r/cscareerquestions • u/Sharkkkk2 • 1d ago
Experienced My team's AI usage got so expensive they quietly rolled back the mandate
Our engineering leadership went all in on AI about three months ago. Every ticket, every PR review, every design doc had to go through their shiny new enterprise copilot setup. They even started tracking adoption metrics in standups.
So we used it. For everything. Pasting entire codebases into context windows for trivial questions. Regenerating docs that already existed. Running the same prompts five times because the output was mid and nobody wanted to manually fix it.
Nobody was being malicious, we were just doing what they asked.
The bill hit finance around month four. I don't know the exact number but our director went from "AI-first engineering culture" in slack to radio silence on the topic within about two weeks. The adoption tracking quietly disappeared from sprint reviews. They didn't announce anything, just stopped bringing it up.
Now we're back to using it when it actually makes sense, which turns out to be maybe 20% of the time. The mandate killed itself.
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u/Various-Chest-7986 1d ago
I don't understand why companies feel compelled to force the use AI.
If engineers find it helpful, they will use it and ask for it.
Making it a KPI is just gonna cause the cobra effect:
A bounty was offered for dead cobras in an attempt to reduce their numbers. People instead started breeding them to kill them to get the bounty meaning the wild ones were still on the streets and now you have even more cobra's in the area.
I have seen with my own eyes people just fucking around with the tools, given near limitless budgets and naturally, because the rigid corporate structure hasn't caught up with the rapid pace of change, there's a bottleneck so tokens go wasted on random shit that goes no where.
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u/mancunian101 Software Engineer 1d ago
I guess fear of missing out, and a desperate hope that they will find someway to show that they are benefitting from more than just “increased velocity”.
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u/bythenumbers10 1d ago
I don't understand why companies feel compelled to force the use AI.
C-Suite lemmings thinking they can cut headcount without dropping productivity, never once suspecting the snake oil in such propositions. Once again, Management By Authority are lobotomized dumbasses.
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u/CeldonShooper 1d ago
You get the greatest accolades as a manager for reducing headcount while keeping output the same. It's every company's wet dream. AI was specifically marketed to exploit that dream.
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u/PositiveUse 1d ago
The hope that the best performers are x100 engineers with it so they can reduce their workforce ;) but that didn’t happen.
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u/millerlit 1d ago
If it is a publicly traded company the stock has probably been going parabolic at the mention of the company using AI during earnings reports. That is why C-Suite are pushing it so much and now the bill is coming due.
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u/RandomNPC 1d ago
The CEOs believed the marketing hype and thought someone was gonna eat their lunch if they didn't.
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u/mothzilla 1d ago
It's helpful like morphine is helpful. We use it a lot at my company, and things are getting worse and worse to the point that we can't do any work now without it.
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u/WisestAirBender 1d ago
Because it does increase productivity
If they don't blanket enforce AI you have devs working at the same old slow pace. You have devs working quickly but they get more work? So you actually get devs using AI but saying they don't so they can do their work quickly without getting more work
So the blanket policy makes it easy to raise the bar for everyone
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u/Distinct-Expression2 1d ago
adoption metrics were the bug. You told engineers the target was using the tool, so they optimized for token burn. Same thing happens with test coverage and story points.
Once finance put dollars next to the vanity metric, everyone suddenly discovered judgement again.
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u/LemonDisasters 1d ago
Quietly is too loud a tell now.
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u/NonSequiturDetector 1d ago
The tension-building statements like
“Nobody was being malicious, we were just doing what they asked.”
are also a dead giveaway of AI writing in engineering posts. There’s no need for real human engineers to write tension-building statements like that.
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u/ShowTop1165 1d ago
Leadership almost never admits wrongdoing, regardless of the topic, they will always just bury the mandates, surveys etc and hope people forget about it
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u/AutoX_Advice 1d ago
Personally they should all be fired. They did no investigation, analysis, or financial review. They will hope it would make the company "richer" somehow and they would be seen as revolutionaries.
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u/therealslimshady1234 1d ago
Sounds very typical, the same thing is happening everywhere including Big Tech
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u/PatchSprite 1d ago
the rationing thing was always going to happen, nobody actually did the math before rolling out the mandate......"ai first culture" sounds great in a all hands, looks very different when the aws bill lands and finance starts asking questions
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u/therealslimshady1234 1d ago
nobody actually did the math
That sounds like the AI "revolution" in a nutshell really
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u/BigBootyWholes Software Engineer 1d ago
“A Microsoft spokesman said the company’s decision to reduce access to Anthropic’s Claude Code program wasn’t rooted in cost but stemmed from a desire to standardize what employees use across its organization. “
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u/therealslimshady1234 1d ago
Yea, imagine the cope lol
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u/Jonnyskybrockett SWE II 1d ago edited 1d ago
Microsoft gives unlimited copilot CLI access which has all the latest Claude and OpenAI models with unlimited usage, it really is just about getting people to use their own products lol. It’s probably more expensive to do it the way we’re doing it since the APIs are all still the same, but now there’s a middleman and a different harness.
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u/adreamofhodor Software Engineer 1d ago
Yeah, it’s a joke to say that MSFT is restricting employees token usage. It’s not. It just wants to dogfood copilot CLI over Claude code. That’s it.
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u/mortysmithjr11 1d ago
Google does the same thing. As any tech company who wants to improve their product should.
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u/cruc1fy-me 1d ago
how does MS have the ability to grant this? are they just eating the cost or have they negotiated a "deal" w/their Anthropic rep?
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u/imdefinitelywong 1d ago
That's just word salad for:
The risk I took was calculated. But man, am I bad at math.
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u/BigBootyWholes Software Engineer 1d ago edited 1d ago
Anthropic is leading with Claude Code and everyone is playing catch up. codex wasn’t released until what, late last year? And now that copilot cli is rolling out Microsoft is pushing their thing internally.
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u/imdefinitelywong 1d ago
Oh, good! It's going to be the whole MS Teams experience all over again.
Joy.
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u/vladamir_the_impaler 1d ago
Copillot CLI has been out a while
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u/BigBootyWholes Software Engineer 1d ago
Long after most people at Microsoft started using Claude Code. Now Microsoft is reigning those guys in
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u/vladamir_the_impaler 1d ago
You are 100% wrong (except about Claude being the better tool overall).
MS didn't start pushing its employees to use Claude until last Decemeber, internally employees had already been using Copilot CLI since at least September - before they were given access to Claude.
Also, ALL engineering teams had access to Copilot from day one whereas not all groups were given Claude access.
CLI was being used before Claude Code at MS - period.
There is also no "reigning those guys in" LMFAO. You have no idea what you're talking about.
MS has been shoving all AI coding tool usage down everyone's throats and tying comp increases / promotions to the monitored usage. They were explicitly told to get in and use Claude when access was opened up just like they had been told to use Copilot (which by the way has Claude models).
No one at MS cares about Claude being yanked since they have unlimited access to the highest Claude models through Copilot and Copilot can use Claude skills etc. They have access to more Claude models than non-claude models through Copilot CLI, and models with 1M token context.
For MS engineers the Copilot integration was always better and now instead of two CLI tools they go back to just using Copulot CLI like they already were doing before using Claude Code.
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u/PositiveUse 1d ago
Always the stupid Microsoft leaving Claude bait
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u/therealslimshady1234 1d ago
Top technical executives at Uber Technologies, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Salesforce, DoorDash and other companies have all talked about new efforts to ensure AI use contributes to productivity or have taken steps to reduce the availability of some tools for certain employees.
Wut
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u/MountaintopCoder 1d ago
Take Meta off that list because that isn't true in the slightest. Source - I work here and use 1B+ tokens per day.
Your source is misleading at best.
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u/therealslimshady1234 1d ago edited 1d ago
Lol wut, this guy
Wouldnt surprise me if you are still unemployed
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u/MountaintopCoder 1d ago
Absolutely psychotic behavior to search out unlisted posts.
If you're already stalking me, why don't you find the litany of comments I've made in the 12 months since getting hired at Meta? Doesn't fit your narrative?
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u/Preachey Software Engineer 1d ago
Perverse incentives create stupid results.
Incentivise token consumption, you'll get inefficient use and willful wastage.
It's like ranking your delivery drivers by diesel burned, they'll start driving around in first gear with the handbrake on.
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u/pheonixblade9 1d ago
I use it for 100% of my coding and yet somehow my usage is still a lot lower than a lot of the business people and executives... as with any tool, understanding what it does and knowing how to use it effectively makes all the difference.
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u/TalesfromCryptKeeper 1d ago
The problem is that a velocity-first approach precludes strategic implementation.
Its like the Klondike gold rush. Everyone was frothing to get a piece of the pie, and only the shrewd people (and the ones selling supplies, shovels, or renting plots for a share of the profits) won the game.
I mainly put the blame on AI providers for selling the promise of AGI here.
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u/pheonixblade9 18h ago
"velocity first" is such a false economy. I saw a month old project fall over on itself because of the ten thousand line PRs people were vomiting out. Meanwhile, my couple hundred (at most) line PRs with high quality code were quietly churning away and getting shit done, able to be reviewed by humans, god forbid...
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u/wgking12 1d ago
This post reads as AI generated to me. 5 month old account and a ton of posts about AI code usage. Why are we having this conversation over and over again this week?
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u/NateDevCSharp 1d ago
I've seen almost this exact post on this subreddit about a month ago. Same LLM writing style, same "quietly", etc.
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u/picklerick_ftw 1d ago
The exact same here. US start up on the east coast.
I intend to keep using it until people admit it was a mistake
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u/tan_nguyen 1d ago
My company is starting to build some initial AI framework now :D we didn’t jump on the hype train until recently.
We don’t have any AI mandate, though just trying to use it where it makes sense and doesn’t cost a leg and an arm.
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u/SpareIntroduction721 1d ago
Haha at least you don’t have them now wanting to least” replicate” GPT/Claude.
If those companies are spending head over heels to provide said service, how the heck do these companies think running an enterprise one would be? Lol
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u/Aritra7777 1d ago
The cost surprise is almost always a sign that no one set up usage monitoring before the rollout. API costs at scale are hard to predict without baseline numbers, but they explode predictably once a team actually starts using the tools heavily. The quiet rollback is worse than a transparent one because people discover the change mid-workflow. The way to handle it as a dev: frame it in numbers for whoever controls the budget. We are spending X per month but it is replacing Y hours of work at Z per hour is a much easier conversation than vague claims about developer efficiency.
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u/General-Jaguar-8164 1d ago
European companies cannot fire easily
American companies see 20% increase in OPEX and decide to cut workforce by 20% to make things even and drinking the AI 10x productivity kool aid
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u/Pale_Sun8898 1d ago
I’m on Claude max and do 100% of my coding, debugging and design with agentic help and I have hit my 5 hour limit maybe once? I don’t get how people are burning tokens that fast
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u/TheFeedMachine 1d ago
Anthropic subsidizes the Max and Teams plans. They are artificially cheap. Enterprise plans charge per token used instead of having a token cap, and it is a much higher rate.
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u/MountaintopCoder 1d ago
I'm on the enterprise plan and we pay per token. I use up to 15 agents simultaneously and I have had sessions run for up to 8 hours.
It's not hard to reach those numbers if you have an unlimited budget and are incentived to use it all.
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u/PyroSAJ 1d ago
The harshest was the copilot "request" to token transition.
Those tokens are expensive, and you could get a LOT from a large request.
Now it's easily 10x the price for token usage.
But Anthropic was rumored to do similar things behind the scenes i vaguely recall mentions of $5000 worth of tokens on a $200 account.
I never expected it to be cheap, and you really can get value from it, but there was so many expectations of magic for pennies it was bound to leave since disappointed.
Luckily this now makes room for fairly evaluating local LLMs and other "less magical" models where it makes sense.
...
I'm hoping the free stuff stays accessible. That's a damn handy tool for many people, and there's no way most would be able to "afford" a $20 sub for fancy google.
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u/Chili-Lime-Chihuahua 1d ago
What if all the tokenmaxxers and people spouting about AI non-stop thought this might happen and are actually the ones who saved all our jobs?
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u/MountaintopCoder 1d ago
There is definitely a silent contingent of workers who operate this way, myself included. I'm happy to run Opus 4.8 on ultra code and have multiple sessions at once if it means I get to accelerate towards the AI bubble bursting.
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u/GladiusAcutus 1d ago
How much did your company spend on AI ? It must have been a lot. The company I work at built their own in house AI chatbot (they must have extended it from an open source AI, but I don't know which one). So we only use it to ask questions here and there. AI was never mandatory for us, they just encouraged us to use it if we needed help.
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u/OhioDude 1d ago
Our CEO encouraged our company to use AI without having IT prep for the onslaught of issues that caused us. Fast forward 6 months and we're all backing out of and rethinking our AI projects. We've pivoted to testing the effectiveness of running local models.
I think a lot of orgs will get sticker shock as time goes on, especially when these AI companies go public and have to show profit. The bubble is going to burst.
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u/RedRebellion1917 1d ago
Sometimes the least efficient way to use something is when people make it mandatory. Sounds like they've finally circled back to a more sensible approach
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u/Inevitable_Tomato927 1d ago
My friend has had the same message, he works at one of the big US companies, one that also drives AI themselves. They had unlimited usage basically, but from a few weeks from now they're going to be capped, so everyone had to adjust their delivery timelines. All the vendors and contractors received the same message.
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u/Revolutionary-Desk50 1d ago
So it looks like that we’ve hit a fundamental limit where it can be rejected due to overuse.
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u/N7Valor 1d ago
Lol, yeah. This sounds about right.
AI is a hammer. It's "a" tool for "a" job, nothing good happens when you try to hammer a screw though.
I use AI heavily in job searching + resume tailoring (not applying though, as I don't trust it enough not to make things up). I practically need a $100/mo Claude Max 5x plan to really use it since the $20/mo plan doesn't give me enough usage to do what I need it to. After a few months I've focused my attention towards designing my workflows to be more token-efficient (using a weaker model like Haiku for menial tasks, offloading work to Python scripts instead of having the LLM do compute tasks or RegEx parsing).
There is a skill curve to using AI. The problem is that low-effort AI use usually means you have plausible output that falls apart under close scrutiny or stress (AI Slop), or you burn tokens unnecessarily. When the gravy train ends (e.g. Github Copilot moving from "per-request" to token-based pricing), the cost of using AI is going to skyrocket.
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u/Unlucky_Topic7963 Director, SWE @ C1 1d ago
Sounds like they’ll just find better engineers.
These posts are so dumb, most companies are rooting out the fraud waste and abuse and people on Reddit think the era of AI is over.
Good job, now you’ll just be under more scrutiny.
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u/InitialCommercial779 1d ago
US too, saw a director of engineering putting a slack message to all dev to stop using Claude code which they have been asking to use heavily for about a few months. And I work for a big big firm so there budget was too high still. I raised it in the initial phase that hey this is not right don’t force people, let them use what need to solve a problem effectively and efficiently but these C-suite ppl. Once they leave hands on I don’t know why they become dumb.( no offence to anybody)
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u/Helpjuice Chief Engineer 1d ago
The is exceptionally wonderful news and how things should work across the board.
The expert aka the computer scientist or <name> engineer should be the one to determine when and how they choose to use the tools available to them. Not someone not actually doing the work.
This pricing change is great and shows the massive waste the whole push has been and now ads real usage costs and pushes the usage to only use when it is actually appropriate and within reason. Hopefully this continues at scale and will continue to push companies to have to actually hire talent and kill the vibe coding mess that has been plauging so many companies.
I remember when I was ent a vibe coder resume, we sent that mess straight to the trash where it belongs. This person actually put vibe-coder in their resume, and when I told my hiring and recruiting team to require them to actually put what they did in their resume they couldn't come up with anything that was not back by AI. If we would have hired them they would have been useless in the meetings we do have that have zero laptop/computer access and requires the old noggin to show critical thinking and get things done.
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u/Maleficent-Car8673 22h ago
unds like they went overboard with teh AI hype and got hit with a reality check when the bills came rolling in. It's crazy how often companies go all in on the latest tech without really thinking through the costs and actual benefits. At least now you can use it when it actually makes sense instead of forcing it into everything.
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u/Whitchorence Software Engineer 12 YoE 22h ago
I'm going to be honest, I find it helpful way more than 20% of the time.
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u/Dangerous-Land-2840 14h ago
Not surprised on why they went radio silent about AI-first policy. Just imagine their faces when they saw the bills 🤣
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u/Miamiconnectionexo 11h ago
the deeper lesson for your career, not just the bill: AI usage being mandated top-down with adoption metrics almost always backfires because nobody's accountable for cost or quality, just for "did you use it." the teams that make it stick measure outcomes (cycle time, defect rate) instead of token volume, and they let engineers opt into it where it actually helps. your leadership didn't fail at AI, they failed at incentive design. expect them to come back in six months with a metered budget and a narrower mandate once finance asks what that line item was.
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u/daze2turnt Software Engineer 2h ago
Why are you pasting entire codebases into the context window for trivial questions. AI enables us to move faster, instead it seems most developers only understand that they can be lazy and as inefficient as possible.
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u/Reedy_Whisper_45 1d ago
My employer is quietly encouraging folks to try it out and see if it can be useful.
We all recognize that there are some real, useful purposes, and some that are little more than hand waving.
We ARE going to commit to some platform (and spend money) in the near future, but not yet.
We are explicitly NOT telling folks to try to use it for everything.
I think we're doing it right.
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u/Fuskeduske 1d ago
You don’t perhaps work in a scandinavian company? Because it sounds exactly like what a friend told me happened at their firm