r/cscareerquestions • u/EverydayEverynight01 • 7h ago
Is anyone else's company having second thoughts about AI?
My current company, a large boring corporation that's not in tech used to be very encouraging of everyone using AI (but they weren't AI pilled and shoving it down everyone's throats) and they used to handed out licences to all sorts of AI licences like candy.
But a few months later now, not only are they straight up not issuing licences to a lot of them and very heavily restricting the one they settled on (Claude and ChatGPT) and they are removing licences of people that aren't using the ones they have access to.
They recently made three moves that were a bit surprising.
Due to how much AI has been costing they've done a few things:
First, they are refusing to increase usage limits to the few we do now have access to, and asking your manager isn't enough. If you really want to, they want to see cold hard numbers in how much it'll save in money, and no not even time savings count.
Second, they are denying access to the expensive models and telling everyone to use the cheaper ones (ie Sonnet and Terra and below)
Third they made us do a training module, and it wasn't just "You can't provide confidential and sensitive data to the AI" it also straight up told people to be more conservative and to prompt better so it won't be burning so much tokens.
They're also telling people that they are responsible for the accuracy of their work. But also they gave some prohibited examples of AI use that made me think that it's actually what was going on. Like how they can't use AI to screen, analyze, or even summarize resumes and interviewers. And telling managers they can't use AI to do performance review and analysis for their team, especially pertaining to bonus, raises, and promotions.
However, my own team has noticed some issues with AI too, while it for sure has helped us, it has caused problems of massive PRs, and even more difficult surprisingly are AI slop generated documents and reports that are really important, but don't have the luxury of a compiler or a linter to at least do basic quality control for.
Seeing what's going on from the higher up's decisions and the impact of AI on our own team I think a lot of people were intentionally or unintentionally generating slop work that makes the rest of the team hold the bag and figure out or just straight up using AI on things they're not supposed to just to be lazy. The AI slop and the extent of the usage raised alarm bells with the higher ups and now they're putting the lid on it.
It's not some cutting edge company, just a boring big enterprise. How's it going on at your place?
33
u/Post-mo 7h ago
They're conflicted, they see the gains, but they also see the spend. I've got engineers using $1k per week.
Last quarter they were enough over budget that they started doing a daily cap, for the last couple days of the quarter things would start shutting down around 4 PST.
A year ago all the internal talks were "AI: how to use as much as possible to make your team more productive". Now all the talks are "AI: how to make the most out of less tokens"
7
u/cascadiabibliomania 6h ago
I told my boss this would happen and he dismissed it completely, claimed tokenmaxxing was the wave of the future forever and token costs were going down fast enough no one would need to worry about efficiency.
5
u/nrmitchi 6h ago
“Tokenmaxxing” has 2 definitions (depending on who you talk to).
Definition 1: “use AI for all the things you can use AI for” Definition 2: “spend as many tokens as possible regardless of if it’s useful”
6
u/andhausen 6h ago
I mean let's be real... no one should ever use anything-"maxxing" in earnest, regardless of whether or not the definition is malleable
1
2
u/Majestic-Watch-2025 4h ago
> how to make the most out of less tokens
This is the right attitude though. You should be thoughtful and efficient using any tool. And you have to look at the ROI
18
u/promotionpotion 7h ago
Exact same happening where I work. But ofc the insane increased productivity expectations remain…lol
34
u/Angriestanteater Wannabe Software Engineer 7h ago
My org sees AI as an obvious win. We have concerns about token costs as we have unlimited tokens for all devs. However, we are still waiting to see how things play out. For now, we’re just trying to maximize use while we can. No point optimizing when the market around tokens and models are changing every month.
Our devs are still owning the code in their PRs so we aren’t seeing a significant quality drop or anything.
12
u/rovermicrover 7h ago
If you keep token maxing your leadership is going to have to trade salaries for capex…
9
1
21
u/orbit99za 7h ago
I recently applied for a job, have interview this week that Specifically Stated they whant Senior Devs who can actually "old school read and code" and only use AI as an adjacent tool.
This is a large Corp, they have the cash, very interesting to listen the recuter.
13
u/Information_High 5h ago
I'm not sure whether I want to hysterically laugh or sob at the notion that knowing how to read/write code is now "old school". 🤦♂️
1
u/orbit99za 1h ago
In 2005 my Comp sci lectures where so full of crap, we had to write exam Code on paper books, no IDE with a pen, or pencil.
Try reversing a binary tree on paper , in an exam hall sitting next to a humanities student.
5
2
u/Majestic-Watch-2025 4h ago
Ooh I like that wording, maybe I'll use it in the JD I have to write this week
13
u/Nervous-Assistant659 7h ago
Just 6 months ago they were daring us to make them care about AI spend. Now they're backpedaling hard with token limits.
6
4
u/drahgon 6h ago
The slop that gets generated when you start using AI is intense as a company, especially on the non-coding side. Coders always had a process to prevent slop, reviews. There’s a lot of people looking at your stuff but all the product people for instance in my company they write tickets now that are complete Garbo. They’re just AI brain dumps where it goes through the code and recommends solutions and it talks so technically it’s just hard to even consume the ticket. And there’s just nobody checking them which is why this is happening. We have to take these tickets and either put in the work to figure out what they really want or we have to use AI ourselves to even comprehend them.
3
u/ButterflySammy Senior 7h ago
I mean, if you feed everyone's work into AI and ask AI to report on the value, it's going to pick higher numbers than a human.
People know they have to get their staff to take lower numbers than is justified, and they can't say that out loud or document it in code.
It's pure institutional knowledge stored only in brain meat.
AI can't use it.
AI just goes "This guy is doing great, meeting and exceeding all the goals he should, and he makes so much money for the company and we pay him so much under the going rate we should give him a raise".
Can't have that. Human bosses know they're supposed to under sell achievements and say the company can't afford any raises right now.
3
u/throwaway09234023322 7h ago
My org pretty recently did the opposite. They said AI was helping a lot and offered higher limits
2
u/Acrobatic-Ice-5877 6h ago
Management changed their tune at my company a month or so again. No more licenses and a $40/month limit for those that do have access. I still use my own codex though. I have the $20/month subscription and have always used the cheapest model.
2
u/SomeoneNewPlease 13m ago
$40 a month makes no sense, I burn through that in a few prompts. I’d rather not use AI than babysit the cheapest model. And why are you using your own subscription at work?
2
u/Majestic-Watch-2025 4h ago
My industry is experiencing this. Everyone was so excited by AI but now that they've used it for a while and aren't seeing the impact on the bottom line questions are being asked about actual effectiveness.
3
u/ibeerianhamhock 7h ago
Tbh AI works well when you barely use it and when you lean super hard into it. Eveyrhing else in between is kind of a mess
1
u/Illustrious-Lime-878 4h ago
That's kind of automation in general. It has an upfront cost but pays off overtime. But if you don't complete the full thing, you get the worse of both.
1
u/FearlessPark4588 4h ago
No, mine is in all aspects doubling down. Could they change? Sure. But no signs yet.
My guess is they've made big bets on certain outcomes as a result of AI that haven't yet happened or happening slower than anticipated (which is an extremely common outcome).
1
u/geekpgh 3h ago
My company is doubling down, they want to eliminate human code review so we can ship even faster.
We’re shipping more code, but it’s unclear we’re making any additional revenue.
1
u/EverydayEverynight01 3h ago
Yeah no, unless if you're at an early stage startup where you don't have a strong pmf this is a major mistake.
Even human written code has mistakes that has to be caught by a human reviewer or manual QA and in my experience having human oversight catches things even from good developers
1
u/SuchDrawing8585 2h ago
our company has been progressing use of LLMs incredibly slowly and keeping it optional.
So technically, we are still getting more and more permissions than we did in the past, but we haven't done anything stupid enough to regret it
1
u/UhOhByeByeBadBoy 2h ago
I work in public sector and people are starting to ask for access to agents. Non-tech people who want to speed up repetitive tasks etc.
After only getting into agentic coding the past six months or so, I’m terrified of the amount of token churn we risk by unleashing this on the average person.
I’m impressed at how easy it is to rack up a bill and either something is going to pop that makes all of this cheaper to run and easier to afford, or it’s going to get locked down for a lot of people.
1
u/coolthesejets 13m ago
My company just replaced a a piece of software that cost several thousand dollars a month with a vibe code alternative.
1
u/Manholebeast 4m ago
It's crazy to me this is being questioned because hyperscalers already spent tons and tons and tons of money and even incurred huge debt on this this yet revenue generation is still uncertain for so many regular businesses. This bubble can't burst fast enough and it's going to be painful.
89
u/Mundane-Charge-1900 6h ago
One of the biggest paradoxes of AI today is that everyone seems to observe increased productivity but it’s not showing up in the larger economy at all yet.
It’s still an open question if being able to produce code faster is making businesses grow revenue faster or be more profitable, outside of those with AI as a product itself like the frontier labs.