It's only too low if the goal is to use AI as much as possible. If Apple are saying their engineers should not use AI for everything, and that they should still be working as they did but with a small assist from AI, the budget makes a lot of sense.

Giving people some constraints so they have to actually think about solving their problems properly rather than just throwing money (or tokens) at it is not a bad idea.

Apple is paying API prices, not subscription prices, though. $6000/month is half the engineer's monthly salary, it seems ridiculous to say that won't be enough, unless you're being very inefficient with token spend.

It's kinda borderline. My dev workflow in my full-time job (Opus 5.5, 5 concurrent worktrees with human checking results and giving instructions) spend exactly $200/day on average. I imagine it could be more friendly if it's $300, as otherwise I might have to move some of my AI usage to weekends, which implicitly increases working hours :[

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