In my opinion, the problem is not even the cost. The problem is that people are using AI for running recurrent stuff instead of writing code to automate it.

For example. Imagine that you are comparing two documents (let's assume diff doesn't exist). You could ask an AI to compare the differences from you or you could use AI to write a tool to do it. For whatever reason, people are starting to go with the former not realizing that now they basically have to pay to compare documents.

I have exposure to AI initiatives at several companies including a few F500's. I have seen teams dump huge logs into frontier models that took hours to get so-so results that we were able to replace with a few lines of python code at 1000 times the speed and 100% accuracy. When asked why they were doing this they literally said "because we don't understand the subject matter so we were depending on the AI". I saw one team file a complaint with a vendor about a frontier backed coding harness and it's inability to consistently format headers because they were using it as a reporting engine. When I recommended they just use the coding tool to write code to generate reports you would have thought I had just cured cancer from their response. I frequently see people complain about the fact that AI is going to take their jobs and then see them gripe about the fact that AI is 'worthless' because it can't do more of their job than it already does. It's easy to see the difference between the people seeing 10x productivity gains from leveraging AI and those who aren't and it's not the AI.

Because you look at the work from the perspective of a programmer, not the perspective of a regular person.

Normal people have never gone around automating their work. The most automation they do is dynamic tables on excel sheets.

I obviously know building a tool that can programmatically do something is a better solution, but I think that requires a fundamental shift in how people work. People need to be told by someone "this is how you should be using the AI" but right now they're simple told "use the AI".

Laziness, pure and simple. The inevitable consequence of “the LLm is the compiler now”. And what do you even expect people to do when they are forced at threat of termination to use AI for everything as much as possible? Not to mention people are being pressured to do insane thing like review hundreds of pull requests per day and deliver like 15 features per week so OBVIOUSLY there isn’t time to build out proper tooling. Just shove everything in a prompt and call it a day. Some people have families to feed, just do what you’re told.

Agreed. I’ve been telling my team to build up internal packages so we can push all that ad hoc reinvention into something more tangible and deterministic. Invest the $$$ in inference into something the agent can reach for next time that’s neutral and consumable by other code to reduce future spend.

It's this and worse. To use your example, it's like people using AI to write a diff algorithm, incorrectly, then using AI to fix it, because they don't know that diff exists already. Lazyness and starting development with a very low level of understanding. People think lowering the barrier to entry is a good thing, when in reality there are just fundamentals and things you just have to know before you can start using a tool like llms properly.

100% this. For my own company I mostly build deterministic workflows that may have a simple AI step in the middle using an appropriate Chinese model in a very limited way. I wouldn't want to burn tokens to satisfy some metric.

With this AI is a fallback and not the default. Sounds like large companies have it backwards.

AI can do things around semantic analysis that a deterministic diff tool cannot.

I understand and agree with your point though.

Isn't that the supposed point of it though? At least how it is marketed/hyped. Don't use your brain, you don't need one, spend all your thinking energy on... dunno, something else, and leave all the "mundane" stuff to AI. Just pay for the tokens, it's going to make you 10x more efficient, the $1000/month is worth it.

Same with writing boilerplate code. It’s been a solved problem yet here we are.

Same, even opus favor short term solution and scripts with a billion flags that constabtly require rescanning to understand how to launch it is a constant struggle to get it to build sane default and reusable scripts that run with minimal parameters

it's all about cost at the end of the day. if you're allowed and encouraged to tokenmaxx, then of course this'll happen.

Oh no! People are doing what they've been told to do!

I agree, but even this use case isn't the most wasteful. The interwebs says Agentic consumes 50% of token use, but I'd hazard this number is north of 90% for many shops. My cynical view of Agentic is its sole purpose is to make "number go up".