keithwhor

Employee A: $2,000 / mo inference spend (eg Claude code). Ships 5 features a month. High impact. No bugs.

Employee B: $100 / mo inference. Otherwise identical.

Does Employee B deserve a higher salary than Employee A? How should employers think about these variable costs? In some orgs, engineers are being aggressively encouraged to lean on AI as much as possible. But for highly competent contributors shouldn’t that $2,000 / mo in surplus go to eg their kids’ daycare instead of an inference provider?

At what point does inference spend become a red flag? Are there organizations that are punishing people for not using enough?

I’m sure there’s an argument a manager might make that Employee B should be more productive. But at some point you’re just incentivizing waste, right?