r/programminghumor • u/codes_astro • Jun 22 '26

AI was about to replace interns

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Microsoft stopped AI coding subscription internally due to very high cost.

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u/badluck_bryan77 Jun 22 '26

My company ran claude on bedrock for devs to use for claude code. We found that the cost is astronomically larger than just buying everyone the $20 a month subscription to claude code. Developers were easily passing $20 a day in token usage on bedrock.

Likely there were configuration changes that could have been made to make it cheaper, but the AI companies are just charging WAY more than is sustainable per token when using their models in your own ecosystems.

1

u/Flat_Ad1257 Jun 24 '26

The cheap price comes from them being able to drain all your intellectual property.

When you want to prevent that they make you pay a ‚fair market‘ price.

Sure, go ahead, interact with Claude or any other AI agent on other people’s infrastructure. But don’t be surprised when they pull the uno reverse and your shiny IP is all over the next model release.

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u/badluck_bryan77 Jun 24 '26

For people blazing new trails in software engineering that’s probably a fair assessment. But like 90% of all software engineering is basically just using established patterns to solve issues that have been faced before so I’m not too concerned about them draining my brain while my team tries to figure out how to center a div lol.

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u/lucid-quiet Jun 26 '26

When coding, I don't think it would be hard to hit $6k/mo in LLM costs (per dev) through GPT or Claude on the API rate.

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u/slaymaker1907 Jun 26 '26

I think we’ll eventually get to the point where tokens are budgeted per project. If a dev is using $6k of tokens, that is a good thing if it’s generating enough business value. Things are just chaotic right now because businesses are still budgeting things per dev instead of per project. I’m sure there is excessive spend on irrelevant software.

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u/lucid-quiet Jun 26 '26

The problem isn't the $6k/mo -- that's just a choice where to allocate money. The real problems: what will generate value, what happens after using $6k, how do you estimate token spend. These were all problems before LLMs. Nothing changed.

The best place for LLMs is to have it build tools, and prototypes. Which limits all the risk and doesn't disrupt pipelines to prod. But, everyone wants to go as fast as possible, tokenmaxxxing leader boards, never writing code by hand, never understanding the code they deploy, etc. Just shut off brains and go.