- Build up reliance on AI, which looks really cheap
- You can now replace employees with AI so fire away!
- You are now completely dependent on AI and a handful of employees
- AI company sees they have you and start jacking up rates. If you could afford paying for people before then you have the $ to pay high rates.
- Company now wonders why costs are back to where they were before and the AI isn't working out as expected.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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It's particularly funny because I'm pretty sure AI companies are still selling the service below cost to try to retain market share (and drive small competitors out of business). They just aren't taking quite as big a loss on every token with the increased prices.
Yeah it’s basically the enshitification model
With the quirk that the service was shit to begin with.
And if we had strong labour relationships, we'd make them fucking pay for having attempted to destroy our lives for profit.
"The man selling AI lied so that I would buy AI. :("
Should post this under \leopardsatemyface
You'd think they would have learned that from the cloud or any SaaS provider multiple times over already.
We are ruled by privileged idiots.
Can't wait for this AI shit to crash and burn itself to dust!!
@FoxtrotDeltaTango's post glosses over something: the token bill is only 60% of the real cost. Infrastructure to handle latency (caching, batching), human review loops for quality, and retraining pipelines when models drift add another 40-50%. A team that thought they'd replace two engineers with an API often ends up hiring a prompt engineer + ML ops person instead. The margin math gets much uglier when you add those in. Broke down the full cost-of-ownership (tokens + ops + people) here https://cxgo.ai/l/IjOzask — helps separate real savings from accounting fiction.
Musical expenses. Just shifting costs around.
The hugest bills so far
Just wait until all the technical debt has to be paid as well.
I already see lots of boutique consultancies popping up specifically saying they will fix tour slop code bases. Developers and doctors will never run out of work.
I'm not sure fixing it will be possible.
They will have to trash a bunch of it and rewrite entire modules and components from scratch.
I’ve seen as AI keeps iterating over enhancements and bug fixes, the spaghetti code gets worse and worse over time. At some point only the AI understands its own code, as it is too much garbled nonsense for a human to trace through. Eventually that becomes too much garbage for the ai to trace through. And then that’s where you end up.
The idea that this can be some kind of non-deterministic abstraction layer between pseudo code and actual code is absurd.
I know what you mean, but the tech debt problem will never get resolved.
And people realize they don't understand the output anymore or the architecture. AI isn't creating anything new either.
I thought billionaires liked giving money to their billionaire friends? What's the issue?
/s
an astonishing 29 percent of [execs] had no idea where the growing costs associated with AI were coming from.
The headline combined with the quote just make me laugh so much, I love it
This is what happens when the people in charge of everything are entirely separated from reality.
Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about these people. Calls them "Business Idiots"
Those same idiots have been in charge of everything for decades, blindly doing whatever suited them.
They got duped and didn't have the technical competence to see it or trust their staff to negotiate it.
Every IT / Developer out there knew it was a bad idea. The C-Staff was sold by the billionaires that you will go AI or you will be left behind.
My own CEO is simultaneously telling us to use AI for as much as we can and telling us to reduce costs as much as possible.
I told my boss this:
- Right now the AI race has a lot of similarities to the dotcom bubble. The subject is packed with risky loans based on huge debts. Those huge debts are expecting to be paid as AI becomes profitable, but AI companies are largely loosing money.
- All those loans and infrastructure create the burden of sunk costs leading to a desperate need to succeed.
- The people feeling that desperation are the same people who own the largest marketing, news, and social media networks in the world.
- As a result, there’s a lot of hype around AI. A lot of “kool-aid,” and everyone wants you to drink it. If you drink the kool-aid, that means you’re also bought into the problem. You also need it to succeed, thus making their problem into your problem.
I explained to him that mature, professional use of AI is going to wind up following a similar path to data engineering. It’ll start with bullshit standards, “prompt engineers” and the like, but eventually SE disciplines are going to define who makes best use of AI. You’re going to have niche use cases for daemon AIs, local LLMs, and remote models. You’ll have stronger frameworks around session management, context management, agent permissions, …
It’s not going to be like this forever, “dump all your shit into our web upload and let the AI figure everything out in one go.” It’s going to become more fragmented, bounded, dare I say deterministic… orchestratable.
Then I told my boss, it would be better if he could frame his excitement around these future use cases… so we can skip the kool-aid stage and get right into the good stuff.
He agreed, until about a week passed. Then it was AI hype again.
The 3rd or 4th "industry expert" tells them that things are "moving fast" and things that were impossible months ago are now reality. It's designed to make them distrust their own subject-matter experts. They thing, ohh POTV, they're just not educated and up to speed.
Yeah. Local LLM stuff is great when you want to shove a huge pile of documentation into a model trainer and make a more intelligent search. Two of my vendors have implemented it, and it's more useful than a traditional indexing search tool, though you do have to verify the results (which is not much more effort since with a search you'd have to skim the document to find the info it matched anyway).
But for general "do everything" tool, yeah no. It can't read and understand your entire database, codebase, business process, etc.
Honestly, I’ve had a rather interesting experience with AI. I was very adverse to LLM usage at first. Later I sort of figured out that I was more adverse to the energy around AI than I am AI itself.
I knew the models sucked at large tasks. Trying to get an edge on the matter though, I started asking myself, how can I get the model to perform better? I figured I could pass over the AI hate stage and get right into the AI professional stage… at least a head start.
So I began experimenting with local LLMs, LLM harnesses, and various governance tools like jai. I decided against Claude Code and Cortex because they’re provider specific — instead using OpenCode so that I can use whichever model I desire. Then I began building out a SKILL.md repository for tightly scoped tasks like change-review, security-analysis, refactor, architecture-review, grill-me, feature-design, …
I’m still thinking through some of the project needs. I want something that lets an agent work, while treating the agent as a kind of helpful adversary. You should be able to configure workloads that designate models, context, available tooling, skills, permissions, session length, inference level, acceptance criteria, and human-review stages. It would also allow for session switching, model switching, agent deliverable handoff to another agent, … not to mention, your VCS should know and respond appropriately if an agent ever pushes code. Don’t trust it by default.
These workloads should be version controllable, benchmarked, …
Anyway, a lot of that is speculative. Just where I’m at now, controlling context and skills manually, I’m already seeing much better results.
And no, I don’t have the AI do everything. I just find smarter ways to decompose “everything” into much smaller tasks that are easier to review and scrutinize.
But also, I push for local model usage in my organization. I don’t want my success to mean success for the AI companies. Fuck the AI companies.
Neither Claude code neither codex is actually vendor specific, they just don't tell you that you can config other providers, including local
However opencode is pretty nice too, so if you like it, use that. I personally find that opencode with GLM 5.2 or Kimi K2.7 isn't actually that great, it'll hallucinate more than Claude code or Codex with their respective first party models. I think it's the models themselves rather than opencode itself though, as when I use GPT for planning and hand it off to deepseek flash to do the actual work, it's more or less fine.
The "you'll be left behind" nonsense makes me laugh. Left behind from what exactly? Lol
The sales pitch is:
All your competition is going AI. They're be producing 10x the work with mouth breathing morons at the keys, while you're stuck paying millions to subject matter experts.
They're scared ot death that the tenuous hold they have on their market segment will be severed if their competition outflanks them in this, so FUD wins.
This isn't Justin industry or tech. I work in the academy. You would be shocked how many people from administrators all the way on down truly believe this. That, without any proof, this technology is going to make everybody a billion times more productive and that any graduates who don't have this is a foundational skill will surely not survive in the future workforce.
"it's technology and science, it must be good!"
Someone else can output more slop than us!
These execs were the ones we were supposed to replace with AI.
Someone should remind those soggy, arrogant execs that down here in the developer trenches we survived web services, software as a service, outsourcing, and off-shoring. We're still here after all that and we'll still be here after AI.
Some of these people are so out of touch that they'd have to spend a decade in the trenches before they might even begin to get an inkling that something is up.
Case in point: Bezos went to space and wasn't humbled by the overviewer effect because his ego is literally larger than the planet he lives on.
SMH Did they really think all these investors just wanted to burn 9-figure sums without any serious return?
i am saying this for about a year now: Altman wants to rule the world.
Who of the billionaire (and now trillionaires, sigh) fucknuggets does not want to rule the world?
What else should one do if one already has everything and can't buy anything else...
A trillionaire sounds surreal. Imagine having an entire country economy (or a few smaller ones) as your budget.
Indeed. When I was young, a millionaire seemed rich. As I grew older, billionaires seemed rich. And now we're one step further. The average millionaire is further away from musk than the average Joe from said millionaire.
It's absurd and shouldn't be possible. Billionaires also shouldn't. Why would anyone even need hundreds of millions. You can live wonderfully with very few millions or even less than one.
These days, in many cities, being a millionaire is a prerequisite for owning a house.
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And the media will keep on shamelessly calling them "job creators".
Hopefully some day the average voter will see through that shit.
That makes it pretty clear that most executives are the worst possible people to run a company. Well, that’s just how it is when ruthlessness and greed are the only criteria used to select top executives.
But hey, even if they were to lose their jobs because they’re burning through so much money, things will go on as usual: Anyone who’s ever held a top management position will always be hired for the same role somewhere else, because competence is definitely not the deciding factor here. Never was, never will be.
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