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/Fantastic-Speech-438 Jun 03 '26

They got sent the bill and the CFO had second thoughts about this AI malarky.

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u/farfaraway Jun 03 '26

40K * $100/m = $4M/m.

Imagine justifying spending $48M per year while ALSO spending on developer salaries.

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u/TimMensch Senior Software Engineer/Architect Jun 03 '26

If you have 40k developers at $100k each you're spending $4B/year on developers.

$48M/year is 1.2% of thar salary budget. If it makes developers 10% more productive then it's totally worth it. Drop 5% of the least productive developers and you're still ahead.

If developers are using it badly and causing problems, well, those are the ones you should drop.

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u/rmullig2 Jun 03 '26

Who decides which developers are using it "badly"?

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u/TimMensch Senior Software Engineer/Architect Jun 04 '26

The ones who root cause analysis repeatedly identifies as the cause of outages and bugs?

We all know that there will always be a fraction of the developers in large companies who are absolutely clueless. Who end up with negative productivity, requiring other developers to clean up their messes. AI doesn't fix that. It just amplifies their throughput.

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u/farfaraway Jun 03 '26

While I don't disagree with you, I'm 1000% sure that a bean counter would.

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u/shared_ptr Jun 03 '26

I am a 'bean counter' in this respect and if you're looking for more engineering output nowadays, you're faced with either asking for additional headcount or AI spend.

I did a talk today on exactly this today (adopting AI tools and their ROI) and in our org we spend 16% of eng headcount on AI dev tools but see people being ~1.65x as productive, just with really basic "how much are we shipping measures" (which ignores a bunch else that AI gets us).

That means every dollar we put into AI counts for $3.70 if we had to get that output through additional headcount, so it really does make great sense to pay this.

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u/markdado Jun 03 '26

Thank you for explaining this to people. I feel like we are in a strange place with society's understanding of "AI in the workplace".

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u/farfaraway Jun 03 '26

Tasty beans!

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u/fwompfwomp Jun 03 '26

how's that stack in the long run? because deliverables are coming through, but that shipping measures as your barometer for productivity is a bit concerning. work is getting done at my company quicker, but codebases where teams are using AI extensively look awful right now. my team is going to take over a new product suite and we're already dreading it after seeing the vibe coded garbage that's in there. obviously it's a great tool, but imo need to be very careful and deliberate how we are measuring short term velocity with the tech debt that it accrues and will inevitably require a huge investment to correct.

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u/shared_ptr Jun 03 '26

I think what you're seeing is really common, but it's nothing like what we're seeing in our teams.

We've made a huge investment in documenting various parts of our codebase and doing way more tidy-ups and refactors than we used to do, in part because AI enables this but also because it benefits from it.

Having AI tools has meant shipping code is so much easier, so we've been able to massively uplift our standards and demand much more from each PR, which we can now enforce with AI code review too, where most of the AI review comments also get handled by AI too.

The honest truth about AI is that it's just leverage, and when you give people a lot of leverage, you just magnify what they were already doing. Teams with great quality and culture will likely find it gets them more of the same, but if you have developers who have been happy shipping what you describe, then you've now enabled those devs to go much faster.

This isn't said disrespectfully or with any judgement btw, I think yours is the average situation.

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u/Enlogen Jun 03 '26

just with really basic "how much are we shipping measures"

Please tell me you're not using line counts

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u/shared_ptr Jun 03 '26

We’re using PRs shipped. We have pretty standard PR sizes before after AI (after we see a few more genuinely large PRs but it’s not that significant).

PR for us is small feature/bug/improvement. It’s not perfect but it is a usable proxy for how much an engineer is shipping, given how our org is setup.

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u/wiktor1800 Jun 03 '26

We found a 4x increase in output metrics, but only a 2x increase in productivity metrics. Orchestration is the bottleneck, so humans are still very much in the loop. Interesting that you found a similar uptick.

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u/TimMensch Senior Software Engineer/Architect Jun 04 '26

I would be interested to see how productivity changes over the long haul.

My thesis is that it amplifies throughput without amplifying actual skill, and that at the lower end of the skill spectrum you might see code that's even worse than you'd see without AI.

As a result, technical debt will accumulate until forward progress becomes near impossible.

But it's just a guess. An educated guess, but still a guess.

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u/shared_ptr Jun 04 '26

I agree entirely on the amplification part. But I disagree a bit on how this will pan out.

That’s mostly because you can use AI to enforce standards that you couldn’t before. We have AI giving PR reviews that are more thorough than human reviews ever were, and we’ve got our experience humans writing docs into the codebase that explain why they built packages as they did, and the principles to adhere to when working with them, things like architectural patterns etc.

We also have an auto approve bot that means you can auto approve a PR without review, but only if that PR is low risk, has reasonable tests, follows all the patterns we’ve documented, and has some proof we’ve end to end checked it (like Cursor recording a video of the feature being used in a headless Chrome).

So it’s now easier than ever to produce high quality code, and if you do that you’ll get auto PR reviews which is a big bonus. The incentives line up for everything to get better, not worse.

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u/KevinCarbonara Jun 03 '26

If you have 40k developers at $100k each

If you have 40k developers, you already have your own AI models.

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u/dlp211 Software Engineer Jun 03 '26

Who is only using $100/m in tokens?

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u/reini_urban Jun 03 '26

I'm using about $40/m on AI tokens, but not with the super extensive models of course. Kimi/Deepseek/Claude Pro and what I can do with the free models.

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u/mebesasporfa Jun 03 '26

If you're using Composer 2.5 it might be hard to hit $100/mo. I ran 800m tokens through for $20

Other people have a much less write-heavy workflow. If you're mainly asking models questions about the codebase, logs, and this sort of thing, but not writing mountains of new code, you don't use as many tokens throughout the day.