> In a past life I had to argue every year to renew a license for a profiling tool that cost about 20 EUR a month. I’ve heard since that everyone at the company

> In a past life I had to argue every year to renew a license for a profiling tool that cost about 20 EUR a month. I’ve heard since that everyone at the company is now getting a Claude subscription, even non-programmers. Underrated quote. I also found this frustrating. At one company I was at (a very old company which was trying to pivot to software engineering), we had hellish bureaucratic fights with the IT department to get access to Pycharm, Obsidian, and even GitHub. But then the AI craze dropped and management just gave us all GitHub Copilot access without us even asking. Cory Doctorow's book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI talks more about this. It's just a modern symptom of an age-old power struggle. The workers want more control over their craft, including quality standards and tools, but their bosses want more control over the workers. What's happening now is bosses are feeling pressure from investors to show productivity gains from using AI, so bosses panic-push AI within their companies. Which leads to misaligned incentives like tokenmaxxing.