Wait, okay maybe I'm in a bubble, but every org I've worked at understood that giving us whatever hardware we want more than pays for itself, and very quickly.
I can't fathom the logic of paying 10k a month for a developer and giving them an 800 device.
Insane. Your leadership is severely broken. If you can, work somewhere that values you.
Extremely tangential but I'm feeling a bit rambley today.
Pretty early in my software career I had a job at a very awful company [0]. They wanted me to use the software "Weblog Analyzer" to analyze Apache logs and create reports that no one actually read. I was to do this twice a week. It wasn't hard and it only took like fifteen minutes so I didn't really mind doing it.
Initially I had a 30 or 60 day trial for the software, but once that expired the software (understandably) stopped working. I went to the director of technology, asking him to buy me to the software, and he responded back with "whoooa, hold up, that's not within the budget". To be clear, this software was, I believe, less than $100.
I responded back with something like "Ok, well then I'm not going to make these reports anymore". He acted surprised, like I was starting some kind of fucking mutiny, and he asked me why I'm being difficult. I said something to the effect of "I don't make that much money as it is, and I'm not going to spend my own money to make your company more money". [1]
He responded back with "Well [my direct manager] never asked me to buy this software", to which I responded with "Well [manager] is a moron who doesn't know anything".
Like a fucking sitcom, unbeknownst to me my manager was right behind me and heard the entire conversation. The next day I was fired. I don't completely blame them, it was admittedly very mean to say that about my manager even though I did (and still do) believe it.
I later found out that my manager had actually asked for the software years before, the director had said no and forgotten, and my direct manager had just bought the software with their own money.
Point is, at least some employers seem to have no issues making employees pay for their own tools, even for tools that they very specifically want the employees to use.
[0] This was a W2 job, not a contract gig.
[1] I even offered to try and find some alternative free software that might give us something similar, but he immediately poopoo'd that idea because they really liked these very specific charts that they never actually read.
You're opening yourself up to data right and privacy risks with that. My company demands that I use their enterprise account because they can claim full ownership of all produced output and have full logs of every interaction.
I think that gets legally murky, if the employee is the one who pays for the tool.
But Microsoft and Meta are not blocking competitor tools for internal use, they're merely trying to reduce costs and divert a fraction of use to their own technologies. Microsoft and Meta are both still spending nine figures a year on Claude, and the article does not state or imply they're even considering a complete halt.
I should probably know more about Claude's TOS, but it is probably a mistake for these companies not to leverage the plausible deniability of their usage and turn it into a massive distillation resource for their own models.
From what I could see these numbers would usually be hit by people doing vast amounts of analysis over files, they would usually rock up tokens very fast. Then you combine this with the selection of Opus models which are much more expensive internally than GPT ones and the limit gets reached quite quickly.
My company took away my Claude because it’s too expensive. I feel like there is a reckoning coming. The accountants are finally realising the cost of token maxing.
Does all this velocity translate to increased income to the business though. At some point if we are releasing 20x more features, more games, more music, who is actually buying it all?
I mean, we’re not far from a situation where instead of how many story points you completed per sprint the metric to optimize is going to be what was your efficiency? How many story points did you complete while minimizing your token usage. In fact, that’s a pretty good idea. I’m going try and implement it at work with some sort of complexity normalization function
The reckoning started years ago when we did the equivalent to token maxxing hiring coders for everything to crank LOC
Software is inherently a physics problem not all the job titles and specializations made up the last 20 years as dev job salaries kept attracting people
That was all illusory social construct to prop up jobs
Still a whole lot of that in tech but it's all at the top of the org now. Leadership sensory experience and thus innate habit to forecast future been programmed by years of yes men they refuse to accept the jig is up for them too
Sensory memory of being a useless figurehead fosters a lot of existential dread in priests, politicians, and the like. Completely aware their day to day effort is insufficient to sustain them they know how co-dependent they are. They'll dig in harder.
See Chris Matthews flame out shrieking about socialist execution squads. Dude seriously thought everyone wants to hang him from a lamp post. The reality is people just want a sense of control back and not have their perception dragged along by Chris Matthews.
Do you know the details of the Claude Code plan you and your company are using (if not part of some enterprise deal)? Does your individual capacity out run something like Claude Max 20x ($200/mo)?
I've got a 100$ openAI sub through work and I never even get close to reaching the limit. I really wonder what the hell is everyone else doing that they could even get close to spending 4 figures a month in tokens.
That's funny. In a meeting with my manager recently, they specifically called me out for not spending enough money on tokens. It's not like I didn't use it, just apparently not enough, and apparently on too low a setting.
Since then I've had fable cranked up to 11 for even the most trivial of tasks.
I know plenty of people working at very well known and very large companies who's CEOs were boasting about "not hiring anyone anymore", "all the code will be generated in 3 months", etc. they all went from "unlimited budget per dev" + public dashboard with ranking to flex how much credits everyone was burning to hard caps at $500-$1000/month/employee real fast. Some are even not allowing their devs to use the more expensive models
> My company took away my Claude because it’s too expensive.
My company didn't took away any expensive model, but it did imposed a tight budget and gave my team hardware to run local models. The budget works mainly as an influence on the decision process of which model to run. We can still run expensive budget-burning models if we really want to, but there is a clear incentive to use options that allow us to save our token budget for a rainy prompt.
Surprisingly, I feel this had a positive impact on results. Instead of succumbing to extremely expensive one-shot prompts with the most expensive model in the news, chaining agents running cheap models equiped with context and specialized skills and scripts ends up having a better and more reliable output. And faster too.
I think there is a lot of propaganda, perhaps even astroturfing, on how only the most expensive models churned out by US companies are worth using. Nowadays the cheapest models get the job done, and local models can already handle most tasks as well specially as part of orchestration chains.
My company gives all employees $2500/month. I tokenmaxxx to make the most of it but have a gut feeling I could get as much work done with 10% of the budget spent on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and similar models.
If you were wondering the same thing I am - it's not about skills loss, quality, and less about money spent. It's more about frontier AI shops dogfooding their own models.
Talking to my friends working there, they said they were surprised when that happened and they didn't find Claude quality to be that much better than Gemini when using agy. So maybe after all the issue is not mainly the model, but harness and custom tooling.
Only if all you care about is developing models. I assume the rest of the business would rather just use whatever's best in class regardless of who made it, so I'm sure it's not that straightforward of a decision.
> Only if all you care about is developing models.
Is security no longer a concern?
When you are using a third party model, you are literally feeding it not only your current software but also all the context and work fronts under development.
This is way more than granting a third party access to your internals. This is feeding it in advance updates on all their operations in real time.
If it’s anything like AWS there’s hundreds of people making bespoke software factory setups, enhanced interfaces for ai tools, spinning up 10 parallel review agents with the best model available, etc because the budget is basically unlimited.
If you can use as many as you want but only 1% productively, thats still potentially infinite productivity. Of course, the efficiency is not that great, but more tokens = more productive work. This is only a thing if your token budget is unconstrained, which isn’t sustainable and never lasts.
I find it a bit comical. AI tools are so easy to pick up, and it's unlikely you've pushed some highly critical features which couldn't have waited for a few months.
You make a good point. That’s why there is AI fatigue. People are moving at speeds that aren’t normal and it’s mentally taxing.
If it’s not already a thing, it will be soon, the mental health aspects of all professions moving at unsustainable speeds and what that will do to people.
> You make a good point. That’s why there is AI fatigue. People are moving at speeds that aren’t normal and it’s mentally taxing.
I don't think any vague claim of "speed" has anything to do with fatigue.
I do think the parallel world monitoring and validating N work fronts, followed by rounds of fixes where you lay there waiting for the agents to converge, is the defining factor.
Instead of you hunkering down and hammering out a single task where your full attention can be focused 100% on a problem, your mindset is a kin to juggling N balls and hoping to not let any of which to fall.
Reading, understanding and verifying code has always required more cognitive effort than typing it out. Running agents in parallel just forces you to spend 100% of your day doing the most taxing part of the job
I guess a shop can burn away his whole crew, no newcomers- and the old guard is burned out and quits- and the profession suddenly is just AI and managers yelling at AI realizing the job leads to burn out fast.
The other part that is kind of comical is that the software factories keep growing quality gates and automated tasks that need to run for every commit, PR, deploy, etc. Then someone goes "oh, but now it's slowing us down", so a new thing gets added which decides when it's appropriate to run the gate, and on and on endlessly until it's a gigantic soup of actions that are running which provide negligible, and more frequently negative value over the software lifecycle. People are making big expensive messes of agents and acting like it's galaxy brain stuff.
Probably more, but not necessarily functionality users requested or even know about.
Case in point: VSCode has a multistage "upgrade project to the latest .NET runtime with Copilot" process that takes several minutes of processing punctuated by frequent authorization prompts for even the most trivial project, resulting in the functional equivalent of
find . -iname '*.csproj' | xargs sed -E -i.bak 's/(<TargetFramework>net)8(\.0<\/TargetFramework>)/\110\2/'
along the happy path.
It has many more features than my shell command, of course, but none that I care about when migrating trivial projects from runtime version n-1 that are unlikely to hit breaking runtime or compiler changes that don't elicit warnings from the toolchain.
Most of the times, the bottleneck is mainly the company’s legacy. People are using AI on an old, rigid codebase and are still following processes and team rituals dating back from before the IA.
The biggest bottleneck in most organizations is not the production of said work, but the bureaucracy surrounding it. AI isn’t going to solve that. So it really doesn’t matter if AI makes programmers 20, 30, 40 percent faster, they will still be facing the same bottleneck at the end.
It's also frequently the same old bottleneck/problem that we already consciously decided to move away from. We used to produce big binders of specifications. Then a lot of us switched over to "agile", or a more flexible, JIT'd style where you iterate as you go, because surprise, you learn a lot as you go. This remains as true as ever, even with agent help.
Budget unlimited + upper management claiming that engineers should be spending at least their salary equivalent on token costs or they're being ineffective. So many possible misaligned incentives...
> If it’s anything like AWS there’s hundreds of people making bespoke software factory setups
Yep, this is happening in lots of companies. I know my small company has about ~1/3rd of the developers working on one (different ones, all semi-personal projects).
I sometimes wonder if we are drawn to building these because it feels like one of the remaining challenges and a desire not to be an "LLM text shuttle". Additionally/alternatively, you can go as fast as you want with building a software factory and you aren't held back by the "bottlenecks" (PR review, QA, etc).
Working on my software factory is the closest to a "flow state" I've been able to achieve since LLMs turned the corner earlier this year and replaced the vast majority of our code-writing work.
I think if you talk to LLMs and give feedback or openly say what works and what doesn't, you are essentially solving a captcha and produce accurate training data, while you pay for the token spend. I'd be a bit nervous with this lol.
Just one unsanitized input and you leak info. Or one hidden character and code may or may not belong to you anymore. Its very odd on many levels
These are companies famous for following the rules when it comes to handling other people’s data and IP after all, totally a non-issue and they would never violate contract law for a high quality training set.
You think they can't and aren't siphoning off @defensecontractor.mil/whatever.mil/enemycountrybigcorp search contexts, history, whatever. when we literally just had that math equation shoved in our faces for a month
I can't tell if hn is becoming a dead internet graveyard full of bots or filling up with people who can't keep up with modern news.
Your account seems to be popping up a lot in places where I'd go "oh, i bet this is a rando 4 month old account with nothing to contribute," and look, it's you again.
`Business plans offer zero data retention. This is a non-issue.`
- Not all, I checked Anthropic has a min 30 day data retention policy for Enterprise Plan.
Microsoft is not a frontier AI shop at all. They just resell others' models. They don't have anything of their own worth mentioning. They missed the boat and tried to acquire OpenAI and failed, and now they pivoted their strategy to be a model-agnostic middleman.
And meta is only arguably so. Not really in the same league as OpenAI and Anthropic. More second tier like Google and xAi. (and of those Google is pretty close to the top two at times)
> Microsoft is not a frontier AI shop at all. They just resell others' models. They don't have anything of their own worth mentioning.
Microsoft's MAI-Code-1.1-Flash is on par with OpenAI's Luna line of models. If not for OpenAI's recent radical change of heart on Luna's pricing, MAI-Code-1.1-Flash could very well be the dominant cheap model.
I assume that at shops that both employ engineers and are developing an AI product, internal usage is not about improving productivity, it is about improving the offering. Of course they want employees to use internal tools.
Maybe I am slow here and everyone is using Claude with credits at max use. But isn't Claude Teams like $25/month per developer for ordinary use? What the heck of these guys doing that makes it get that phenomenally expensive for their use cases? These are presumably well capable engineers who started to use this as an aid right not just throw Fable at everything and loop to the max?
There are people out there building AI building orchestrators for orchestrators for orchestrators for agents. The author of that blog post later claimed to be spending the equivalent of $122k/month on tokens (by rotating their usage between 21 accounts).
As far as I can tell, the only thing that this level of spend has produced so far is an indie 2D RPG video game.
> Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw
I hadn't seen the $122K figure mentioned previously. $87K for API-style pricing was mentioned in the above post, and ~$2,800/mo for multiple Claude Max accounts:
> My solution has been to create a token tap on $200 Max accounts, which for me work out to ~30x the list-price equivalent. So in reality I'm only spending about $2800/month out of pocket for my $87k "worth" of tokens. Though that number keeps growing alarmingly.
(He never seemed to provide numbers for Gas Town initially, whether what he paid, or what the API-style pricing would have charged, so it was interesting to get some actual figures. Sounds like a lot to me, but if he's genuinely getting multiple people's-worth of work out of it, then...)
(Also in the article: a little morsel of Emacs content, which was nice to see.)
He's always come across to me as at least a little bit like this! His AI stuff doesn't feel enormously out of character to me. (If you hadn't encountered him before Gas Town - he's been posting online for like 20+ years, got a Wikipedia page and everything, so you can find his back catalogue and judge for yourself.)
Oh, you can see his outputs. GasTown and Beads (and maybe other AI-related projects) are all open source on GitHub, and you should go checkout the activity on those repos. At their peak he was churning out absolutely insane amounts of code. I'm talking 100s of commits and literally 100s of 1000s of lines of code changed per week.
Whether that produced anything worthwhile can be controversial, depending on the very subjective ways people quantify these things. All I'll say is that they have 18K and 27.7K stars on GitHub and apparently a comparable number of users.
It may bei cost efficient, but is it wise? We use not only the big US models, but also Chinese ones. This way we can compare who makes the difference. Simplified: Knowledge comes before economic aspects.
I feel like "good enough" was reached around Opus 4.6 - 4.8. All I wanted after that is improved speed, continued tweaks to the tooling to get the most out of it and quality of life features added.
If true, it is a huge blow to Anthropic’s revenue stream. IIRC it was reported that the quarter of their revenue comes from just two clients and as the ex-Meta guy who left this July, I am convinced that Meta must be one of the two.
> The company's financial trajectory already shows how quickly that equation is changing. Anthropic's revenue run rate was about $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the company, before rising to more than $47 billion by May. Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
> The company has told a small group of shareholders that its adjusted operating income will be positive for the second consecutive quarter, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.
These are leaked and self-reported numbers, but no matter how much skepticism you pile on them it still looks likely that Anthropic in 2026 have had some of the fastest revenue growth of any company in history.
They may be self-reported numbers, but they're consistent across multiple reporting sources. If Anthropic are lying to their investors about these numbers they will be in very real trouble with the SEC come IPO time.
And even if they're using funky accounting tricks to exaggerate their profits and downplay some of their losses, I expect the numbers for 2026 will still be really impressive.
There is a conspiracy theory that the tokenmaxxing period was anthropic/openai ipo play. They do the tokenmaxxing to revenuemaxxing first, then time the ipo window to show they had the the huge growth to justify their price tag.
However Elon was able to ipo before them which took a lot liquidity of the market. Their financials are exposed. The market condition and sentiment now is in the gutter. It would be very interesting to see how these would pan out
That's my theory, which I've seen being echoed here a few times. Encourage increased usage, suddenly raise prices, capture the photo-finish in the short lapse between prices going up and usages adjusting, and present that goldilock point-in-time to the investors as the new normal.
Doesnt matter if Microsoft and meta are pushing employees towards their own models today. What matters is that it's the economically sensible direction, and so it will happen if it's not today.
The cybersecuritynews.com news one simply republishes details of a story published by The Information. At least they have the decency to LINK to that Information story:
CEO's nephew showed him how good the Chinese models are?
I am only half joking, I heard something like "my son or nephew did this cool thing with $X so we'll take $this_radical_step because of it" enough times over my career.
There is a perceived opportunity cost from someone using a lower-tier model on their task. What if the better model did a "better" job? what if my trials and tribulations are due to model quality?
If you are used to talking to opus5.5 medium, going to GPT6.1 luna low will feel like a step down. Why would any employee take the (personal) risk?
The way around that is to take the choice away from the individual. We expose three model aliases instead of model names, each mapped to the cheapest model that clears a benchmark threshold, and the cheapest one is the default. Moving up a tier is an explicit step you take when the default actually falls short, not a bet you make up front. We re-check the mapping every few days, since prices and rankings move that fast, and nobody has to change their setup when a mapping changes.
It doesn't say they're cutting back on OpenAI usage.
To me this seems mostly related to the way Anthropic showed the level at which they monitor sessions, plus wanting to limit how much training data they're directly feeding into a company that competes with their own products/investments.
The first things I install on Windows 11 are OpenShell and ExplorerPatcher to get rid of their crap taskbar and start menu and bring back the Windows 10 taskbar and start menu. What they did with Windows 11 is an abomination.
I cant find it, but I think I recall a windows dev tweeting his frustration when they launched windows 11. He was upset because they didnt want to make the design choices they made, and the UI designers forced them to do it because it would modernize the OS and be the next great thing...
What does it even mean to use "Copilot" these days?
I use the Github Copilot app at work but it's really just a tool that gives models access to our Github repos and my local clones of them, and it's been super helpful to just tell it to reference other repos for patterns or integrations or whatever, get agents and an orchestrator to look at multiple repos to make a change across several projects and then implement them, etc.
And yeah you can use a selection of whatever model, I was using Opus 4.6 for a while, now I'm on GPT-6 Sol. It's been a very good experience.
i use windows by choice and would personally pay for copilot if the quotas didn't dry up so fast for the cheapest plan. i think the harness is the best for writing and reviewing code.
AFAIK there is no such explicit, company-wide effort at meta. The article seems to try to slip Meta in there with whatever reporting they are doing on Microsoft, despite there being no such evidence for meta.
To also add an important context to the drop in Claude code users reported for meta - this elides that we are absolutely still using the Anthropic models full steam ahead, but are moving towards internal interfaces and harnesses.
So I would question if that 50% drop in CC users is more of an interface change than anything else.
I for one have stopped explicitly using codex or CC entirely. But the interfaces I am using still use those harnesses under the hood. I wonder how that is counted.
At Microsoft, the recommendation is to use cheaper models for tasks that don't need frontier models. I personally use Lua and it's more than capable for complex problems.
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[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 32.4 ms ] threadAfter all, they should know how to compile their software. Any automation of that process is cheating their employer.
If my employer is putting scoreboards to see and champion who uses a tool which costs money to use, they shall pay for the tool.
Sorry, I'm not a ladder climber, yet I'm not mindless enough to bankrupt myself.
I can't fathom the logic of paying 10k a month for a developer and giving them an 800 device.
Insane. Your leadership is severely broken. If you can, work somewhere that values you.
Pretty early in my software career I had a job at a very awful company [0]. They wanted me to use the software "Weblog Analyzer" to analyze Apache logs and create reports that no one actually read. I was to do this twice a week. It wasn't hard and it only took like fifteen minutes so I didn't really mind doing it.
Initially I had a 30 or 60 day trial for the software, but once that expired the software (understandably) stopped working. I went to the director of technology, asking him to buy me to the software, and he responded back with "whoooa, hold up, that's not within the budget". To be clear, this software was, I believe, less than $100.
I responded back with something like "Ok, well then I'm not going to make these reports anymore". He acted surprised, like I was starting some kind of fucking mutiny, and he asked me why I'm being difficult. I said something to the effect of "I don't make that much money as it is, and I'm not going to spend my own money to make your company more money". [1]
He responded back with "Well [my direct manager] never asked me to buy this software", to which I responded with "Well [manager] is a moron who doesn't know anything".
Like a fucking sitcom, unbeknownst to me my manager was right behind me and heard the entire conversation. The next day I was fired. I don't completely blame them, it was admittedly very mean to say that about my manager even though I did (and still do) believe it.
I later found out that my manager had actually asked for the software years before, the director had said no and forgotten, and my direct manager had just bought the software with their own money.
Point is, at least some employers seem to have no issues making employees pay for their own tools, even for tools that they very specifically want the employees to use.
[0] This was a W2 job, not a contract gig.
[1] I even offered to try and find some alternative free software that might give us something similar, but he immediately poopoo'd that idea because they really liked these very specific charts that they never actually read.
An LLM is not too dissimilar to a Work Laptop or an IDE license.
I think that gets legally murky, if the employee is the one who pays for the tool.
$1.4B/year is not a small number, even at Meta's scale, when it's money going to a competitor
>Great Depression style collapse and all the current AI companies go bankrupt.
Oh this is just a 33 day old doomer account.
Our velocity is twice as high as it was before Claude, so I doubt that we'll ever go back, but I could see efficiency being a priority.
Is this the new buzzword for the quarter? Last quarter was "granularity", I didn't get the memo yet
You had budget for your normal salaries, for externals and now suddenly you have a few millions additional.
What do you do? You compensate.
Business people doing business things.
Software is inherently a physics problem not all the job titles and specializations made up the last 20 years as dev job salaries kept attracting people
That was all illusory social construct to prop up jobs
Still a whole lot of that in tech but it's all at the top of the org now. Leadership sensory experience and thus innate habit to forecast future been programmed by years of yes men they refuse to accept the jig is up for them too
Sensory memory of being a useless figurehead fosters a lot of existential dread in priests, politicians, and the like. Completely aware their day to day effort is insufficient to sustain them they know how co-dependent they are. They'll dig in harder.
See Chris Matthews flame out shrieking about socialist execution squads. Dude seriously thought everyone wants to hang him from a lamp post. The reality is people just want a sense of control back and not have their perception dragged along by Chris Matthews.
I'm sure investors will love it.
Now we're starting to see real impact from AI, people are learning how to use it, and OpenAI cut prices by no less than 60% like a week ago.
You think now is the time they're going to cut the spend?
Since then I've had fable cranked up to 11 for even the most trivial of tasks.
Disclosure: I work on Xpoze.
Since this summer coding on Opencode Go + Codex for a total 28$/month gives me more intelligence and token than 400$ did in may.
Also, SOTA models are increasingly useless for anything even barely tangential to security work.
My company didn't took away any expensive model, but it did imposed a tight budget and gave my team hardware to run local models. The budget works mainly as an influence on the decision process of which model to run. We can still run expensive budget-burning models if we really want to, but there is a clear incentive to use options that allow us to save our token budget for a rainy prompt.
Surprisingly, I feel this had a positive impact on results. Instead of succumbing to extremely expensive one-shot prompts with the most expensive model in the news, chaining agents running cheap models equiped with context and specialized skills and scripts ends up having a better and more reliable output. And faster too.
I think there is a lot of propaganda, perhaps even astroturfing, on how only the most expensive models churned out by US companies are worth using. Nowadays the cheapest models get the job done, and local models can already handle most tasks as well specially as part of orchestration chains.
Like its a no brainer to force your employees to use your own models, then RL train them to be better.
I am not convinced that's the case.
Is security no longer a concern?
When you are using a third party model, you are literally feeding it not only your current software but also all the context and work fronts under development.
This is way more than granting a third party access to your internals. This is feeding it in advance updates on all their operations in real time.
ask it for recipes, weather, directions, explain baroque art, etc.
arguably still a common use case...
If it’s not already a thing, it will be soon, the mental health aspects of all professions moving at unsustainable speeds and what that will do to people.
Nobody will take care of us. Ever.
I don't think any vague claim of "speed" has anything to do with fatigue.
I do think the parallel world monitoring and validating N work fronts, followed by rounds of fixes where you lay there waiting for the agents to converge, is the defining factor.
Instead of you hunkering down and hammering out a single task where your full attention can be focused 100% on a problem, your mindset is a kin to juggling N balls and hoping to not let any of which to fall.
Case in point: VSCode has a multistage "upgrade project to the latest .NET runtime with Copilot" process that takes several minutes of processing punctuated by frequent authorization prompts for even the most trivial project, resulting in the functional equivalent of
along the happy path.It has many more features than my shell command, of course, but none that I care about when migrating trivial projects from runtime version n-1 that are unlikely to hit breaking runtime or compiler changes that don't elicit warnings from the toolchain.
Yep, this is happening in lots of companies. I know my small company has about ~1/3rd of the developers working on one (different ones, all semi-personal projects).
I sometimes wonder if we are drawn to building these because it feels like one of the remaining challenges and a desire not to be an "LLM text shuttle". Additionally/alternatively, you can go as fast as you want with building a software factory and you aren't held back by the "bottlenecks" (PR review, QA, etc).
Working on my software factory is the closest to a "flow state" I've been able to achieve since LLMs turned the corner earlier this year and replaced the vast majority of our code-writing work.
Just one unsanitized input and you leak info. Or one hidden character and code may or may not belong to you anymore. Its very odd on many levels
At best you produce some noisy signals that are going to have a tiny impact if even that.
And that's on a personal plan where you didn't opt out of sharing usage data.
Business plans offer zero data retention. This is a non-issue.
I think this data is likely worthless compared to curated RL tasks.
I can't tell if hn is becoming a dead internet graveyard full of bots or filling up with people who can't keep up with modern news.
Your account seems to be popping up a lot in places where I'd go "oh, i bet this is a rando 4 month old account with nothing to contribute," and look, it's you again.
... in 1988.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
And meta is only arguably so. Not really in the same league as OpenAI and Anthropic. More second tier like Google and xAi. (and of those Google is pretty close to the top two at times)
Microsoft's MAI-Code-1.1-Flash is on par with OpenAI's Luna line of models. If not for OpenAI's recent radical change of heart on Luna's pricing, MAI-Code-1.1-Flash could very well be the dominant cheap model.
I see MSFT hasn't gotten any better at product naming :/
There are people out there building AI building orchestrators for orchestrators for orchestrators for agents. The author of that blog post later claimed to be spending the equivalent of $122k/month on tokens (by rotating their usage between 21 accounts).
As far as I can tell, the only thing that this level of spend has produced so far is an indie 2D RPG video game.
Regarding Gas Town, see also https://yegge.ai/essays/the-shape-of-things-to-come/ :
> Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw
I hadn't seen the $122K figure mentioned previously. $87K for API-style pricing was mentioned in the above post, and ~$2,800/mo for multiple Claude Max accounts:
> My solution has been to create a token tap on $200 Max accounts, which for me work out to ~30x the list-price equivalent. So in reality I'm only spending about $2800/month out of pocket for my $87k "worth" of tokens. Though that number keeps growing alarmingly.
(He never seemed to provide numbers for Gas Town initially, whether what he paid, or what the API-style pricing would have charged, so it was interesting to get some actual figures. Sounds like a lot to me, but if he's genuinely getting multiple people's-worth of work out of it, then...)
(Also in the article: a little morsel of Emacs content, which was nice to see.)
Whether that produced anything worthwhile can be controversial, depending on the very subjective ways people quantify these things. All I'll say is that they have 18K and 27.7K stars on GitHub and apparently a comparable number of users.
So you still pay $100/$200 dollar per person and depending on the size of the company, you have to use and pay API costs.
In 2026 their revenue has gone up by a factor of more than 10x, and they no longer have just two whale customers.
I heard a rumor recently that customers spending less than $100m/year aren't even considered their "top tier" now.
Where are you getting the 2026 figures from? The Bloomberg article that was "on track to generate" and just prediction?
The most recent reporting from Reuters themselves (somehow not included in their more recent article about the IPO stuff): https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-ipo-valuation-hin...
> The company's financial trajectory already shows how quickly that equation is changing. Anthropic's revenue run rate was about $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the company, before rising to more than $47 billion by May. Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
Here's the FT: https://www.ft.com/content/4564e6a5-69e9-40a6-bf0f-a888f2f4f... - "Anthropic tells investors it will be profitable for second straight quarter"
> The company has told a small group of shareholders that its adjusted operating income will be positive for the second consecutive quarter, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.
These are leaked and self-reported numbers, but no matter how much skepticism you pile on them it still looks likely that Anthropic in 2026 have had some of the fastest revenue growth of any company in history.
If you're able to link something non-paywalled, I'd be happy to read thru.
They may be self-reported numbers, but they're consistent across multiple reporting sources. If Anthropic are lying to their investors about these numbers they will be in very real trouble with the SEC come IPO time.
And even if they're using funky accounting tricks to exaggerate their profits and downplay some of their losses, I expect the numbers for 2026 will still be really impressive.
However Elon was able to ipo before them which took a lot liquidity of the market. Their financials are exposed. The market condition and sentiment now is in the gutter. It would be very interesting to see how these would pan out
Doesnt matter if Microsoft and meta are pushing employees towards their own models today. What matters is that it's the economically sensible direction, and so it will happen if it's not today.
The cybersecuritynews.com news one simply republishes details of a story published by The Information. At least they have the decency to LINK to that Information story:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meta-microsoft-work-...
... and of course the Information story is behind a paywall.
I am only half joking, I heard something like "my son or nephew did this cool thing with $X so we'll take $this_radical_step because of it" enough times over my career.
If you are used to talking to opus5.5 medium, going to GPT6.1 luna low will feel like a step down. Why would any employee take the (personal) risk?
what. I can see a team of 20 costing 100k per month (but rare), but per person?
Or maybe not, but the bar was set pretty low that going all-in on AI might have been worth it.
To me this seems mostly related to the way Anthropic showed the level at which they monitor sessions, plus wanting to limit how much training data they're directly feeding into a company that competes with their own products/investments.
"Fine. Please no. I'm out..." in that order
Windows 11 shipped with a broken task bar, couldn't even ungroup items. No power users was ever involved in this.
Does anyone else remember this?
I use the Github Copilot app at work but it's really just a tool that gives models access to our Github repos and my local clones of them, and it's been super helpful to just tell it to reference other repos for patterns or integrations or whatever, get agents and an orchestrator to look at multiple repos to make a change across several projects and then implement them, etc.
And yeah you can use a selection of whatever model, I was using Opus 4.6 for a while, now I'm on GPT-6 Sol. It's been a very good experience.
To also add an important context to the drop in Claude code users reported for meta - this elides that we are absolutely still using the Anthropic models full steam ahead, but are moving towards internal interfaces and harnesses.
So I would question if that 50% drop in CC users is more of an interface change than anything else.
I for one have stopped explicitly using codex or CC entirely. But the interfaces I am using still use those harnesses under the hood. I wonder how that is counted.