Oh sure. We agree on all you said. I wouldn’t call it cheap either. :)
The best you can say is “high cost but positive ROI investment.” Although I don’t think that’s true beyond a certain point either, certainly not outside special cases like small startups with a lot of funding trying to build a product quickly. You can’t just spew tokens about and expect revenue to increase.
That said, I do reserve some special scorn for companies that penny-pinch on AI tooling. Any CTO or CEO who thinks a $200/month Claude Max subscription (or equivalent) for each developer is too much money to spent really needs to rethink their whole model of software ROI and costs. You’re often paying your devs >$100k yr and you won’t pay $2k / yr to make them more productive? I understand there are budget and planning cycle constraints blah blah, but… really?!