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SubiculumCode | on: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses
At the enterprise level though, its going to be hard to want to use a service in which costs are not predictable, and keeping those costs under control requires employee training.
mrgoldenbrown | parent | next
>...use a service in which costs are not predictable, and keeping those costs under control requires employee training.

Isn't this a (mildly exaggerated) description of AWS, which is a very successful service?

noodletheworld | root | parent
Mmm… but for AWS its pay for external use right?

So your costs scale with the number of users you have.

Thats an op ex that you can explain.

For tokens for developers its maybe closer, cost/outcome wise, to hiring an external consulting company to write your code; money paid scales with work done, no promise of delivery, arbitrary unpredictable external price changes.

Its not quite the same; though, similarly lucrative for consultants.

logicchains | root | parent
>Mmm… but for AWS its pay for external use right?

Not if you're using it for running builds, running research jobs, model training, etc.

jochem9 | parent | next
You can put a limit on token spend and provide training (and even pre-configured workflows) on how to limit token spend.

Like the other commenter said: cloud spend can also spin out of control if you don't pay attention, yet we've found ways to keep it under control (training, guardrails, limits, transparancy).

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sidewndr46 | parent | next
Am I losing my mind, aren't there multiple headlines each day about companies penalizing employees for not using AI enough?
iSnow | root | parent | next
That was roughly 3 weeks ago, with the reprising of Claude 4.7 and GPT 5.5, things have become more spicy.
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basch | root | parent
since those headlines started ive felt it just encouraged inefficiency. "say as much as you can without saying anything." if you were accomplishing your task the need for more would end, thus there is incentive to never succeed.
layer8 | parent | next
To be fair, the cost of software development has always been fairly unpredictable. What may be different is that the cost used to be roughly proportional to man-hours spent, while now the number of agents running in parallel may be less predictable.
ilovecake1984 | root | parent | next
The cost per month is 100% known and always has been. What has been variable is the rate of delivery. AI is different and can be substantial in countries with lower wages.
xienze | root | parent
> To be fair, the cost of software development has always been fairly unpredictable.

Yes, but in a "oops this is gonna take another two months to finish" kind of way, not the "oops this is the 12th time this month 8 developers have burned $2K in tokens in a single day and no one really knows how it happened" kind of way.

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salawat | parent
There's no fucking training to mitigate a slot machine.
serf | root | parent | next
that analogy is so boring now with so many real world examples of actual LLM work.

people still can't get over the unreasonable effectiveness of algorithms.

arkadiytehgraet | root | parent | next
There have also been winners of a slot machine gamba, so the analogy quite holds. I would even argue that there are considerably more slot machine gamba winners than the real world examples of actual LLM work.
greenchair | root | parent
nondeterminism will always be anathema to the engineering mind
__mharrison__ | root | parent | next
Odd, I train teams (at large companies) to use harnesses effectively. So some training does exist.

I get the anti/skeptic sentiment. I've been called a lot of horrible things by a vocal contingent when they hear that I help train folks to learn software engineering best practices and then apply AI to that.

LPisGood | root | parent | next
There’s actually been a ton of research on how to optimize “slot machines,” at least in a generalized sense. For more reading, check out the literature on multi armed bandits.
dgellow | root | parent | next
Games like Diablo are basically a whole bunch of slot machines, and there are strategies you can follow to optimize your run.
gambiting | root | parent
Yes, because in video games there is always a chance to win so you can optimize your strategy around that chance. If you have a 1% chance to drop a legendary weapon, the question becomes how do I manufacture 100 chances for a weapon drop in the shortest possible time. With agentic coding there is no such guaranteed chance - in a way it's worse than a slot machine that is guaranteed to pay out eventually. You could spend hundreds of millions of tokens and still not get what you asked for.
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subscribed | root | parent
LOL, that's a sophisticated and sometimes slightly unpredictable multitool.

If this is the "analogy" you go for, you don't seem to be suited to make that comparison.