They are looking to lower it further to $100 [0]. This is definitely concerning for frontier labs since Accenture also caps their employees' usage to $29 a month [1].
Accenture lol, in that case, considering the quality of the output previously released by their humans, maybe local LLMs are already more than enough for that use case.
Yes, considering their CEO said that AI usage was a requirement for promotion earlier this year [0]. Companies are backpedaling now when the AI bills come out and bite them.
200 daily means that you use 1 session in a turn-based setup. Hence likely you still know what is going on in the code.
Once you have multiple agents working in parallel, hands off the wheel becomes very attractive. And that that exactly point you lose completely touch of what the heck is going on in your ex-code.
I’m not sure if the /usage in cc is directly comparable to this? It gives a $ value which I assume is API equivalent.
Most of the programming work I get opus5.5 to do, sometimes with fable coordinating. When I’m building a large feature it will often run over $500 and occasionally on longer sessions over 1k. Everyone else seems to think $200 should get by?
It's only too low if the goal is to use AI as much as possible. If Apple are saying their engineers should not use AI for everything, and that they should still be working as they did but with a small assist from AI, the budget makes a lot of sense.
Giving people some constraints so they have to actually think about solving their problems properly rather than just throwing money (or tokens) at it is not a bad idea.
It's kinda borderline. My dev workflow in my full-time job (Opus 5.5, 5 concurrent worktrees with human checking results and giving instructions) spend exactly $200/day on average. I imagine it could be more friendly if it's $300, as otherwise I might have to move some of my AI usage to weekends, which implicitly increases working hours :[
Apple is paying API prices, not subscription prices, though. $6000/month is half the engineer's monthly salary, it seems ridiculous to say that won't be enough, unless you're being very inefficient with token spend.
The fact that it's expensive has nothing to do with how useful it is though... I know plenty of people who max out their $200 plans every week, and they are working on stuff a lot less financially valuable than what Apple employees work on.
My "AI subscription" is just buying 20$ openrouter credits when I run out and it's costing me less every month then a monthly Claude subscription. 200$ a day is insane
Your data is likely kept and used for training models.
For most businesses, that's a no go. At least at the company I work for, we have to wait for new models because they negotiate away the training and retention and the vendors are not too eager to give up their moat.
Finally companies are realizing that subsidizing unlimited AI for your employees is basically just paying for the tools for them to work 2hrs a day while you pay them for 8.
Listen, I dont care if employees scam their bosses by offshoring their work to AI, but its absolutely the case that 90% of people irresponsibly use AI to be lazy, get by doing less work.
Unfortunately, as Ive personally witnessed when you do this and take away the cheating tools engineers just start copying and pasting IP into their own AI subs where you have less garuntees about ZDR. Employees will gladly spend an extra $200 a month so they can work 4hrs less a day and just get by.
Only 10%, maybe less, are actual super contributors with AI. The rest are literally getting a form of diabetes of the brain and the exercise required to reverse that disease is quite uncomfortable, especially when you've been hands off using a cheating tool for a year straight.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/apple-cuts-...
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/accenture-j...
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/accentures-ceo-says-using-ai-...
Once you have multiple agents working in parallel, hands off the wheel becomes very attractive. And that that exactly point you lose completely touch of what the heck is going on in your ex-code.
Most of the programming work I get opus5.5 to do, sometimes with fable coordinating. When I’m building a large feature it will often run over $500 and occasionally on longer sessions over 1k. Everyone else seems to think $200 should get by?
I’m looking for a point of reference here.
Giving people some constraints so they have to actually think about solving their problems properly rather than just throwing money (or tokens) at it is not a bad idea.
For most businesses, that's a no go. At least at the company I work for, we have to wait for new models because they negotiate away the training and retention and the vendors are not too eager to give up their moat.
That's their moat: your data.
Listen, I dont care if employees scam their bosses by offshoring their work to AI, but its absolutely the case that 90% of people irresponsibly use AI to be lazy, get by doing less work.
Unfortunately, as Ive personally witnessed when you do this and take away the cheating tools engineers just start copying and pasting IP into their own AI subs where you have less garuntees about ZDR. Employees will gladly spend an extra $200 a month so they can work 4hrs less a day and just get by.
Only 10%, maybe less, are actual super contributors with AI. The rest are literally getting a form of diabetes of the brain and the exercise required to reverse that disease is quite uncomfortable, especially when you've been hands off using a cheating tool for a year straight.