Seems like your employer would do best to let you go and find someone that can use tools to increase their productivity.
3. Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. More than once I've had my hand slapped professionally for taking ownership of something my immediate superiors wanted to micromanage. Fine, here I was trying to take something off their plate that was in my wheelhouse, but if that's where they want to draw the line I guess I'll just give less of a shit.
If you actively deny your employees ownership, then the relationship becomes purely transactional.
It's also possible OP is just a bad employee, but I've met far more demoralized good employees than malicious bad ones over the course of my career.
4. A lot of orgs are bad about giving credit to employees for productivity, what's the point of working 4x harder if it'll just result in a few % point difference in yearly raise, and you're still going to have to job hop to get a respectable pay bump? Might as well work less and spend time polishing your resume/side projects to make yourself as employable as possible. This is 100% the fault of poor incentives on the part of employers.
5. > It's not like there was some fixed pool of work to be done and you just had to hire enough to exhaust the pool.
I'm my opinion you are failing to consider other bottlenecks, a la the theory of constraints.
An analogy: Imagine you have a widget factory that requires 3 machines, executed in sequence, to produce one widget.
Now imagine one of those machines gets 2x-5x more efficient. What will you do? Buy more of the faster machines? Of course not! Maybe you'll scale up by buying more of the slower machines (which are now your bottleneck) so they can match the output of the faster one, but that's only if you can acquire the raw material inputs fast enough to make use of them, and also that you can sell the output fast enough to not end up with a massive unsold inventory.
Bringing this back to software engineering: there are other processes in the software development lifecycle besides writing code -- namely gathering requirements, testing with users (getting feedback), and deployment / operations. And human coordination across these processes is hard, and hard to scale with agents.
These other aspects are much harder to scale (for now, at least) with agents. This is the core reason why agentic development will lead to fewer developers -- because you just don't need as many developers to deliver the same amount of development velocity.
The same logic explains (at least in part) why US companies don't simply continue hiring more and more outsourced developers. At a certain point, more raw development velocity isn't helpful because you're limited by other constraints.
On the other hand, agentic development DOES mean a boon to solo developers, who can MUCH more easily scale just themselves. It's much easier to coordinate between the product team, the development team, the ops team, and the customer support team when all the teams are in the same person's head.
6. > I'm wondering where that is
Not at work, elsewhere
7. I mean at work people are slowed down by management and getting alignment is even slower than before. As PMs and execs keep asking more to be done in the same-ish time, we are getting slow cooked.
Extra productivity at work is not being used at fixing bugs as well.
8. Yeah work, despite management's best intentions, is really failing AI by being that much relatively slower than engineering potential now. It's a bummer.
9. It is a long-standing policy at Netflix for employees to pay for their own subscriptions. It ensures that employees "live the member experience".
10. That’s for personal use at home.
I guarantee the engineers at Netflix who develop and test video streaming aren’t doing so on their family’s home Netflix plan.
11. Especially when the software they're developing is supposed to speed up the speed at which the software they are developing is developed.
12. Why is that funny? What company gives you unlimited resources? That doesn’t scale. Google employees can’t just demand a $10,000 workstation. It’s reasonable to assume they have some guardrails, for both financial and stability reasons. Who knows… if it’s unlimited now, will it stay that way forever? Probably unlimited in the same sense as unlimited pto.
13. > Why is that funny? What company gives you unlimited resources?
Anthropic has raised tens of billions of dollars of funding.
Their number of employees is in the thousands. This isn't like Google.
Claude Code is what they're developing. The company is obviously going to encourage them to use it as much as possible.
Limiting how much the Claude Code lead can use Claude Code would be funny because their lead dev would have to stop mid-day and wait for his token quota window to reset before he can continue developing their flagship coding product. Not going to happen.
I'm strangely fascinated by the reaction in the comments, though. A lot of people here must have worked in oddly restrictive corporate environments to even think that a company like this would limit how much their own employees can use the company's own product to develop their own product.
14. I can't get a $10k workstation but if I used $10k/month on cloud compute it'd take a few months for anyone to talk to me about it and as long as I was actually using it for work purposes I wouldn't run into any consequences more severe than being told to knock it off if I couldn't convince people it was worth the cost.
15. Google gives most of their engineers access to machines that would cost that much. If you’re working on specific projects (e.g. Chrome) you can request even more expensive machines.
16. Folks in MEGACORP cloud env can spend > 5 digits a month and not get noticed.
17. Can they spend 7 digits?
18. Yes, but it would get noticed.
19. If an employee has a business need for a $10k workstation, I'm fairly certain they'll get a $10k workstation.
Yes, accounting still happens. Guardrails exist. But quibbling over 2% of a SWEs salary if it's clear that the productivity increase will be significantly more than 2% would be... not a wise use of anybody's time.
20. If it takes a lot of back and forth it between lots of people it is more like a $12000 workstation or more after the labor for requesting and approving.
21. well, not only their software but also hardware resources they're renting, but I agree they don't.
22. Tokens aren’t free.
23. Its not unlimited, the compute allocation was one of the reason for the coup at OpenAI
24. Frankly Claude code is painfully slow. To the point I get frustrated.
On large codebases I often find it taking 20+ minutes to do basic things like writing tests.
Way too often people are like it takes 2 minutes for it to do a full pr. Yeah how big is the code base actually.
I also have a coworker who is about 10x more then everyone else. Burning through credits yet he is one of the lowest performers.{closing in on around 1k worth of credits a day now).
25. $1,000.00 of credits per-day?? $200,000 per year? Those are bonkers numbers for someone not performing at a high level (on-top of their salary). Do you know what they are doing?
26. Yup. The way he works is all tasks he is issued in a sprint he just fires them through opus in parallel hoping to get a hit on Claude magically solving the ticket having them constantly be iterated on them. He doesnt even try using proper having plans be created.
Often time tickets get fleshed out or requirements change. He just throws everything out and reshoves it into Claude.
I weep for the planet.
27. I have a coworker who is basically doing this right now he leads our team and is second place overall. Regularly runs opus in parallel he alone is burning through 1k worth of credits a day.
He is also one of our worst performers.
28. Wait, what is he second place at?
29. Credit usage.
</comments_about_topic>
Write a concise, engaging paragraph (3-5 sentences) summarizing the key points and perspectives in these comments about the topic. Focus on the most interesting viewpoints. Do not use bullet points—write flowing prose.
Corporate Adoption and Budgeting # Anecdotes about colleagues burning through massive amounts of API credits with varying degrees of success, and the disconnect between management's desire for AI productivity and the reality of review bottlenecks.
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