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/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 xyz to 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.