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  • Cost is the exception to how LLM learning curves have dropped off and in some ways rewarded late adopters. (e.g. prompt engineering is hardly worth the bother when the models now think so hard about user intent)

    It continues to be an uphill battle to help people at $DAYJOB understand that the relationship between turns and cost is nonlinear. And many still don't understand the idea of a system prompt, that they can control how chatty all responses are.

    by randusername
  • Why not just set a spending limit per person and extend/adjust the limit case by case. This would actually make people be more mindful about burning tokens on useless stuff
    by sajithdilshan
  • Did anyone ever do a software project before AI? You can predict costs far better than you can with people.

    Yeah, that guy you hired to write the prototype went on a 2 month bender and created 0 usable code. Did you budget for that? Oh, okay. The strategies to deal with spending on tokens are nothing compared to the overhead of managing actual people and their outputs.

    by 01284a7e
  • https://archive.ph/aBXzS
    by neom
  • Are any forward thinking companies allowing employees to use their own money for tokens? e.g. there is a budget of $500 per month but the employee can choose to pay another $1000 for that month from their own funds. In many industries where there is high bonus incentive, at least some employees will choose to do that so they can get more bonus based on additional work/results they can get.

    I would do it myself if given a chance. I would spend a sizable chunk, say up to $2000 per month if this is allowed. I do value my time way more than that and if I can save time using AI that the company is not willing to pay for, I will gladly do that.

    by techlover14159
  • I do quite a bit of coding with Claude but am perfectly fine on the $20/mo plan. You people who just let agents go for hours on end... I'm not sure you're doing it right.
    by bentt
  • You can set spending limits, but I don't feel like that helps much because everyone's accustomed to AI. Nobody would accept "We're out of usage so we have to wait until Monday" and do all of their work manually.

    I believe that we're in a scenario where usage is unlikely to go down and neither are frontier AI costs.

    I believe we'll see a shift to more organizations building their own harnesses with model routing logic to get central control over who can use what AI and for what.

    A marketer doesn't need to default to Opus 5.5 to upload a blog article with MCP, which could be done by a model 10% of the price.

    by FinnLobsien
  • I see a lot of businesses who just dump this all on their employees and then get mad at their employees effectively for not following the most recent LLM related talk on twitter.

    Most employees can't tell you what database to use, what software programming framework to use, what document management framework to use, but they are expected to know which of the 25 models available to use for a task, budget appropriately, monitor efficacy, update models to the most relevant for a task, continue to manage architecture patterns??? for LLM agents, this list goes on.

    This is getting stupid folks.

    by hilariously

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