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Should they pay for their pipelines too?

After all, they should know how to compile their software. Any automation of that process is cheating their employer.

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Sure. Should I also pay rent for my desk at the office?
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They're welcome to let you use the desk at your house that you own.
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You're opening yourself up to data right and privacy risks with that. My company demands that I use their enterprise account because they can claim full ownership of all produced output and have full logs of every interaction.

I think that gets legally murky, if the employee is the one who pays for the tool.

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The forklift should just be paid for by the employee. After all they should be strong enough to do work without one.
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The better analogy would be "Tools should be paid for by the mechanic". Experienced ones tend to have $10K+ worth of tools that they paid for.
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I don't understand your logic, why would an employee pay for a tool their employer wants them to use?
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Yeah that only makes sense if they are a freelancer/contractor.
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If my employer is not forcing me to use a tool and gives me freedom, I'll be perfectly OK to use my own tools which I bought with my own money.

If my employer is putting scoreboards to see and champion who uses a tool which costs money to use, they shall pay for the tool.

Sorry, I'm not a ladder climber, yet I'm not mindless enough to bankrupt myself.

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I could still do my job by typing all code into notepad, but companies don't charge employees for their IDE usage for a reason.
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And I could do my job by paying someone overseas to do it for me. Why is that not paid by the employer then?
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Nah. Work provides the tools.

An LLM is not too dissimilar to a Work Laptop or an IDE license.

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I am fine with that if I can keep the time saved for my personal use.
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I’d love it if I could bring my own computer to do my work, rather than be stuck with garbage hardware because of an enterprise agreement.
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Wait, okay maybe I'm in a bubble, but every org I've worked at understood that giving us whatever hardware we want more than pays for itself, and very quickly.

I can't fathom the logic of paying 10k a month for a developer and giving them an 800 device.

Insane. Your leadership is severely broken. If you can, work somewhere that values you.

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Employer pays tools used for work. Whether they are used to speed up work or to make it possible.
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As someone who does have to pay for my own AI tools (if I didn't use OpenCode's free models), I agree.
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"employees should foot the bill for tools that directly benefit their billion dollar employers"
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In California this would mean the employee would own the IP -- or at least it would be murky -- and companies and lawyers don't like murky.
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