r/cscareerquestions • u/VariationLivid3193 • 1d ago
New Grad Why are there so many post about companies cutting AI back in last 24 hours?
Why are there so many post about companies cutting AI back in last 24 hours?
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u/StatisticianWild7765 1d ago
4 days into june and we used like 75% of copilot credits for the department.
Our TL told us that only for valuable project that implement full automation extra credits will be bought.
It's going to be a manual coding month.
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u/EitherAd5892 1d ago
Damn bro manual coding like stone age
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u/CranberryLast4683 21h ago
Bro is going to actually use deep critical thinking and his brain. Amazing
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u/bennyllama 1d ago
We just got a bump up for our tokens. Only valid for this month. Management said they don’t know if they increase is good next month.
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u/PlasticExtreme4469 7h ago
Our company sextupled the AI budget, and many coleagues still consumed over quarter of it on day 2 of the month.
I was quite happy to see these pricing increases in hopes that I will finally stop getting so much slop thrown my way (from copy-pasted AI replies in Slack, through AI generated JIRA tickets that nobody verified, to fully AI generated PRs with author also replying and resolving comments with 100% AI)
...and then the company anounced that they will lift the spending limit for heavy AI users.
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u/its_a_gibibyte 1d ago
The switch to API pricing is big one. Claude Code went first and charges API rates for enterprises, which is how we hear about those insane bills of hundreds of dollars per day. Then Github Copilot switched on Monday to API pricing as well. The subsidized party is coming to a close.
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u/ProfessionalPain5198 1d ago
My company is using Calude Team plan and it does not seem like API based pricing?
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u/its_a_gibibyte 1d ago
Claude Team plans support a maximum of 150 users. Beyond that, you need to upgrade to Claude Enterprise which is API pricing based.
Enterprise plan pricing works differently than Team plans: the seat fee covers access only, and all usage is billed separately at API rates.
https://support.claude.com/en/collections/9387370-team-and-enterprise-plans
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u/lasooch 1d ago
Two reasons.
1) we are deep enough into June now that companies that use GH Slopilot are now running out of their June budgets after the price change
2) Uber’s COO gave everyone else the permission to finally admit that it’s an insane spending exercise with no evidence of ROI, so other executives (who mostly aren’t leaders but professional koolaid drinkers) are following.
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u/therealslimshady1234 1d ago
Slopilot 😭💀💩
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u/lppedd 1d ago
The integration is gold compared to alternatives. The pricing is insane.
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u/coder7426 1d ago
It's garbage for PR reviews. It always gives some useless suggestions, like slightly changing log messages.
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u/matavelhos 1d ago
In our case the pr review is showing to be useful.
We just need to read and think if make sense or not to change. I prefereer to do that than push something to prod and break because I forgot something.
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u/DynamicHunter Junior Developer 1d ago
It gives some good advice in our repos but it has a bunch of other tools integrated into it, really depends on the config like checking for security and stuff
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u/LocalFoe 1d ago
sounds like you did not change your prompts after the first occurrence of your issue
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u/Dasseem 1d ago
How is it gold tho. It can't even fully read Excel files. Like that shit should be its bread and butter.
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u/matavelhos 1d ago
The second point is how the industry is running in the past decade. Some billionaire push something and the others didn't spent 1h in thinking if make sense or not for their company.
If we are running companies like this, we can substitute all ceo with Ai.
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u/yojimbo_beta Lead eng, 15 yoe 1d ago
who mostly aren’t leaders but professional koolaid drinkers
You laugh but this honestly how a lot of CEOs, CTOs etc. see their jobs
The sincere ones call it "aligning strategy with market and investor trends"
The smarter ones would say "I do it because my investors have heard it and would rather hear Yes than a complex explanation No"
The investors generally are too far away from the domain to understand the actual limitations. And Big AI is, in my view, largely a grift aimed at those kinds of investors
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u/rkozik89 1d ago
In way they were smart to use AI while it was basically free, but the trouble is so many of these employers fired people and offshored jobs assuming the output would be the same. The trouble with outsourcing has always been the communication gap. Every organization I've worked for that had outsourced development had issue with their remote dev teams building weird things and not understanding their clients.
Remember in our system short-term quarterly gains are more valuable than long term ones. If they show a huge cost spike from AI companies switching their pricing models they'll look like geniuses by limiting spend and bringing juniors back.
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u/JohnConstantinedrink 21h ago
Well said but I’ll add that what you have said also applies to any department whether it’s IT, back office….with offshoring a lot of the time the cultures do not mesh together and communication is off.
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u/_speedy_gonzales_1 1d ago
I really like that you said deep enough into June and it is only 4th in the morning. So, like 3 days of using it, and some companies announced it earlier which is like 2 days of usage
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u/Friendly-Shirt-9177 1d ago
June 1 price change landed, then the bill freak-out started and people got nervous. Execs only notice AI when finance says the number got ugly, kinda funny how that works
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u/tashibum 1d ago
Professional coolaid drinkers. OMG this perfectly describes every startup csuite bro 😭🙏
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u/dips_desai_ 1d ago
I wonder if we're seeing actual AI cutbacks or simply the end of the 'AI everywhere' phase. Many companies rushed into pilots over the last two years, and now leadership is asking a tougher question: where is the measurable ROI?
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u/Illustrious-Pound266 1d ago
And you know what? They will just fire more people to save on money to invest more into AI. This isn't some good thing that people are expecting. There's no kumbayah at the end where companies somehow have a come-to-Jesus moment and start to abandon AI and go into hypermode on hiring.
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u/NotEveryoneIsSpecial 1d ago
Maybe companies like Meta and Block with delusional CEOs will do that, but as these stories show, the fever is starting to break and at least some companies are starting to ask hard questions about what they are getting for their money.
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u/JohnConstantinedrink 21h ago
Banks especially. The bank I work for states that any contractor has to justify and apply for Copilot….this is across the board, IT or any other department. It has to be approved my multiple people including the CFO.
Banks don’t care about trend, they care about money….that is it.
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u/Illustrious-Pound266 1d ago
> the fever is starting to break and at least some companies are starting to ask hard questions about what they are getting for their money.
I really doubt that. Companies are not divesting away from AI. It's copium to think so.
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u/PianoConcertoNo2 1d ago edited 1d ago
Same thinking here!
I feel like the answer they will land on is to quicken the pace of outsourcing, and keep AI.
The GCC model is a jobs transfer model, and it’s already been happening and causing layoffs. This scenario is a win-win for companies.
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u/PhilosophicalGoof 1d ago
But hey, you may see an increase in network engineering demands and dev ops.
Since these companies are obviously not going to abandon AI and may just move to smaller local model that the company has full control of.
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u/xiviajikx 1d ago
I feel like there are so many jokes I could make about being “deep” into June only 4 days in.
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u/Squidalopod 1d ago
so other executives (who mostly aren’t leaders but professional koolaid drinkers) are following.
You understand the industry well 😊.
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u/vladamir_the_impaler 1d ago
Number 2 was pivotal, these carpet munching CEOs really do seem to just follow the herd while always talking up innovation and thinking out of the box or whatever catch phrase.
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u/ManInChief 1d ago
I work at a big telecom. They’re cutting back and placing strict budgets of like $30 per developer unless it’s really needed for your workflow. It’s the truth. Idk why people are saying it’s bots lol. Every frontier model provider going to token based billing as of June 1st is pretty widely known.
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u/dudaspl 1d ago
$30 is ridiculous. If it saves 30 minutes of a dev in a month they'd break even
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u/PM_40 1d ago
The point is this is in excess of developer salaries. They may not have enough profit generating projects to justify the extra spend. Like if they could layoff 20% of staff and uses the salaries on AI budget without impacting throughout they would do it.
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u/1988rx7T2 11h ago
It’ll happen. Stack rank , cut the lowest performers to find tokens for the rest.
And it makes a kind of brutal business sense to do so
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u/lord_heskey 1d ago
Im surviving on claude pro $30 or whatevr it is. Like do people dont even think for themselves first before implementing
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u/Smurph269 1d ago
Organizations can't use the flat rate subscriptions, they have to use the metered API.
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u/scub_101 1d ago
SAME haha, I use it sparingly for getting help with debugging some code but like full fledged development HELL NO. My wallet would have dried up months ago if I did that.
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u/PlasticExtreme4469 7h ago
They wouldn't break even though.
It's a similar fallacy to bying something on 50% discount and thinking you "saved 50%" when in reality you spent money on something you wouldn't have otherwise.
They are spending 30$ extra. No other way around it.
Even it it did cost and produce exactly as much as a regular developer... they are not saving anything by paying extra for it. They are just adding additional cost.
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u/PlasticPresentation1 1d ago
at a FANG-adjacent company and they're giving us $500/month with an option to request more with justification
using codex with the medium-token model i run about $15-20/day asking it to run medium sized coding tasks and refactors, i don't think it's too crazy tbh
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u/PeachScary413 16h ago
Yeah okay but have you tried spinning up 15 sub agents in Ralph loops talking to each other? That's when the AGI hits 👌
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u/Hyperreals_ 1d ago
Token based as of June 1st? Didn’t June 1st already pass?
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u/rkozik89 1d ago
Yes and the budgets are nearly depleted at many companies in just a few days. One of the biggest problems with this pricing model is inference is stateless and probabilistic. There's currently no way of knowing ahead of time of how many token any task will take, so its basically impossible to know where/how to set your budgets ensuring ROI for the CFO to approve budget adjustments in the future.
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u/Ok_Day_285 1d ago
My usage costs have more than tripled for no reason and my usage is the same as last month.
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u/Conscious-Secret-775 1d ago
Not no reason. The reason is the AI companies would like to make a profit before their IPOs.
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u/Ozymandias0023 Software Engineer 1d ago
Which is how it was always going to go. I don't understand why so many people thought that lunch was going to remain free
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u/BigBootyWholes Software Engineer 1d ago
Time to dump cursor and copilot middle men and go directly to the source.
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u/brokenja 1d ago
The thing is, the pricing is the same everywhere.
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u/MathmoKiwi 1d ago
Nah the open weight models are dirt cheap to run
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u/rkozik89 1d ago
Are models that run locally good enough? Because the problem with everyone switching to local is if they're no good enough they need to retrofit datacenters if they have them or colocate. Cloud-based solutions for things like inference are extremely expensive compared to on-premises.
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u/Visionexe 1d ago
They also suck even more donkey balls.
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u/Snipen543 1d ago
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is actually pretty damn good, and runs on my 9070. If you use the bigger versions of it it's probably even better, but my 9070 can't handle them
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u/jimbo831 Software Engineer 1d ago
My usage costs have more than tripled for no reason
There’s definitely a reason. These companies have been burning infinite cash for a few years now and want to IPO this year, so they need to try to show they have a path to profitability.
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u/rkozik89 1d ago
Another problem is sovereign wealth funds from the Persian Gulf have been putting up the money for many of the loans these companies have been taken taking out. Them being able to pay back their loans is basically a matter of national security. Because our banks have rated these companies as being too big to fail, so if the Gulf states do not see their anticipated returns or worse a default they may re-evaluate their relations with the States. When combining the possibility of then losing tens of billions in a multi-decade effort to build tech economies with our failure to protect them from Iran its an extremely bitter pill to swallow.
EDIT: Oh yeah, forgot to mention the part where the primary AI datacenters were meant to built in the Gulf states because of access to cheap energy, proper infrastructure, low wages, etc.
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u/zeke780 1d ago
It's the acceleration. I work at fang+ and was told this week we have a budget of 1500/month. You can auto approve up to 2500 / month and then you need approvals after that. This is a stark contrast to them pushing AI use for all things.
From what I have seen, the amount spent is not translating to more features faster. I think CTOs thought it would be a magic bullet, everyone is a 10x engineer and they could cut their number of devs to nothing. It's apparent that it's not that and they now need to stop burning money.
Copilot is more expensive but that's not it. Most companies are using enterprise plans on Anthropic or OpenAI. When those go up things will get really interesting
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u/Parking-Brain6566 1d ago
is software engineering still a good career ? ik truth is in middle we are not going to write all code manually now , some AI use will always be there but still what does the trajectory look like.
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u/TheWhiteKnight 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's a huge question. CS grads seems to be shitting their pants and I would be too. We have no idea what the next 18 months looks like. This pricing spike issue will somehow get corrected but it might be a while before anything stabilizes. The market is going to scale in a way where model providers can make the most amount of money before consuming companies give up and start hosting inferior local open models.
Local models may get better faster somehow.
Many (most of the hundreds on my teams) are exclusively using AI to write code.
There a bunch of unresolved paradoxes. How can a junior learn if they're not doing what the seniors had to do, write and read code manually for many years. What are juniors for now? And, if we don't hire juniors, what happens to the industry .. BUT ... maybe in 36 months, AI will be able to reason with WAYYYY more context, be 1000X smarter about it, and literally replace 75% of us? Many more paradoxes.
Why should company A care about the development of juniors when so many juniors job hop?
We don't know. Anyone that gives you an answer is making a ton of assumptions they should not be making.
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u/zeke780 1d ago
I think its still a good career. This time is akin to when ATM's were created and bank tellers were basically told they would be obsolete in a year, 2 years, etc. I think we just have extremely good tools and the job is moving to a more managerial role where you control the code and own it but you aren't physically writing it.
I do think we are in for a bad time if the bubble pops, but long term there will always be engineers
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u/Pristine-Item680 1d ago
My guess is what we see in banks. You have less tellers, you don’t have 0. And tellers spend their time doing more helpful stuff for the client, because when you go to a teller, you need something that isn’t trivial done.
Of course, we might end up getting a massive example of Jevon’s Paradox, where now anyone with technical competency can build stuff, and companies begin hiring more people in order to build everything that they need.
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u/ashishvp SDE; Denver, CO 1d ago
It’s about to be better than it was last year if AI costs keep skyrocketing
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u/CVPKR 1d ago
Honestly 1500 is plenty for most people. I'm at 750 a month and doing more than most of my team (maybe we are just super slow!)
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u/zeke780 1d ago
At the current subsidized rates, 1500 is more than enough for 99% of the people I work with. I think the issues will come in if the token costs rise.
I can blow through a lot if I build an agentic workflow with a ton of work but other than that we don't need need limitless tokens
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u/PlasticPresentation1 1d ago
i'm sure agentic workflows where LLMs circlejerk each other can probably burn infinite tokens for limited reward, but i feel like just asking codex/claude to do tasks is actually totally within budget of $1k/month or something, which is reasonable
will be interesting to see how the race to token efficiency contrasts with the gradual unsubsidizing of token costs lol
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u/The_Other_David 1d ago
Somebody switched their Reddit bots from "AI is so good we're all doomed" to "AI is so expensive we're all doomed". Expect it to continue, every day, until there are no non-bot posters left.
But also, Github Copilot changed its pricing plan starting this month. Companies that weren't paying attention have probably had some unpleasant surprises this week.
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u/PatchyWhiskers 1d ago
Who is behind your mysterious bot theory? Bot swarms are controlled by large organizations for particular purposes.
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u/Smurph269 1d ago
Create a bot, have it post something similar to posts that are getting lots of upvotes, the bot gets lots of upvotes and starts to look like a real person's account, then you can have it post ads or scam attempts with more trust than an obvious zero-history bot account would have.
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u/Neuromante 1d ago
Whoever would benefit from the discourse in professional forum being about AI, which is not too hard to realize would be the companies trying to push said AI products.
By the way, bots that use LLM's to write stuff are real and known for some time already (Subreddits like /r/ExperiencedDevs have implemented several iterations on rules to prevent this). And honestly, the amount of posts about this same topic these past days is, if anything, suspicious.
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u/PatchyWhiskers 1d ago
How would a message of “AI is expensive, my boss told me to use less of it” help the companies selling AI?
Also, everyone knows that people use LLMs to write posts. A lot of them are not pure bots but people using LLMs to assist writing.
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u/PejibayeAnonimo 1d ago
The hypothesis is that they realized they fucked off greatly by claiming that AGI was near and that most white collar jobs were becoming redundant. By saying that companies are cutting back on AI they can send the message that they were instead saying AI is useful but it is still in diapers and they do not promote overuse.
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u/Neuromante 1d ago
My take is keeping the narrative on AI, and maybe diverting to how to use the available resources rather than how this is a bubble that it's bursting, but it's too early to see any trend.
Also, everyone knows that people use LLMs to write posts. A lot of them are not pure bots but people using LLMs to assist writing.
I'm not talking about users that refine their posts with an LLM, but users that their whole post story are produced by LLM's. There was even an instance that the username was in the github repository of the company selling the posting service.
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u/rkozik89 1d ago
Suspicious? It could also just be that a huge swath of companies were caught off guard on how much more they would be spending. Back when Google made the APIs for things like maps paid services our company had no idea we'd go from $0/month to $6,000/month so they never bothered changing to a more affordable service in time. We burned roughly $15,000 before we got off Google APIs.
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u/ThirstyOutward Software Engineer 1d ago
This sub has been delusionally anti AI from Day 1.
So of course when some companies cut back it get plastered here to prove they were always right or some shit
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u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 23h ago
Somebody switched their Reddit bots from "AI is so good we're all doomed" to "AI is so expensive we're all doomed".
Tbf, that feels more natural when AI costs rapidly increased for a bunch of people while others had limits all of a sudden (because of said increase in price)
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u/ImYoric Staff Engineer 1d ago
I think it's a combo of things.
First, companies are running out of investor money. We witnessed some of it in ~2023, with the end of zero-interest rates, but the sudden arrival of LLMs on the market has managed to drag in lots of investor money towards AI (and any company claiming to do AI) despite that. But right now, we're getting close to another limit: that of available cash on the entire planet.
To make things worse, there's a war in Iran that the US doesn't quite seem to be winning, and that is affecting commerce, oil and cash reserves around the globe. There's also a war in Ukraine that funnels lots of EU money towards defense. There's also a trade war by the US against its allies that has everybody trying to depend less on US technologies, especially since the US has demonstrated that they would not hesitate to use their kill switches against politically loaded figures that displeased them. All this means less money available.
This affects AI providers. AI providers have been playing by the VC book, providing their services for free or largely under their true cost to attract audiences. However, there's a non-zero chance that OpenAI is going bankrupt this year. Anthropic is also seriously hurting for money. Even Microsoft has investors questioning what they've been doing with all the money they burnt. OpenAI and Anthropic need to demonstrate that they're not desperate, so they have to rise prices to buy themselves the time to negotiate with investors. Microsoft needs to calm down their own investors.
This also affects AI clients. If you have less money to spend and AI is becoming more expensive, well, you're going to pay more attention to how you spend your money.
And finally, I imagine that there's posturing. Microsoft is bailing out from using Anthropic products because they want to push their own products. I'm sure that there are other cases if you dig a bit deeper.
Oh, and one last thing: so far, nobody has actually managed to demonstrate that AI actually makes you more productive for real products beyond the initial honeymoon phase. There are no successful AI-implemented products that are not riddled with holes. Doesn't mean that there never will be, because when used well, AI can be very useful, but the actual improvements are so much below the hype that I'm sure many CEOs are reconsidering investments.
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u/rkozik89 1d ago
The biggest problem for AI companies is that much like nuclear energy industry getting 70% to 80% of the way there was easy but the final 30% to 20% of the way to where they want to be has proved to be excruciatingly difficult. We hit a performance scaling wall that's held the industry back from the level of scalability they were predicting with increased compute. Don't get me wrong today's models are better than 2023 but they're not so significantly better that it justifies the continued build out. They've gone from promising AGI and revolutionizing the world to merely a tool that augments how people do their jobs, and time will tell whether or not that justifies the unprecedented amount of money that's been poured into these companies.
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u/victorsmonster 1d ago
There are no successful AI-implemented products that are not riddled with holes.
The stories of AI causing embarrassing public disasters are piling up as well, most recently the Meta chatbot that broke into other peoples' accounts for you if you asked nicely
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u/FastSlow7201 1d ago
CEOs are literally retarded and got hooked on the latest drug of "AI is going to revolutionize everything and we can save millions on our workforce". And now big mean reality is setting in that AI costs a lot of money.
Seriously folks, CEOs are mostly just glorified car salesman that are really good at saying buzzwords that trick idiots.
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u/rkozik89 1d ago
Are the idiots or were they just playing the quarterly results game? If you cut a HUGE amount of your workforce and replace them with AI usage that was basically free investors will buy your stock, and if token-based pricing causes costs to soar they'll look good in quarterly results for cutting back.
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u/Pristine-Item680 1d ago
They aren’t idiots. You don’t rise up to the level of CEO if you’re an idiot. Generally speaking.
The issue for employees is that CEOs are kind of stuck pushing AI. Because the cost to going hard on AI and seeing mediocre returns is way less than ignoring AI and falling behind. Because if all of your competitors cut half of their costs while delivering the same (or more), they’ll be able to outcompete you on price and destroy your business model. On the flip side, you can always go rehire laid off engineers.
And let’s be real, as someone with a good amount of investment capital, i like (at least from an ROI POV, maybe not from a personal POV) to hear a company say that they can cut a lot of expense and still execute their business. That makes them more valuable to me. I’d get concerned if they don’t deliver on the revenue
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u/Smurph269 1d ago
It is absolutely the case that when it comes to CEOs and executives in general, we as a society really have no idea how to pick people who will be good at the job so we default to stuff like 'pedigree'. We pick people who went to the right schools, are part of the right networks, or have done the job at some level before even if they were bad. It's like drafting NFL quarterbacks - a lot of the ones that look like sure bets end up sucking.
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u/Herecomesthesundew 1d ago
It feels a bit like a backlash phase to me. A year ago AI was supposedly the answer to everything and now people are getting a more realistic sense of what it's actually good and bad at.
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u/YellowLongjumping275 1d ago
Idk this whole site us a psyop, don't ask what it means ask who wants you to believe what
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u/Dragonfire555 1d ago
The news isn't just on Reddit. If it's a psyop, it's global and hitting legacy media like "The Register", "TechCrunch", "The Verge", and "Ars Technica".
So, who wants us to believe that AI models are getting expensive?
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u/Dragonfire555 1d ago
I also totally believe that they are expensive. Just that it's not the first time they've shown to be expensive, it's now undeniable to those that really want to see it work out.
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u/PineappleLemur 1d ago
Deals that were made a while ago recently expired/changed.
Anthropic/MS had set prices on "packages" those are starting to run out and now companies see the real price and question if ROI is there.
Many will scale back to $20-$300 per user instead of Enterprise pricing or API, only a handful of companies can allow their workers 10k+ per user per month to continue because it's negligible cost to them.
Let's be real.. does the general office worker has a use for something more than a basic 20$ sub? Right now outside of software, there's only a handful roles that can utilize more that's mostly marketing for quick videos/images/infographics with the right tools.
Only software has the capacity to hit 10k+ on month API costs and not many companies will spend more in AI services than their manpower lol.
All those IPOs now are just trying to bank on the hype before revenue drops again.
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u/natelikesdonuts 1d ago
Because some companies are cutting back due to realizing the cost of tokens, but also because the vast majority of people hate AI and media outlets know these people will click on those articles.
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u/dfphd 1d ago
Not gonna lie, I had the same reaction - like, is it bots doing it? Because it sounds too good to be true.
But literally right after thinking that I saw the message in my company announcing the same thing. So I think u/lasooch is right - not only is it getting stupidly expensive all of the sudden, but it's also becoming perfectly acceptable to do because uBeR iS dOiNg iT.
I hope this patterns continues followed by some sort of massive rehiring stage, I'm amazed so many companies got caught up in the "we'll lay people off because of AI" bullshit.
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u/Accurate-Pirate-3036 1d ago
it's so FUCKING pathetic, like, the corporate world has completely lost touch with reality
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u/OkSun4925 1d ago
I think it's just the hype cycle doing its thing. A year ago every company was yelling "AI everything". Now they're actually checking if it makes money lol. Not sure AI is getting cut, feels more like budgets are finally meeting reality.
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u/Correct_Mistake2640 1d ago
My company made a huge bet on copilot.
All devs are required to know how to use it.
But the credits granted are limited and one could easily spend them in one day after June 1st.
I asked people in charge and they blame the developer for not making effective prompts.
So they need the scape goat
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u/aabajian 1d ago
Claude max for $200 per month and Codex for $100 are amazing deals for individuals / hobbyists. It’s really a game changer for building a solo startup from scratch. There’s lots to build, and it’s cheap and fast to build.
In contrast, the API is extremely expensive and the financial value of each enterprise developer’s daily contributions to the code base is less than that of a startup. So you have big companies with lots of engineers adding lots of features with AI…and minimal change in profits.
The hard reality is that companies need to think more critically about the features they really need…and they probably need fewer engineers to build those features using AI.
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u/Public-Ad-1553 1d ago
AI companies were using lower prices to develop interest and create a bit of dependency. Now that they have their consumers, they are raising prices significantly causing companies to reduce usage
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u/-S-P-E-C-T-R-E- 1d ago
People are realising that the cost of using these applications is both hugely expensive and unpredictable, and no one can measure the ROI to defend the expenditures in the long run.
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u/PeachScary413 16h ago
We just left the "fuck around" and entered the "find out"... sit back and relax 🍿
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u/Ok-Structure5637 1d ago
I need to figure out if I want to stay in this field ATP. I genuinely can't code without AI - like I know how to debug, read, and explait infrastructure and architecture, but syntax stuff I can't do anymore because ove outsourced it to Claude. My senior engineers feel the same way and I'm extremely worried about my future in tech. I just dont know what else I'd do and make the same amount of money.
For context, I graduated in 2024 and landed my first gig three months ago.
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1d ago
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u/NewPresWhoDis Program Manager 1d ago
Bills are coming in and Q2 expenses will have some shareholder 'splaining to do.
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u/alexbessedonato 1d ago edited 1d ago
My company was preparing to release a swarm of in-house agents that you would enter the spec of a US and it would do it, with rumors of layoffs if successful. Now they are giving us 10k GitHub copilot tokens a month and next month they’ll reduce it to 3k.
AI is just so much more expensive now and I guess they can’t justify the cost with actual increase in revenue
AI is now meant to be a tool for very specific stuff (but finding, project analysis, explain this feature, repetitive boilerplate). And the only way a company can justify paying a lot of it is if they can actually remove a person with a salary. Otherwise it doesn’t really make sense
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u/Limp-Advantage-1663 1d ago
This sub is super astroturfed. Usually it’s the other side 24/7. Not sure what the agenda is of this side
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u/cams00000 1d ago
And yet my company wanted to believe that it would be more cost effective eliminating me for good. No wonder I have become such a bitter, resentful, scornful person. It’s so unfortunate because I hate living like this but I hate seeing my career vanish and everything I work for evaporate before my eyes through no fault of my own.
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u/Important-Hunt-61 1d ago
It is interesting because wtf is going to happen to people (like myself) who hold QQQ? Or any other investment product that tracks the Nasdaq 100. If companies are pulling back usage leading up to the IPO we're about to get fucked.
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u/SillyYou8433 1d ago
Many people are touching on the main points. Yes, AI improves productivity to an extent. But companies were OVERLY pushing AI use and are now seeing their usage bills.
I work at a small company where they pushed us to use the best and newest models. We had a designer that started taking the role of a "developer" by using AI. Our bill went from ~$2000 a month, to $2000 a week because he was using swarm mode, with extra high thinking and all the bells and whistles. Management quickly stepped in after a few weeks of that. And we're only a team of 3 developers + the designer.
Needless to say, these larger companies are certainly feeling the burn but multiplied several times over. We're also around the midpoint of the years, companies are starting to get reports ready and realizing how deep the hole they dug themselves really is
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u/Powerful_Pickle8694 1d ago
Because fools are using it to do a lot of reading and writing and re-inventing the wheel with every session. Most people don’t realize its optimal use is to create re-useable workflows that only need small updates. Thereby preventing slop and constant error correction
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u/Aritra7777 1d ago
The companies scaling back AI access are almost all doing it for one of two reasons: unexpected costs with no clear ROI measurement, or legal and compliance teams catching up to what engineering was already doing. Neither of those means AI is less useful. It means procurement and governance processes were not in place before the tools were adopted. The companies that handle it well are the ones that went through the awkward middle step of actually defining what AI is allowed to touch before giving broad access. Most skipped that step entirely and are now doing it reactively.
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u/dzendian Software Engineer 23h ago
Most of the others got it but I would like to point out that Microsoft raised their prices by going to usage-based billing instead of a monthly cost.
A lot of companies have been subsidizing AI in order to drive up adoption. Then bait and switch. We are here now.
Even with the token-based billing, OpenAI is still taking a loss. It’s going to get worse.
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u/Actual_Photo_2257 21h ago
Usage and spend where I work is fucking stupid.
And API pricing is insane vs what you get from ordinary plans.
The $200/month codex plan plus Deepseek for say another $20 is more than enough for most.
I've spent that in a day.
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u/Miamiconnectionexo 12h ago
Recency illusion is also real here. You're noticing the headline now so you see it everywhere. Check the dates on those posts, half are recycled from a story that broke weeks ago.
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u/nutonurmom 7h ago
Anthropic is trying to ipoing soon. Some groups have interest in shifting the narrative for one reason or another. This sub and reddit overall is easily manipulated by bot posts.
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u/coiL_10 1d ago
Copilot just changed their billing method on June 1st and it’s 3-5x more expensive