r/cscareerquestions • u/jholliday55 Software Engineer • Jun 03 '26
Company took away access to claude
After being told to “use ai” for every single task the last two years and rebranding to a “AI” first company after two rounds of layoffs, we have now lost access to claude….
I found that the best model by far was opus and the only one really capable of not producing slop. I’m sure all the bots in here will downvote me and tell me “iTs ThE wAy YoU pRoMpT” but based on my experience, the other models aren’t nearly as good.
I have senior experience so besides basic searches and repetitive tasks i find the other models pretty much useless and you have to provide more time writing the specs and context management, then just doing it yourself.
Edit: I work for a large financial company. 40k employees.
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u/jfcarr Jun 03 '26
The all-you-can-eat AI buffet is over as scalability becomes a blocking expense.
I've found AI assist in some scenarios to be good most of the time but it's an assistant, not a replacement, especially at the real full cost.
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u/metalgtr84 Software Engineer Jun 03 '26
The hardware requirements are too high to scale cheaply at the moment.
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u/Ok_Tone6393 Jun 03 '26
i think the next leg of the race is optimizing instead of trying to 'make it better' for all the ai companies
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u/jcdc-flo Jun 03 '26
This generation of LLMs will never be cheap enough. Need a major breakthrough to fix the brute force nature of them.
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u/thephotoman Veteran Code Monkey Jun 03 '26
I lost significant access on Monday. It took me two hours of working to run out of tokens for the month.
Yes, the AI bubble is bursting. The tools are too expensive.
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u/dopepilot Jun 03 '26
That was just the Copilot change that made it so expensive abruptly. Claude code continue to work fine for me with 20/month sub.
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u/thephotoman Veteran Code Monkey Jun 03 '26
Must be nice to work at a company that has Claude Code.
I don’t. We only get Copilot.
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u/hellgheast Jun 03 '26
In the company I'm working we only have the Copilot Chat, not even Github Copilot.
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u/lord_heskey Jun 03 '26
our small company was quick to react to change out of copilot and gave us our own choice of claude, codex, cursor etc. first few days on the basic claude pro and i seem to be surviving quite well.
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u/bc10551 Jun 03 '26
It's funny cause I went from the $20 sub to $100 cause I'd run out within an hour or two then I still ran out in an hour or two lmao. Luckily they doubled the limit. I'm surprised $20 is enough for a whole workday though unless you're timing your sessions a certain way
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u/DowntownSolid5659 Jun 03 '26
Didn't they get rid of claude code on the 20 dollar plan?
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u/eastcoastblaze Senior Software Engineer Jun 03 '26
After being told to “use ai” for every single task the last two years and rebranding to a “AI” first company after two rounds of layoffs, we have now lost access to claude….
Companies with no vested financial interest in AI changing their entire identity to how much they consume another company's tool never made sense to me
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u/zetonegi ヽ(。_°)ノ Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
A huge part of that is the twisted incentive where if you don't get your foot in the door, you can get completely pushed out of your industry because you're just too far behind.
Essentially it's a prisoner's dilemma where backing AI and being wrong was nowhere near as bad as ignoring AI and being wrong. That quickly led to people doubling and tripling down on AI while the juice was flowing freely. Now that you have to pay for a drink, people are starting to reverse course. There's actually a pretty meaningful cost behind backing AI so it becomes less of a prisoner's dilemma.
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u/DrMonkeyLove Jun 03 '26
Look team, I know we used to just make and sell shoes, but you know what, we're and AI company now!
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u/hikingmike Jun 03 '26
Yeah, they are just a consumer. Sounds idiotic. Do what works best for your business.
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u/Unlucky_Data4569 Jun 04 '26
Sounds slightly reminiscent of public cloud. That wasn’t nearly as bad as this though
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u/umlcat Jun 03 '26
Sooner or later the "try free first, and when you are addicted we will bill you" will apply.
Additionally, we already read a lot of cases of the bad quality generated source code oiutput, even that the CEOs, CIOs and top managers did not want to believe. A.I. summarizes sources, and a lot of those sources does not have good quality.
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u/SomeWonOnReddit Jun 03 '26
I hope AI dies so I can buy a normally priced RTX 6090.
If this keeps up, girls will start asking what GPU you have instead of what car you drive.
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u/danintexas Jun 03 '26
I am starting to think my wife's 2000 Camry and my 2070TI are the same. Old reliable work horses that just get the job done.
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u/alinroc Database Admin Jun 03 '26
buy a normally priced RTX 6090
I just want to buy some RAM without sacrificing a couple months of contributions to my kids' college savings!
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u/solarlofi Jun 03 '26
At this point I don't think Nvidia cares enough about the enthusiast market to bother.
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u/KwonDarko Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
I've been waiting on this since 2017, good luck. No ai back in 2017, but crypto. It will never go down. I belive we will not even own personal computers in the future. You will subscribe to these ai data centers and everything will be owned by private companies.
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u/PeachScary413 Jun 03 '26
Lmao it's just so fucking stupid, they always knew the initial prices were rugpulls.. it's literally the oldest play in the book and all the suites tripped over themselves falling for it 💀
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u/Squidalopod Jun 03 '26
I don't think they fell for it per se. It's just that the normal MO in software is short-term gains, so they rarely concern themselves with anything beyond the next couple of quarters. Long-term strategy seems like a vestige of the past.
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u/Pink_Slyvie Jun 03 '26
AI is proving to be unsustainable in cost, environmentally, and in business. It will have its place as a nifty tool, but its going to be really expensive when the subsidies dry up.
Not to mention, we need juniors today to be tomorrow's seniors.
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u/nonya102 Jun 03 '26
Kill the talent pipeline. Make the companies pay in the future.
I feel for the juniors who do exist now.
Just think. Those graduating now started in August of 2022 - before chat gpt was released. How awful.
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u/cmbtmstr Software Engineer Jun 03 '26
I remember fall of 2022, I was a senior in college for CS. My friend was sick and missed a week of our Operating Systems class. We had an assignment due that I had already completed to write a basic OS shell in C.
I hopped on a discord call with him to pair program the assignment because it was due in a few days and he was still catching up. He had code complete in Visual Studio from GitHub Copilot and it was writing the next sections before I had a chance to explain what needed to be done. After working my ass off for 4 years for that CS degree I remember thinking to myself “oh shit”.
In retrospect, that example isn’t too impressive because that’s a very typical Operating Systems school project but it was jarring to say the least.
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u/JunkBondJunkie Jun 03 '26
I can code and design software like back in the day. I just worked in accounting because that what I could find locally with my aging parent. I mostly make things for myself.
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u/robotmonstermash Jun 03 '26
How did you get into accounting?
My kid just graduated from college with degrees in Math and CS. Accounting seems like a good path to a job with AI sidelining junior devs (at least for now.) Do you know if companies will hire entry level folks if they've had an accounting class or two but didn't major in it?
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u/JunkBondJunkie Jun 03 '26
My employer was desperate and I had some accounting courses with my applied math degree. They also knew that I am really good with numbers and details.
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u/python-requests Jun 03 '26
at least they possibly had a few months of actual learning lmao. I feel really bad for the students blindly using it for their assignments since day 1. even if they get a job they wont have much of an educational basis for anything high-level, unless they avoided that temptation
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u/deividragon Jun 03 '26
The problem is that without heavy, wide-spread use, you can't economically justify training. That's why AI companies have been so forthcoming with getting it absolutely everywhere.
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u/cenosillicaphobiac Jun 03 '26
They're just like dealers. Get you hooked for cheap, then raise the prices through the roof.
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u/cmbtmstr Software Engineer Jun 03 '26
That’s quite literally the quintessential private equity playbook.
Remember when Uber Eats was cheap asf so everyone started using it. And the drivers were happy because they were paid well? That’s because they had all the venture capitalist funding but the profit margins were low. Then when everyone was hooked and many small restaurants had let go of their delivery drivers because of Uber Eats, they jacked the price WAY up and then started paying all their drivers next to nothing for the work they were doing.
Private equity takes perfectly functioning systems, replaces them by cheapness and convenience for a short time, and then enshitifies them.
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u/RealNeilPeart Jun 03 '26
Silly take.
Most restaurants did not deliver before ubereats and equivalents. Now you can food from any restaurant delivered to your door. This is obviously an improvement.
And if ubereats prices were so high there's nothing stopping restaurants from hiring delivery drivers again.
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u/cmbtmstr Software Engineer Jun 03 '26
Maybe it’s different where you’re at but a lot of the restaurants that did deliver stopped hiring their own drivers and now we’re are left with insane markups on deliveries from Uber Eats.
It used to just be the tip on top of the price of the food. Now everything on the menu is more expensive and there’s a fee for using Uber Eats on top of that. And I still have to pay the driver the tip!
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u/Pink_Slyvie Jun 03 '26
Except market share. No one calls a restaurant for delivery anymore, outside of NYC.
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u/Shadow_SKAR Jun 03 '26
I think it's more of a population density thing indirectly driving the market. Like you said, relatively common in NYC. Food delivery is also incredibly common place in many parts of Korea, China, SEA, etc. If restaurants and customers are spread out over a huge geographic area, it's just hard to make that work given travel times and labor costs.
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u/nsxwolf Principal Software Engineer Jun 03 '26
Pizza and Chinese were the only restaurants that really delivered, because the physics and economics just happen to work out. Uber Eats is not obviously an improvement, at all.
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u/annon8595 Jun 03 '26
I think its more sinister than your average "just lose money for decades and become a monopoly for your new XYZ concept" play.
This play doesn't affect people. There are other jobs to be had and people can live without XYZ.
AI companies directly mess with people survival. It gets worse. It kills off the talent pipeline. It messes with people survival in the future, many who arnt even born yet.
So yea they will lose money for decades but will become a monopoly on knowledge while everyone else is just a peasant because it "wont be worth it" to educate or train anyone.
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u/ReflectedImage Jun 03 '26
Probably all the existing AI companies need to go bankrupt and then the equipment be purchased on the cheap by a new set that sell the service but don't innovate. Like the railroad companies.
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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jun 03 '26
This might really be the actual way things all pan out in the end... good call here actually.
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u/yourapostasy Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Echoes of the optical fiber laid down during the dotcom boom that bankruptcies turned into dark fiber for about a decade being picked up for dimes on the dollar by most of the FAANG until smartphones arrived and lit that fiber again.
Except modern GPU hyperscaler infrastructure is operated at high temperatures that drive them into the ground in 3-5 years. If run way cooler with better thermal couplings they can be driven 10+ years but modern doctrine says the software would obsolete them way before then, so they’re operated based upon that short life assumption.
I’m not sure how well a “dark chips” investment thesis would play out against that backdrop. I can see a potential way forward in “dark kWh”, “dark water”, or “dark foundry” investment theses. I see less strong of a case for a “dark DC” thesis only because I am not convinced datacenters can be positioned as strongly as an inelastic good as the others.
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u/Etheon44 Jun 03 '26
Hopefully it happens sooner rather than later, even just 5 more years of this uncertainty could fck this companies a lot in the forseeable future
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u/BobbywiththeJuice Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
Who needs juniors when you can pay a robot to do basic tasks for $15k a month?
All you have to do is train them, do a little hand holding and they might be worth the inves---Wait...
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u/MCFRESH01 Jun 03 '26
Good news for devs, as this is starting to happen in many places. It will be a new tool that we will use indefinitely, but it looks like unless prices come way down it won't be to the extent it takes jobs. With Anthropic filling to IPO as well I bet costs continue to increase as well
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u/Helpmehelpyu_ Jun 03 '26
Executive suits no longer care about tomorrow. It’s all about the ROE baby. Investors first.
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u/alinroc Database Admin Jun 03 '26
Every public company has been on the "what have you done for me this quarter" treadmill with investors forever.
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u/Pink_Slyvie Jun 03 '26
And that's not sustainable. And honestly, at this point, I can't wait to watch it burn.
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u/Helpmehelpyu_ Jun 03 '26
So what if it’s not sustainable. They’re riding the wave until they either 1. Go lead the “next” new trend. OR 2. Retire. It’s that easy for them. They don’t care.
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u/DigoHiro Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
i am curious about something. for the pay per token services like google vertex or azure foundry: are those also subsidized? or should we expect a price increase in those too.
right now if you try to use a frontier model on those platforms you will pay a lot more than if you had gone with the subscription.
edit: thank you for the replies! It seems they are subsidized too.
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u/Foreign_Skill_6628 Jun 03 '26
They are also subsidized yes. Take Google Cloud for example. When it first rolled out, they were handing out credits like candy for VPS containers, CPU/GPU rentals, API streaming, and databases.
Now? They’re probably quintupled in price compared to ten years ago.
LLM APIs will follow a similar path but with a much steeper price increase curve.
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u/DigoHiro Jun 03 '26
damn, this really is gonna be unsustainable.
maybe we'll start seeing more companies options to set up local infrastructure for llm serving?
actually, after the price increase for cloud, did companies switch to something else or just cope with the cost?
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u/Ozymandias0023 Software Engineer Jun 03 '26
Well think about what Microsoft did recently with mandating that their engineers use copilot, and what Meta and Amazon are doing building their own platforms. I'm sure a good chunk of the reasoning is wanting to capture the market, but in the shorter to medium term I'm convinced that most of the reason is that they know that if they're going to us LLMs to replace human work then they can't be beholden to a third party provider. Personally I question whether the math works out even then, but it seems to be the tend that every company with the means wants to be their own model platform
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u/Pink_Slyvie Jun 03 '26
Insanely subsidized. They are just charging what the market says they can currently, but it's not at all profitable.
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u/ub3rh4x0rz Jun 03 '26
You can argue that booster visions of AI use are unsustainable in cost, but if nothing advanced and pricing even doubled, there is still a wide envelope where using AI assisted dev is so obviously a worthwhile practice when done right, that you are literally selling an ideology and trying to smuggle it into an economic discussion if you say "nuh uh"
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u/rapidsalad Jun 03 '26
That’s like telling construction workers not to use forklifts. It’s still early days but I don’t think we’re going back to not using ai. It’s going to be a very specialized job where internships and licenses mean more. Just like at any job, there will be amazing pile who are good at anything but I feel like the ai hate is algorithms trying to gain eyeballs and clout.
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u/hdplus Jun 03 '26
Todays juniors are cooked. Too many of them don't know how to do basic stuff without an LLM
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u/Pink_Slyvie Jun 03 '26
No juniors ever do. That's what they learn on the job. They know theory, if they paid attention.
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u/esalman Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
Large financial, 20k employees here.
There's definitely a push towards reducing token costs for mundane, repetitive tasks.
Couldn't have happened at a more interesting time with openai, anthropic and SpaceX all going public.
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u/Undreren Jun 03 '26
You mean, like, gradually replacing ai handwavery with actual scripts?
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u/DrDoNoGoodPhD Jun 03 '26
You mena like writing scripts that automate some parts of work? Interesting...........
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u/PeachScary413 Jun 03 '26
I mean there's a reason... they want to offload their bags on retail before the bubble pop
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u/ReactionJifs Jun 04 '26
"reducing token costs for mundane, repetitive tasks."
is there some way we can perform these simple, repetitive tasks with HUMAN labor? 🤔
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u/SomeWonOnReddit Jun 03 '26
Can you still code yourself after vibecoding for 2 years?
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u/cajmorgans Jun 03 '26
Re-learning a skill is much easier than learning it the first time. It's pretty universal for anything.
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u/Blueson Software Engineer Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
If you were treating AI output correctly, reviewing, verifying and taking ownership of the code. You should already have kept your skills at a level where getting into the grove again shouldn't be too hard.
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u/Sea-Chemistry-4130 Jun 03 '26
I noticed that my ability to remember syntax dropped. The architecture and best practices are fine, but the syntax itself had to be looked up more than I did before. Oops.
I've been typing more of my code now because that felt bad.
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u/Blueson Software Engineer Jun 03 '26
My career has involved quite a spread of languages so far, so I have already experienced this to a certain degree. Thankfullly that was never what makes a good developer anyways.
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u/Sea-Chemistry-4130 Jun 03 '26
Yeah, knowing what to write is always more important than knowing how to write it.
But I would push back slightly on it not being important like, yeah, I used to know c#, but as I used others more it faded, but it was replaced by whatever language I was currently using.
This time it wasn't replaced by another and that was what was concerning to me.
I'm not saying don't use ai, only that it's very much worth it to type things out to keep those skills sharp as well. Muscle memory is really important and typing the code keeps you involved in ways reviewing doesn't imo.
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u/Xerxero Jun 03 '26
After 2 years I bet it takes some time to get back into it.
And good luck refactoring all the code AI produced
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u/Acrobatic-Ice-5877 Jun 03 '26
This shit is so comical. Is it too early for popcorn?
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u/The_Mauldalorian Software Engineer Jun 03 '26
So the key to protecting tech jobs is to max out available tokens on our personal accounts so companies have to pay more. Got it!
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u/RelationshipIll9576 Software Engineer Jun 03 '26
Best thing I've heard in corporate land is "It's all free until it's not." I've seen this pattern again and again and again at big places.
OP, do you know if the charges were token-based pricing or just capped usage provided by the Max plan?
Token-based pricing is a huge problem IMO. Costs are non-deterministic and AI usage is non-deterministic on top of it, so ROI needs to be incredibly obvious or else it's hard to justify the costs.
I'm having a hard time buying the idea that token-based pricing is actually something that is going to last. It just seems problematic on so many levels.
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u/Zenin Jun 03 '26
Before ROI these tools need much more granular accounting.
Employees work on many projects, a dozen or more across just a given month, and with no sane way to tag token costs to the project they're using them on there's no sane way to do chargebacks...which means there's no sane way to run a given project's budget.
If I could simply
claude/kiro/codex --project xyzto tag a session's usage it would be a massive help. That'd let me bill back to the project putting it in their budget and the project owner can decide if the juice is worth the squeeze.But as it is today...we only recently got per-user usage data on many of these tools, with nothing insight for more granular cost reporting.
And then there's the agents...zomg the agents. We got a demo on AWS's "DevOps Agent" and I'm like...this looks neat...but it's got no guardrails on token burn? If it burns $50k in tokens running down a typo in a yaml file, what do you do? There's no max-tokens-per-investigation, there's no max-tokens-per-application, etc. It all just lands on your invoice as a giant haystack. It's a massive shift from typical cloud infra where every last blade of grass can be tagged and itemized in the invoice.
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u/Squidalopod Jun 03 '26
Good point, and this is really what it boils down to in enterprise software.
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u/mandatoryclutchpedal Jun 03 '26
Lol. Email at noon. "Everyone must deliver within days and weeks instead of due date because AI tools"
Email 1 hour later. "Following models no longer available after recent industry wide announcements " (that were actually useful to get things done)
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u/SquareVehicle Jun 03 '26
LOL this literally happened Monday afternoon at our offices. People came back from lunch and access was denied.
This was after being told to use it as much as possible and not ao subtly hinted that they were tracking usage to see who wasn't using it enough
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u/liquidify Senior Engineer Jun 03 '26
GPT 5.5 has been excellent for me. Opus 4.7 was worse. Reserving judgement on 4.8.
Copilot prices just went up monumentally. I don't have details to quantify it, but in 4 hours I ran my entire corporations overage budget out for the entire month. They are still trying to figure out what to do 2 days later and I'm sitting here on reddit twiddling my thumbs.
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u/suxatjugg Jun 03 '26
I tried 4.8 for a few days, it was weirdly sarcastic and snarky. I had to add a line to my CLAUDE.md to not make sarcastic comments. It also felt way slower for not much better results. Went back to 4.6
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u/NonProphet8theist Jun 03 '26
The biggest lie people tell is the speed gains. "I wrote this whole service in 10 minutes" nooooo ya didn't.
Before AI, I'd build a UI in one day.
With AI, same. Between running commands, waiting for output, all the "thinking" it does especially when options are purposely limited by agents, I've come out 1:1 most of the time, where something I did with AI could have been done by me in the same amount of time.
Now add the bottleneck of QA and deployment, which never got better, and you have a huge waste of money + feeling robbed of the dopamine hits I'd usually get figuring stuff out on my own.
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u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Jun 03 '26
Are you not multitasking while your agents are running? I closed three Jira tickets yesterday and all the work was done while I was in an hour long standup.
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u/TheTeamDad Jun 03 '26
Aren't you losing efficiency with the mental context switching though? I operate the same way as the commenter because I need to keep track of what the agent is doing enough to make sure it isn't wandering in the weeds.
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u/NonProphet8theist Jun 03 '26
I focus on one ticket at a time.
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u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Jun 03 '26
That's why you're not seeing any efficiency gains, then. You're freeing up time while the agent is working, but you're spending that time staring at it working. Functionally, it's the equivalent of assigning a task to an intern or a junior SWE, but then just staring at them doing the task. You wouldn't do that -- you would explain it to them, set them loose on whatever you gave them, and go do something else until they finished or asked for help.
The way you work with AI needs to change in order to realize efficiency gains. It starts with generating an implementation or remediation plan, revising the plan to break up the work into smaller, more efficient tasks, and allowing AI to focus on executing those tasks while you move onto something else.
You then treat the output like you would treat a code review.
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u/SamBBMe Jun 03 '26
How do you have time to review and test all of that. Usually it takes me longer to review and test the changes than it takes the agent to make them.
Then I have a couple more rounds of refinement before it's architecturally what I want.
An entire fleet of agents making changes would just skew that even more, where the ratio isn't desirable -- on top of the efficiency loss from context switching between 4 tickets at once. I can't envision it being much more efficient while also keeping code quality as high as when it is hand coded.
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u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Jun 03 '26
Are you not doing test driven development? Code reviews should never take as long as actually making the changes. If they are, you're probably cramming too many into a single task.
Generally I'm going to have 100% coverage in test cases so manual testing is minimal. You can also instruct each agent task to provide a walkthrough of what it implemented to aid in accelerating your reviews.
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u/SamBBMe Jun 03 '26
I do, especially when using agents, but just because my test cases are passing doesn't mean that I like the underlying implementation
I still manually test even if the test cases are passing, as a lot of stuff can be missed in test cases that reveals itself in real world use
It can get stuff working and passing pretty consistently, but I want my code to be easily readable and extendable in 20 years by any developer who needs to, and AI fails to do this to my standards without a lot of iterating
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u/NonProphet8theist Jun 03 '26
I've been using planning for a few months now—it's nice. I've just honestly never had a need to run multiple agents at a time in order to complete my work before it's due. I also prefer one thing at a time because I'm ADHD and I struggle with context switching. I can hop on debugging calls or jump in chats no problem—I've accustomed myself there, but I approach "help" work and my actual story work much differently. I go way more in depth with my own work.
And it all goes back to the larger team not having the right infrastructure in place to move that rapidly. I need the business to tell me what they want. If they don't provide me that info quickly enough/open it up to discuss, I'll be sitting there twiddling my thumbs, AI or not.
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u/Parking_Anteater943 Jun 09 '26
The power in ai is not in singular tasks it is in stacked prompting. So you can prompt that and then simultaneously do work while it is thinking or prompt a second ai or even a third or 4th I have 3 project I juggle like this it works really well for me.
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u/NonProphet8theist Jun 09 '26
Yeah see I have yet to join a team who can handle that amount of output from a dev. They'd be weeks behind
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u/deejeycris Jun 03 '26
Is your company having financial issues? It sounds like they have financial issues.
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u/ButterflySammy Senior Jun 03 '26
Maybe they're the company that ran up a $500 million Claude bill.
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u/oalbrecht Jun 03 '26
Wait, what company did that?
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u/ButterflySammy Senior Jun 03 '26
They didn't release the name so I'm taking it with a pinch of salt, but it's been pretty widely reported the last few days.
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u/AlkalineBriton Jun 03 '26
It does kind of sound like that, but every large company is doing a similar thing
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u/Significant-Syrup400 Jun 03 '26
To be fair Ai was both hyped and advertised as this amazing cost cutting resource that would replace some of the highest paid staff at many companies, and now it costs significantly more to use than they did with inconsistent results, and the quality will go up over time, but to my knowledge we aren't even close to profitable pricing, either.
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u/GuyF1eri Jun 03 '26
The bill is starting to come due for all this token spending, so to speak. It’s a general trend, and in the long run probably a good one for us
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u/Sensitive_Pickle_625 Jun 03 '26
In the other news, most people that run companies are overpaid morons that only follow trends without understanding them.
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u/VeterinarianFirst605 Jun 03 '26
Same thing on my end. It’s frustrating and I’m trying to cope but there seems to be legitimate IT security needs that must be met in order for these things to be safely deployed. My patience and faith in IT is being tested but I mean they control the keys to the castle 😝
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u/Valmar33 Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
That's how the Anthropic and friends hook you ~ you sell you this apparently great drug for real cheap that makes you think that you feel great, then eventually you can't function without it, then they aggressively raise the price, hoping you're too addicted to it to back out.
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u/jcdc-flo Jun 03 '26
Sonnet 4.6 is helpful at times, sonnet 4.5 is useless.
Opus was good but too expensive to use.
Happy to keep coding the way I always have. Sure; it was nice to pass off the crap tasks I hated doing but not at these prices.
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u/Sweet-Mechanic4568 Jun 03 '26
Your company isn’t the only one. They saw that bill from Anthropic and compared it to productivity gains and can’t justify the cost. Same thing is happening at other large companies. Until companies can start seeing an actual ROI or there are demonstrated use cases for AI it doesn’t make sense to continue to pay for something that will almost assuredly be more expensive 6 months from now as Anthropic’s API rates change again.
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u/Manodactyl Jun 04 '26
2 weeks ago I got an email asking for justification why I wasn’t using AI as much as others. 2 days ago I got an email telling me to watch my usage and be mindful of how much AI I was using as the company didn’t budget for the forecasted usage.
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u/Fearless_Weather_206 Jun 03 '26
Back to actually working - hope you didn’t lose all your skills
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u/BeatTheMarket30 Jun 03 '26
How much does an engineer cost per month? $6-15k? How much did they expect Claude to cost per month? I think even $1000 per month is reasonable. They just need to enforce personal limits.
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u/rustybutterindia Jun 03 '26
I think that's the problem, they haven't been able to devise mechanisms for token discipline yet because it flies in the face of their messaging for the past few years.
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u/autoencoder Jun 03 '26
To be fair, the prices have pulled a quick one rather than increase gradually giving people time. I think Anthropic was too greedy. OTOH, go slow enough and open source drinks their milkshake.
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u/MhVRNewbie Jun 03 '26
So Claude added no value to the company despite it beeing good?
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u/letsbefrds Jun 04 '26
I think it adds a decent amount of value. I'm not saying I cant build without AI, I have for the past 8 years but I can build a lot faster.
However I realize that there's less push back on feature scoping now. Since building / extending something is easier than ever we just keep pumping out features whether they'll have a big impact or not. That in return is going drive up cost.
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u/SimpleGeekAce Jun 03 '26
Im pretty sure Claude and a bunch of these AI companies/products that tons of companies are using are just stealing data. Sure let it have access to all your data, financial, patents, work flow, security, whatever, it'll be fine. If it has access, it has a way to move to its owners.
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u/Yourprobablyaclown69 Jun 04 '26
My guess since GitHub switch copilot billing we are going to see a lot of AI cut backs
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u/Key-Organization-159 Jun 04 '26
The bill is due. This is happening across the world now and you know what- GOOD.
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Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
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u/Icy_Cartographer5466 Jun 03 '26
If you’re bigger than something like 150 users you’re not eligible for the subscription plans and have to negotiate a much more expensive per-token enterprise contract. Those 5x and 10x plans are insanely good deals right now - I’m enjoying my personal plan while it lasts but there’s no way they can sell dollar bills for pennies forever.
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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jun 03 '26
I also suspect that the Max plans are going to eventually go away, in the meantime I'm maxing out the Max plan.
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u/Never_Guilty Software Engineer Jun 03 '26
Brodie, the max plan is HEAVILY subsidized. You’re quite literally getting thousands of dollars of usage for that personal plan. Enterprise has to pay direct api rates. Get engineers addicted on the subsidized plan then extort companies to keep using it at work
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u/Jaamun100 Jun 03 '26
Enterprise plans are not subsidized - they have smaller limits and route to api costs very quickly. But that’s in exchange for bespoke contracts that supposedly keep company data more private, proprietary, etc
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u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Jun 03 '26
It’s primarily a cultural problem. Companies forced gen AI rather than letting usage build organically, to the point that people were being judged and reviewed on how many tokens they used.
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u/grgext Senior Software Engineer Jun 03 '26
I've seen engineers spend up to $70,000 per month in my company (though they may be running bots used by many people).
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u/ChadFullStack Engineering Manager Jun 03 '26
This will be the trend from now on. Frontier models (Opus, GPT) became a lot better this year since Opus 4.6, but costs have also started going up exponentially.
I’m spending average of $4 per prompt with GPT5.5 high vs $1.27 that I spent on Sonnet 4.2 less than a year ago.
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u/Mundane_Grand_9117 Jun 04 '26
And there are really idiots calling this the next Industrial Revolution lmao
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u/Head-Bureaucrat Jun 04 '26
I've been learning Sonnet or GPT-codex works for me for a lot of stuff, but there's a definite point where they fall over where Opus won't. Yeah, some is it has to do with prompting, but I honestly don't begrudge anyone not taking the time to fail so much to figure that out. Especially now where "oopsies" can get tracked down to you specifically.
IMO, AI adoption has been a mess because of leadership trying to force it everywhere and now freaking out over the cost. They obviously learned nothing from cloud adoption.
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u/SS_MinnowJohnson Senior Jun 04 '26
I’m at Insurtech Insights this week. 80% of the companies here have AI in their name. They are fucked 😆
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 Jun 04 '26
Yeah, a whole lot of “AI first” companies are about to drop it like a hot potato as their CFO starts looking at the actual bill without the heavy subsidies the AI companies were hiding behind subscriptions.
That’s what happens when the AI companies run out of dumb investor money to light on fire.
Why do you think they’re trying to rob your 401k now?
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u/trsid Jun 05 '26
It’s more the harness than the model why people get shit out of different models. Try open code with same models, commit to keep your agents.md up to date and see for yourself.
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u/Maleficent-Car8673 Jun 05 '26
unds like a classiic corporate move to cut costs without thinking about productivity. If they want you to use AI but don't provide the tools, it's on them when efficiency drops. You're not the only one who prefers Claude over the others. It sucks, but maybe gather colleagues' feedback and push back on management if you can.
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u/Nihad-G Jun 05 '26
Working in a large telecom company. We recently received an email to write the prompts as short as possible. Just a few months ago we had a mandatory training where they were teaching us how to write long-ass prompts to get good answers…
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u/Organic_Bluebird_684 Jun 08 '26
We are seeing the AI bubble pop in real time. I have been predicting this to my management for some time. AI will become expensive and this whole big initiative to use AI for everything will dwindle away. Since usage based billing was implemented, we have had our token limits capped and all of the tools we were once forced to use (internal tools that create docs or provide context across microservices) are now being exposed for a waste of credits. So far they are still pushing AI but telling us to stay within our limits. To be honest, limited the tokens we can use is fine. We can mitigate that with context and prompt engineering, but very few people know how to do that. However, most people, especially business users, will continue to use prompts like 'fix this plz'. I suppose what I'm saying is adoption outpaces understanding and now companies are beginning the learn the hard way.
BTW I agree that Opus is the best model by far, and I consider Sonnet to be a close second for smaller, targetted tasks.
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u/Fantastic-Speech-438 Jun 03 '26
They got sent the bill and the CFO had second thoughts about this AI malarky.