Mastodawn

Is there anyone who has to use the chatbot at work who's being told not to use *too many* tokens?

Ed Zitron's posting about limits on AI token use at Microsoft (at Microsoft!!) and I'm hearing stories from other places.

turns out companies can't afford to go full Gas Town!

Anyone here getting such directives? "use AI or else! 10x the features! NOW! No, not that much AI! Still 10x the features!"

EDIT: thank you for your help! https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/116258235657317479

David Gerard (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Companies go full AI — then the bill comes due Microsoft will pay you tomorrow for a token today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBEOdoYs8v8&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260319-companies-go-full-ai-then-the-bill-comes-due - podcast time: 8 min 01 sec https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/19/companies-go-full-ai-then-the-bill-comes-due/ - blog post

GSV Sleeper Service

gaytabase 2d ago

@davidgerard lol, lmao. "what's a good amount of use then?"

@dysfun @davidgerard whatever keeps you in the uncanny valley!

David Gerard 2d ago

@hllizi @dysfun KEEP 10xING PEON

gaytabase 2d ago

@davidgerard @hllizi i presume you hit your token limit and take the rest of the month off, then.

@dysfun @davidgerard Zero. The only acceptable amount is zero. (Stolen from a campaign video for Vision Zero, i.e. no traffic deaths.)

Andres Jalinton 2d ago

@davidgerard
I'm sure I'm winning this, I'm using no tokens at all!

kralcttam ☕️2d ago

@davidgerard Yep, at my work for more than a year they’ve been pushing “AI all the things!” And now suddenly we’re hearing OMG the cost!

@kralcttam @davidgerard Reminds me a lot of the places that went all in on SaaS a couple of years back, and then complained about their AWS bill.

@kralcttam @davidgerard Oh turns out @fred already pointed this out 😄

David Gerard 2d ago

@kralcttam So what's the upshot of this? Are you being told to use less AI but magically produce more features? If you can tell me!

kralcttam ☕️2d ago

@davidgerard Directives haven’t changed to me. Still AI all the things; I just hear grumbling from above.

random thoughts 2d ago

@kralcttam @davidgerard

I've been raising this as a problem in the office all the time - so far I've been told "shut the fuck up and keep using Glean, we've already paid for it"

Dr Andrew A. Adams #FBPE 🔶2d ago

@kralcttam @davidgerard
Wait til the investment bubbleruns out and they have to pay the full whack for it.

David Gerard 2d ago

@a_cubed @kralcttam sickos.jpg

Frederic Thevenet 2d ago

@davidgerard There was never a second when I did not think that it would end up like that. This is pretty much what happened with the cloud just a few years prior, only faster.

Re: https://social.fthevenet.eu/@fred/statuses/01KJMW8TAV8T0SVXZJQZRQM6K0

Frederic Thevenet (@[email protected])

Hi software developers! Quick question, especially for those of us most keen to indulge in those sweet, sweet company provided encouraged mandated Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT subscriptions: you do remember the race to "pivot to the cloud", right? How everything had to be moved to AWS or Azure or whatnot yesterday, or we would all be left behind? And you also remember how, a few years down the line, after we'd done exactly as asked, an alarmed CFO would come down on us urging to slash those goddamn AWS bills by half, or else? All the while somehow keeping the same level of production and quality with the on-premise infra gone for good and the team "right-sized" by 10~20%? "Doing more with less", all that bullshit? How the fuck do you think this whole "let's all voluntarily deskill ourselves and set budgets on fire so a text extruder can pretend to do our job for us" thing is supposed to pan out, exactly?

fthevenet.eu

jtonline 2d ago

@davidgerard AI recently apologised for wasting $0.63 at work which made me chuckle.

Craig Wright 🐵2d ago

@davidgerard yes 100%. Required use of coding assistant with limited number of monthly tokens.

David Gerard 2d ago

@crw lol fuck

eestileib (she/hers)2d ago

@davidgerard @crw

I've been told recently by two friends that AI has become good enough to save them time on unit tests, and can do stuff like "provide stubbed out mocks for the API calls the code uses in this module".

They still find it annoying because it's still dragging along a junior without getting the satisfaction of seeing it learn.

Bringing younger colleagues along (and indeed having been mentored by people whose work I respected) was one of the few things I actually enjoyed about work.

I'll posit a very non-tech reason why they may be getting enormous bills without any productivity gains (based on what a corporate person told me on how they use AI - so anecdotal).

What people are doing is making AI do dumb tasks to mask away their laziness or sound more professional. Like everyone using AI to reply to emails/messages to get the 'right' corporate tone in replies. Now imagine 10k employees all sending AI emails & replies...

Basically waste 🤣

eestileib (she/hers)2d ago

@kentoseth @davidgerard

I know someone who manages a delivery fleet for a grocery store chain who has been instructed to use AI for internal comms for reasons of professionalism.

David Gerard 2d ago

@eestileib @kentoseth D-: D-:

Allan Chow 2d ago

@davidgerard oh no way who knew

David Gerard 2d ago

@grumpasaurus i know, who coulda thought the same thing would happen like with every other SaaS

Allan Chow 2d ago

@davidgerard but it's not saas it's ai!

sidereal 2d ago

@davidgerard I’ve been arguing to anyone who will listen that AI is useless until it brings in more value than it costs. I’m surprised more people haven’t picked up on this in a capitalist economy

David Gerard 2d ago

@sidereal business is about ape dominance hierarchies and only tangentially about making money. AI is adopted for the first, not the second.

malvarma 2d ago

@sidereal @davidgerard why do we gotta make everything about money. can't we appreciate ai out of sheer love for impersonal corporate email replies? can't we recognize the unquantifiable value of generating software bugs at rapid speed? is it wrong to enjoy not knowing if a chatbot response contains any true information at all? not everything needs to make business sense!

Lucky ✨2d ago

@malvarma @sidereal @davidgerard there's so many simple core pleasures enabled by ai, from traumatizing children to making our planet completely uninhabitable! It'd be crazy not to pivot every business on Earth towards it no matter how dangerous, unprofitable and wasteful it is!

Simon newslttrs.com 2d ago

@davidgerard I imagine a company-wide black market for AI tokens. Long coated spivs hanging out by the watercooler, "Psst, you wanna buy some tokens? I got Claudes, OpenAIs, cheeky little Co-pilots. Good prices. Take a look" *opens coat to reveal pockets full of LLM tokens*

bigethan 2d ago

@spzb @davidgerard hey man, i heard you know claude… yo, could you ask him something for me?

@davidgerard I have $30 (no, $50, no, $150, no $30, WHY DOES IT KEEP CHANGING IN THE SAME MONTH) "worth" of tokens per month. I'm told that can be increased if I hit it, but I haven't hit it yet.

@davidgerard Yep. Go fullbore on Claude. No Opus, though; that's too expensive. Maybe try Haiku until the end of the month. Hey, guys, let's coordinate on some markdown files to cut down on duplicated effort. But no, that thing you suggested last year about owning our own models? We're not doing that until *after* Anthropic owns the whole company.

dogzilla 2d ago

@davidgerard This was predictable, maybe even inevitable. But it’s a result of the “SUVzation” of the market - people paying for powerful frontier models for tasks that only use a fraction of their capability. I predict the growth market will be in products like the DGX Spark or TinyAI PocketLab.

It’s mainframes vs PCs all over again.

I could see this happening at Microsoft purely since they turned Windows Updates over to Claude they brick a couple million devices every month now on patch Tuesday.

The Orange Theme 2d ago

@davidgerard I have quietly refused to use AI at work, but if I wanted to be silly, I would just make two instances of the slop extruder extrude slop back and forth to just burn through tokens.

Jon PENNYCOOK 2d ago

@davidgerard Great. What's the most expensive thing I can request if I'm forced to use AI at work?

jeremiah 2d ago

@davidgerard It hasn't come up yet but there has been proactive discussion about the automated systems being as token lean as possible.

Simon Greenwood 2d ago

@davidgerard
Conversely I saw someone saying that they'd seen a job where part of the package was a billion Anthropic tokens a year. I was visualising them as being delivered in a wheelbarrow like banknotes in Weimar Germany.

Rupert V/2d ago

@davidgerard I've been told to spend at least US$150 per month.
I'm $150 below target. We'll see how that affects the performance review.
#JohnHenry

A Random Half-Giant 2d ago

@davidgerard
Nothing explicit about too much usage, but "premium" requests are definitely capped

CellularMoose 🍉2d ago

@davidgerard
We have a per person cap that once you've reached it you're not able to use more tokens.