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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

$100 day should be more than enough. To exceed that you have to coming up with creative ways to waste it. You couldn’t hit that in normal development using AI all day.

For the edge cases that might need more like running a security audit, it would make more sense to submit that as a project proposal and have the expense approved.

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Most days I use <$100, but very often will go to $200 with $1000 happening at least once or twice a month.

It's easy to spend a lot when writing an entire service, large features, or doing research loops.

Those special cases should be handled with overages and special approvals. Blanket approvals of massive spending doesn't make financial sense.

I don’t agree. You should be empowering your engineers. A higher budget allows them to:

- freely experiment and understand the limitations of AI

- create things outside of what they are officially expected to

I’m not advocating for people who burn tokens for the sake of it. But I do think a single engineer has more potential for impact today than ever before and a high budget unlocks that.

It also isn’t _that_ much more when a fully loaded mid-level engineer is costing you $300k+

I find it hard to use that much in a day. Especially if you delegate to a cheaper model for anything context hungry like reading large amounts of data etc. if you’re doing tasks that cost $1000 a day I feel like there’s some software engineering or script intermediate states to be done to optimize that work than letting the model just go ham

As an example earlier this year I wrote a program to:

- Convert PPTX to TypeScript

- Allow editing of that TypeScript via an LLM interface

- Convert TypeScript to PPTX

The intent was to create slide deck templates via code. The first step was to convert our existing templates to this new format.

So I had it write a harness, gave them problem to Opus, and a couple thousand dollars later the import/export worked near perfectly.

Token-maxxing aside, what's the business value for something like this? Slide-deck generators have been around for a long time already. And at least for me, the LLM-authored decks I've created have always needed tweaking / editing to really make sure the content is useful and correct.

At my company at least, I think our developers waste a ton of labor and money on getting LLMs to produce tools like this. Then they use tool a few times and ultimately forget about it or throw it away. At the end, they've spent a few hundred dollars on frontier tokens for the effort.

More time gets spent tweaking/iterating with the LLM than it would take to make the decks by hand. And sharing takes effort, so our devs mostly roll their own tools with minimal reuse. At the end there's no business value to show for it other than the slide decks that could have been made the old-fashioned way.

> what's the business value for something like this?

We already generated slide decks from a template. The decks generated were consistently missing data, incorrectly formatted, and required many manual edits.

This led to hiring contractors to fix up the decks before being sent internally before being presented to clients.

So, thousands of contractor hours every year going towards fixing up decks in additional to the engineering effort from ~5 bugs each month due to bugs in the deck or feature gaps.

> Then they use tool a few times and ultimately forget about it or throw it away.

This is a running production service

> More time gets spent tweaking/iterating with the LLM than it would take to make the decks by hand.

I think you misunderstood. The LLM produced deterministic deck templates in code that is then templated from a payload and the deck dynamically changes depending on what is in the payload. The user can then further modify the deck as they please since the deck is just code. Then they can export it to a PPTX and make any further adjustment in their favorite tool since it emits a "normal" PPTX.

Techie types seem particularly susceptible to spending massive effort re-inventing things that have already existed for a while.

See also, Matt Levine’s recurring joke about the crypto community constantly re-inventing/re-discovering the need for financial regulations that the larger finance industry have had for a while.

Please point me to a tool that does the following:

- Emits normal PPTX

- Can import any PPTX

- Representation can easily be edited by an LLM

- Handles most PPTX features -- rich text, transforms, charts/tables, images

- Can be templated

Things I tried:

- python-pptx, PptxGenJS

- Marp

- Google Slides + Google Sheets + Google AppScript

We don't know how low it will get yet. The first article I linked also has this: "[m]any groups outside of engineering already face a $100 daily cap, but Apple has considered reducing that limit to as little as $25 for some teams, the people said."

They could be tightening the purse strings further until they hit some magical ROI numbers.

Not at all. $100 is for those with no ambition and no imagination.

> $100 day should be more than enough. To exceed that you have to coming up with creative ways to waste it.

You do not need much creativity for that. Just forget to put build artifacts or node_modules in your agent's ignore list and it will happily burn through the cap in thirty minutes

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