“Sorry Jim, we just don’t have it in the budget to give you a raise.”
Isn’t there a saying for this? If you owe a bank $10,000, it’s your problem. If you owe a bank $100 million, it’s their problem.
That’s why I refuse to use most cloud API keys. The API keys always default to take the money first. Anthropomorphic already has their money. They’re not getting it back.
I’m just a home user and worry that if my security slipped for one moment over my entire life, my keys would be leaked and I’d see a surprise $1k Google cloud bill.
I use openrouter for my of my paid online calls, when setting up API keys you get to set a budget. Easy. It’s also pre-paid so unless I turn on auto-charge for my credit card (which is off by default) it will never blow more than I’ve already loaded. Two layers of safety are better than one.
Oh no! Anyway, what did you guys have for breakfast today?
A single engineer experimenting with agentic coding workflows can rack up hundreds or thousands of dollars in usage costs in a month. Multiply that across an enterprise with unrestricted access, and the numbers become difficult to contain.
I’m not doubting it, but I don’t think I could personally spend more than about $1.5-3k per month. And that’s with like 12-16 hour sessions doing troubleshooting and RCA while it builds tools to dig deeper.
Aside: RCA typically takes me 15-30 minutes by hand and, subsequent to a recent major deployment, we’re having thousands of incidents per day from like ten per week, so I’m faced with building scripts to read from a half dozen systems and collect maybe 100k Kibana logs out of tens of millions and then categorize them by fix so that we can feed those entries into scripts to repair data integrity.
I max out at about $100/day. That’s about all the output I can review. Most days I don’t use it at all but this month has been wild. I can’t imagine what the fuck someone is doing to spend even $30k in a month. There’s no way there’s any human code review going on at all. I’m amazed by Claude, but it’s not that good.
You’re working too much
I enjoy it, honestly. It’s insane to me that someone wants to pay me as much as they do to play with computers and mentor and learn from others.
These models run on normal computers, and they are giving them away.
Does your company not have computers?
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