> especially when said fancy new thing isn’t retuning value

I think this is the key element. Either they can't measure the value, or it's far far lower than anyone wants to believe, or both.

I think the problem is less that it makes some coding tasks XX% faster, but that the end to end of a SWEs roles tasks is only improved by some much smaller Y%.

If a CTO sets $10k/year spend limits on $500k SWEs.. they must not believe any of the hype.

The problem is that AGI fantasy aside, CTOs at companies are expected to deliver results today and tomorrow. Better to let somebody else hold the bag and train models, then once it finally works as advertised you can ease on the brakes.