> The comparison is not SWE vs SWE with AI. It is SWE vs SWE with AI with a constrained token budget ($x/month) delivering the same value at the same or lower cost. If you cannot prove that you are wildly (vs marginally) more productive with the AI, why would they pay for it? Prove it.

https://abhishek-shankar.com/posts/ai-coding-bill-headcount-...

> That is the real content of the Uber story, and it is why filing it under "budgeting discipline" misses what is actually unfolding across half the engineering organizations in the country right now. They ran the same experiment Uber ran, most of them without Uber's $3.4 billion R&D cushion to absorb the surprise, and almost none of them having modeled the heavy-user tail or instrumented the gap between tokens consumed and value shipped. The reckoning will arrive for each of them on their own fiscal calendar, and the first instinct will be the wrong one. The tool is too good to abandon, the bill is too large to absorb, and the only durable resolution runs through a question the entire rollout was designed to defer.

> You cannot get labor-replacement economics out of a tool you deployed as a labor supplement, and the bill comes due before anyone is willing to admit which one they actually bought.