Apple capped engineers at a $200 daily AI budget

They are looking to lower it further to $100 [0]. This is definitely concerning for frontier labs since Accenture also caps their employees' usage to $29 a month [1].

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/apple-cuts-...

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/accenture-j...

I like the term “brute-force inference” because it describes the state of the art accurately.

$5600 per 28-day period is quite a lot!

If $200 in API price equivalent it's too low. That's less than Claude Max x5 plan gives. So with $100 plan you'd have more tokens than apple engineer

Do we know if Apple is working on their own SWE LLM? IIIRC they bought the people behind https://github.com/exo-explore/exo at the very least?

You'd think they must be investing heavily into "secret" agentic engineering dogfooding at this point.

A push in the right direction.

Tokens are a resource. We should use as few as possible (Tokengolfing?).

It seems the big AI companies are gouging enterprises with higher prices.

Claude tells me the retail price of the tokens I use on a personal plan outside of work. It’s way more than the plan costs me, by a factor of 50 or more. But at work I don’t see such discounts reflected in work’s estimates of my token spend. Something strange is going on.

I use claude code $20 plan for the whole month, $200 is a whole year of that.

I’m not sure if the /usage in cc is directly comparable to this? It gives a $ value which I assume is API equivalent.

Most of the programming work I get opus5.5 to do, sometimes with fable coordinating. When I’m building a large feature it will often run over $500 and occasionally on longer sessions over 1k. Everyone else seems to think $200 should get by?

I’m looking for a point of reference here.

I don't use that much to get my job done, but I know some of my friends working in a China's AI company and they use more than $300 per day

$200 a day is not that bad. probably more than the majority of companies?

FTA (emphasis added: Apple has reportedly slashed the daily AI spending limit for SOME of its own engineers, dropping the cap from $300 down to $200

$200 per workday? That’s still a lot

if you buy 15 subs each to claude and codex that's a lot of code. not so much if it's an API per token limit.

I have been able to soak up a weeks worth of tokens in 6 hours with astra ultra if I'm not very explicit and bounded in my requests.

Giving people an unlimited amount of anything means they have zero incentive to optimize using that thing. It's quite common that we complain here about Electron apps using 1GB for something as simple as a REST client. OTOH, many here keep calling for unlimited token budgets. I feel like capping will cause people to find better workflows, which we really need to in order to reduce (among others) the ecological impact of AI.

They could always use Siri for coding, it's an idea?

what's the source? ok i know everything is nowadays ai generated but come on?

200 daily means that you use 1 session in a turn-based setup. Hence likely you still know what is going on in the code.

Once you have multiple agents working in parallel, hands off the wheel becomes very attractive. And at that exactly point you lose completely touch of what the heck is going on in your ex-code.

That's a lot of tokens. I burn Opus about half the day and reach maybe half of that at most.

So that’s a yearly budget cut from $110k down to $73k, correct? I could live with that. I’d have a hard time finding ways to burn all these tokens.

at this scale, it is totally worth for them to self-host models for part of the work.

Finally companies are realizing that subsidizing unlimited AI for your employees is basically just paying for the tools for them to work 2hrs a day while you pay them for 8.

Listen, I dont care if employees scam their bosses by offshoring their work to AI, but its absolutely the case that 90% of people irresponsibly use AI to be lazy, get by doing less work.

Unfortunately, as Ive personally witnessed when you do this and take away the cheating tools engineers just start copying and pasting IP into their own AI subs where you have less garuntees about ZDR. Employees will gladly spend an extra $200 a month so they can work 4hrs less a day and just get by.

Only 10%, maybe less, are actual super contributors with AI. The rest are literally getting a form of diabetes of the brain and the exercise required to reverse that disease is quite uncomfortable, especially when you've been hands off using a cheating tool for a year straight.

I'm curious, what laptops do apple engineers get and are they encouraged to try local LLMs?

So they are paying approximately $6k/engineer-month.

$ 200 a month and yet new releases of Mac are not upto the mark. Very strange

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