So many vibe coders are crying about having to pay for their AI compute now that usage fees are kicking in. Once you lean on LLMs to gain an edge, you're trapped like an addict.
Almost every business is about to experience this first-hand over the next few years... Now I'm certainly not warning against using AI, I'm neck deep in so many digital and analogue projects that if all the models went down tomorrow I'd be screwed. I've been getting hit every week or so with a usage limit notice on Cursor and I've had to up the limit.
What's the alternative? Not push that extra feature. No way. You're going to pay the bill
This is just a glimpse of what's to come though. Now there’s a gold rush to build AI-first everything and swap human capital for AI agents. The question is, is this going to scale like people / executives / gurus are predicting. Or are we going to face an AWS style market capture where everyone is lured in on convenience and then trapped and squeezed.
Not to mention setting up 24/7 automated agents and systems that have inefficiencies built in burning up token credits unnecessarily on tasks that could perhaps still be done better by a human.
The real challenge isn’t "how do we replace humans with AI." It’s going to be "how do we build sustainable systems that actually outperform humans without blowing the margins?" Elon Musk made the same mistake over-automating his Freemont factory before realizing the mistake.
Eventually, builders, indie devs all the way up to C-suite execs waking up and asking "Why are we spending more on prompt engineering and API calls than we ever did on payroll?"
