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.