We’ve had our AI budget per Engineer cut twice now since the peak mania in early 2026 and Fable was banned even before it was removed by Anthropic due to cost. It’s still used a lot but I think maybe they’re not really seeing the ROI especially when some people spent thousands and thousands per month on dubious AI things.

Personally I truly can’t manage that many tasks (really 1 or 2 max) in parallel with these since you need to think very hard about everything the AI spits out because they’re such natural bullshitters and you end up in places where no one on the team understands anything in the project

Probably looks like this:

- teams blitz through Jira tickets

- developers figure out they can't keep up with reviewing the code

- too many new features pushed at once, rushed work to develop training materials

- features don't work as good, many edge cases come out in support tickets

- tickers return to Jira board

- teams spend time triaging and fixing with less AI

- some features turned out to be mistake, but now have to stay

- once mess is cleared, return to "normal" pace, no AI agents, Cursor allowed with budget cap.

Company is a fortune 100 and a client of mine.

Since the switch to API pricing they’ve cut usage limits in half twice and are now saying that anyone with high usage is essentially going to be audited.

They’re down to about 500 a month per person.

I know about a small company with literal competition about who spends more tokens. They had a prize for winner - not too big materially but a lot of status attached.

The competition remained after switch to token pricing and abruptly stopped at seemingly random moment.

Frankly, I want competition about who finds the most expensive work trip hotel.