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Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?
- cebert 2mo agoI have similar concerns about this. The past year or so, software engineers have been encouraged by employers to adopt AI tooling and agentic coding. Now, many enterprises, including mine, are starting to crack down on token spend. I’ve learned how to fully embrace agentic tooling to do tasks like keeping up with vulnerability reports, initially triaging defects that come in, etc. It would be hard for me to do things the old way at this point when I know tools are available that could make me more productive for a particular category of tasks. My employer is considered capping all engineers at $200 or $500/mo of token spend depending on level. I regularly spend over $1k/mo today, but believe I can make a strong business justification for the value those tokens are creating. At this point, I think engineers may be asking what token budgets are when considering new roles.
- alainrk 2mo agoIndeed, but I also think structural considerations must be done at the company level on the work model overall
- theChris-in 2mo agoI think eventually we will converge on a new AI + old AI (ILP, ASP) way of working.
- neaden 2mo agoIt's also kind of odd because even a junior engineer has to cost a company around 10 grand a month in salary, taxes, and other costs. So if the company thinks it makes you 10% more effective it seems like it should be an easy choice. So either the companies are shooting themselves in the foot limiting spending or they aren't seeing the productivity boost.
- andriy_koval 2mo agothere is likely curve of diminishing productivity return
- pdhborges 2mo ago10 grand a month for a junior is absolutely ridiculous in most of the world including large swats of the western world.
- neaden 2mo agoBetween all the benefits, taxes, and the infrastructure the company needs costs rise pretty quickly.
- izacus 2mo agoNo, they really don't, it's a ridiculous claim.
- jdrek1 2mo agoThey were talking about what it costs the company, not just the salary. There are taxes, insurances, equipment costs, etc. 10k might be a bit too high, but it's far from "absolutely ridiculous" amounts of being too high. An employee with a 5k salary can easily cost the employer 7-8k
- the__alchemist 2mo agoMaybe a dumb question, but what are you doing/seeing others do that uses that many tokens? I find myself pressing the weekly caps on the $20/month plan only when I'm really having the LLMs go wild with the Xtra high effort on the newest/biggest models on abstract problems or where I don't really understand the problem well. (E.g. improving ML models, planning creative molecule synthesis pipelines, identifying subtle performance problems etc) Generic CRUD/Config stuff I do for work (and assume most software jobs entail? Maybe not correct) doesn't use a significant amount of tokens.
- unified101 2mo agoThe retail account is about 200 to 300 dollars of api equivalent. Large companies disallow retail.
- the__alchemist 2mo agoAh! That may explain the entirety of my disconnect.
- goolz 2mo agoAt least for myself personally: Opus 5 Ultra spreading out hundreds of subagents on specific tasks can gobble tokens like mad. Recently I did a custom OCR pipeline in a day and some Revit automation, extremely large datasets, but I definitely spent good money to make it happen so fast. I almost certainly wasted tokens, but right now things are subsidized, so it works.
- ygjb 2mo agoI routinely hit the limits on a Claude pro max 20 account for personal projects. For context I have 26 years of professional experience and have been programming for around 40 years. In addition I have virtually unconstrained usage at work (for now). Tasks that I do on my personal account: - building stuff for my wife's business - analyzing and experimentation and building harnesses to test other models/services - processing interesting research papers that publish without code or sufficient data to replicate the work And that's besides simple stuff like exploring new topics I am interested in, and building learning assistants and personal tooling, and eliminating technical chores.
- monkeydust 2mo agoOn business side orgs are now absorbing costs of tokens to their own local budgets...so the calculus soon will be:1 extra engineer or extra token spend for existing ones. Tbh, when the productivity payoff becomes more obvious I would happily take the latter.
- Aboutplants 2mo agoI tend to think this will end up being a good thing. It will force people to actually think about the best use cases and utilization of tokens while others will push to optimize models and tools to improve cost and efficiency. “Life finds a way”
- deadbabe 2mo agoI think it will be a good thing for other reasons: there will be a massive push to get hardware good enough to run local LLMs burning infinite tokens.
- alainrk 2mo agoYeah but energy is still a cost, and local inference without batch and multiplexing for many users (like an office would be) is even less optimal. I'm not sure I think it's just pushing the problem forward
- deadbabe 2mo agoThen there will also be a push for cheaper, freer energy as well.
- yladiz 2mo agoYeah, with all the AI needs we’ll just have to transition to fusion energy.
- deadbabe 2mo agoAnd geothermal. Not even for the environmental aspects, just purely from energy demands, at any spot on the Earth where a data center could go.
- Geezus_42 2mo agoHahahahaha sorry, that's hilarious.
- stephbook 2mo agoYou know what happened the last years when the internet went down and there were no emails, no Microsoft Teams, no "npm install", no stackoverflow, no Google, no coordination with other locations? You know what happened when a PC broke? You know what happens at a construction site when the excavator breaks down? Exactly nothing — and that's okay.
- sokoloff 2mo agoRationing tokens on a spend level or count makes no sense to me. Why would I pay $10-20K/mo to employ a software engineer and then balk at a $500, $1000, or even $2000 monthly AI bill, assuming they were even vaguely trying to use the tokens productively? I’m not an AI-maximalist, but “work a few days with AI and the rest of the month without because of cost” sounds literally crazy to me. (If you think AI is low/zero/negative net value, don’t do the first half; if it has net value, don’t do the second half.)
- loki-ai 2mo agothis not making any sense to you is exactly why companies are implementing these caps: you lack the business acumen to understand how financial resources should actually be deployed.
- iugtmkbdfil834 2mo agoPlease consider rewriting this in a way that does not seem to unnecessarily attack parent. You are not wrong about the incentives, but you may not be right about the execution of the restrictions. I should know. I am living through it.
- loki-ai 2mo agoyou're fully correct and I apologize for my tone. similarly to many here, I got hit by the caps and frustrated by how many times coworkers were unintentionally or not burning through these resources. Claiming you have no idea why the managers had to do this felt to me like avoiding any responsibility
- sokoloff 2mo agoI am the manager in this case and the one who sets the AI policy for my low-8-figure/year product development teams. Our policy is quite permissive for exactly the reasons I conveyed above. It takes an extremely finely-tuned sense of value and high assurance that you’re on the diminishing return portion of the curve to conclude “SWEs should have this precisely metered amount (rather than zero or ‘as much as they don’t waste’)” My claiming to have no idea was not an abdication of responsibility but rather a claim that it was likely an error (assuming a non-trivial team size and a business that can continue to grow).
- deadbabe 2mo agoI don't think people understand, tokens must never be constrained. Right now, LLMs are the worst they'll ever be, but imagine what they will be like at the peak: Anything you want to code, coded instantly. Not waiting for code to stream in or wait hours for some agents to crunch through loops and planned: it just appears on the screen instantly like the way a webpage loads. Then imagine it can be done locally, on your device. Need an entire new custom operating system from scratch for some obscure hardware? Done. Here it is. That's going to be like pure crack to anyone who needs to do absolutely anything. That's going to be like our generation's version of "today's supercomputers will someday be in everyone's pocket".
- alainrk 2mo agoRight, every technology is suboptimal in the beginning, but constraints will ever exists, energy and hardware in primis. Aldo you have to factor entropy in regardless, complexity remains a cost
- deadbabe 2mo agoImagine if people had said one day computer programs had to be more memory constrained because everything uses too much RAM. Madness. We'd never see 128GB of RAM.
- jtfrench 2mo agoThis is actually how Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google recommends doing thought exercises to challenge assumptions (watch is recent YX Startup School talk). The end goal isn’t “128GB of RAM”, the goal is “useful effective software”. If for whatever reason RAM was an immovable constraint, a different tech tree would emerge.
- deadbabe 2mo agoThe tech tree where we develop tech to have tons of RAM is better and leads to more opportunities than the tech tree where everything is built for only a handful of GB of RAM. We may never have had LLMs if we didn’t go down the first path.
- toofy 2mo agothis will mirror what happened in the past. if i’m not mistaken, in the past, people had limited time on “the mainframe”. so eventually they brought in what would be the equivalence of a local model… small computers that could do smaller tasks locally so they didn’t have to keep shelling out money to the mainframe gods and be handcuffed for usable time. i could absolutely be mistaken that this is how it worked, it was before my time. but this is how people explain it worked for them. i don’t think most work gives a shit about soa. smaller repeatable tasks can absolutely be run just fine on smaller local models. sure, we’ll upgrade models occasionally just like we went from suitcase sized laptops to whatever we use today. this idea the hypedorks are pushing that soa is the only way is hilarious. hobbyists spend stupid money on classic cars, tools for woodworking, or whatever. spending money to do a hobby at home has never stopped wonks and their hobbies and businesses will do the same, spend to run models locally. the sooner the hypeTrash does what hype always does, fades to irrelevance, the sooner we can get back to work.
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- idiliv 2mo ago[dead]
- theanonymousone 2mo agoIn my personal anecdotes, Luna has changed calculations, once again; I'm _almost_ unconstrained in spending (my employer's Copilot subscription) tokens as long as its Luna. And it works more than good enough.
- unified101 2mo agoThe elephant in the room is that the choice today is llm limits. Tomorrow 2 engineers at 50% token time will change to 1 engineer with 100% token time for the same work.. the latter is too cost effective.
- skybrian 2mo agoI’m using Luna all the time now since it seems quite good enough for everyday programming and so that my $20/month ChatGPT subscription doesn’t hit the weekly limit. It’s an artificial constraint. I could afford to spend more on my hobbyist programming but I choose not to. I suspect that I’m adapting to the model by giving it more concrete guidance and guardrails. I read code more and I tell it to refactor code that I don’t like. Working within constraints isn’t all bad.
- Altaba 2mo ago[dead]
- Taikhoom2010 2mo agoSimply put token spending is way overblown, and prices have fallen and should continue to do so, as the pricing power of frontier Labs dissapate. https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-struggle-of-openai/ https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-struggle-of-openai/
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- variadix 2mo agoOn-prem AI is another solution. I’m surprised more companies aren’t leaning in this direction due to security/IP concerns. My employer is planning to spend several million on local AI hardware.
- Geezus_42 2mo agoWe were going to offer hosting for "local" models, but the interest isn't there.
- ironqcold 2mo agoI think we're still in the early days of figuring out how to use AI as a daily work tool. It's going to take time to develop the right practices. I do see the point in having token limits, they force you to be intentional. My guess is that eventually we'll end up with small, local LLMs that are unlimited for routine stuff, and we'll save the big expensive models (with quotas) for the heavy lifting.
- jgmedr 2mo agoCurrently navigating this situation at my employer. We went from virtually unlimited token spend per software engineer, to $150 per month due the recent change in billing terms from GitHub Copilot. Rationed over a month, about $7.50 per day. Basically, a couple bad apples spoiled the bunch (contractors using Opus to center divs). We're 15 days into this new policy and its going ~okay~. Engineers adapt as they do, and have been leaning on `gpt-5.6-luna xhigh`. Some contractors have already hit their budget limit for the month. A couple observations here: 1. Because LLMs/agents are tools, limiting their usage becomes a distraction and ends up being more of a drag on each individual's productivity. Instead of "just doing the work" engineers are now wasting time tinkering with setups (graphs, caveman skills, etc.). 2. Skill atrophy is real. Engineers that hit their budgets are seemingly less productive and less capable which is deeply concerning. 3. There are legitimate conversations happening now to explore open source harnesses (opencode/pi) and open weight models at the company in order offset the costs associated with going through a standard provider. 4. Token prices are venture capital subsidies. Its essentially free samples to get the market hooked on their addictive white collar drug. Remember when an Uber cost $7? As soon as OpenAI and Anthropic go public, they will need to begin showing progress toward profitability. That is when the true price of a token will be revealed.
- eudamoniac 2mo agoI don't even understand how it's possible to max out these subscriptions. In the last few weeks I've been basically vibecoding at work with 5.6 Sol at max thinking and max context, ~6hrs per day of the thing chugging along, sometimes 2-3 at a time. And it's not even a quarter used up. I know some people are doing 10-agent parallel harness stuff, but that cannot possibly be the norm, and I find it hard to believe any company is expecting that level of output.
- fullautomation 2mo agoI'm sorry to see that the post has been removed by HN moderation for literally no reason considering the tones of the article and the discussion here: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49319582 https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49319582
- TokenLat 2mo ago[flagged]