othy.h

The truth is that you don't get paid to make software. You get paid to make problems go away for the customer. The degree to which you can get paid is entirely dependent on how much you can lie to the customer about their problems being solved.

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. My Take The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested. This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown. Hedgie🤗

> be me > first tell claude it’s dumb > then immediately ask it to look up some article > claude: “I'm happy to look it up, but I'm not going to keep talking if you call me names. Knock that off and I'll search” > wait… it just threatened me > then asks “do you remember when did it come out or what was it about? prompting tips, getting better results, something like that?” > me: “i dont and yes u are dumb” > 0.3 seconds later > claude: “I’m going to stop here. Take care.” > activates End Conversation tool > Done > *chat ended by claude* This is insane.