I have some bias as a software dev/manager but at least in our org I noticed you can get a lot better value out of your tokens with some proper configuration of context and skills. Providing the latest models with good context can result in extreme savings.

After we started excessively documenting and extracting skills everyone has stopped complaining about running out of tokens, because agents stopped having to reconstruct the full context each time from scratch. Harnesses like claude code also push the model to aggressively keep this documentation in sync so there's little concern about drift.

The worst thing to do from a token usage pov is to give a model a vague open ended prompt because they are so scared to be wrong that they'll waste a ton of tokens "thinking" through the issue and verifying everything. Whereas they almost trust skills blindly and skip all this unnecessary work.

Well at a big bank I work, if you finish in 1 week you do manual coding the rest of the month until next month. Management doesn’t give a shit. And they have daily talks about using more AI.

Now get the 1000 engineers in your company to be as well-behaved and mindful as you are.

(Couldn't even get this to happen in a 30 person team...)

That "intuition" is not intuitive. How do I choose an appropriate reasoning effort?

I use these models all day long, experiment, and have no clue how to choose that.

It just showed up one day in the interface with no explanation or guidance. Its use is mysterious, its effects unclear except through intensive experimentation, and to this day it mostly seems "how many bad decisions will Claude go forward with when it finally dumps out screenfuls of text instead of getting better guidance early on" though it's certainly not a guarantee on anything.

These models are being released at breakneck speed even before their creators know how to use them. It's a big project of collective discovery to figure out what they are doing and how to use them.

Was it ever not stupid?

I use "auto" in vscode which likely selects for cheapest. Good enough!

Assuming the employees are calling themselves "engineers" here, who else is supposed to be doing that work? If we were going through a renaissance in material science, don't you think it would be the mechanical engineers who try to figure out how to figure out what sorts of materials might be suitable for their use case? Surely you don't want the sales team or executives figuring that out.

they're not doing it right _or_ they're doing it correctly.

We're sorta in the age of alchemy. Lots of cranks out there, but there are real recipes.