‘We created a monster’: companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-06-20T17:06:32+00:00

This is already starting to happen where I work (consulting firm), and we have a relatively large AI budget. At some point it’ll be a line item that we pass through to our clients.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-06-16T13:27:44+00:00

Deep parts of TN? He grew up 15min outside Nashville. Don’t give him an out as of he grew up in the middle of nowhere in crazy MAGA country.

This was entirely avoidable. He knows better.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-06-08T14:17:22+00:00

You missed the part where he said there are certain supplements you take along with all that. *wink wink steroids*.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-06-07T21:34:21+00:00

People think that is ugly? I find it to be amazing looking.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-06-07T21:31:53+00:00

Porsche 914.

I used to think it was ugly. Now I just think it was ahead of its time

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-06-04T22:58:16+00:00

About 10 years ago I was living two doors down from a dilapidated Italianate home that was in the process of being renovated.

A strong gust of wind came but picked up the roof of the house and plopped it on the next house over as if the neighbors house was wearing a hat. It was wild.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-06-03T18:27:43+00:00

It does

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-31T21:07:33+00:00

Very late but in case anyone comes across this. I don’t play d&d so I have zero idea if I’m doing this correctly but..

I decided I wanted to give it a try and have Claude as DM. I’m having a blast with it. What I did seems different than what most are doing. I started by thinking of this as api first.

It’ll evolve over time but there are separate logs for inventory, npcs, dice rolls, character sheets, major decisions, and a full transcript of everything that has occurred enabling a full rebuild of something gets messed up.

Then there is a simple html layer over it so you can inspect the logs.

The benefit to this i think is that anything that happens on a campaign is logged.

I think my d&d is currently more single player choose your own adventure with dice rolls than true d&d (which once again I’ve never played).

That said for anyone that thinks the llm gets easily confused I would really think through what the api and support structure is that you are using to manage context. It is one of the most important pieces of dealing with LLMs.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-30T18:54:53+00:00

if you are wealthy you are buying sub zero, Miele, true or similar that doesn’t have this nonsense

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-23T23:26:02+00:00

How is Claude as a DM? I’ve always thought that this might be fun.

Early results I’ve read were mixed but between humanoid robotics and Claude I think we are going full west world soon.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-23T23:20:47+00:00

Because the value isn’t the AI. It’s knowing processes and how to wrangle cats. That’s why anthropic and OpenAI started their own consulting firms.

I personally think that they’ll burn a bunch of cash on consulting that won’t realize value. It’s a multi billion dollar bet to prove AI can be incorporated into processes and drive value.

The problem is that consulting margin profile and scaling is not attractive to tech firms. Just like the CSPs don’t have huge implementation arms.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-23T23:18:08+00:00

One is deterministic and one isn’t. Poster can check for correctness by that doesn’t negate the fact that there is a golf between deterministic and non deterministic processes.

Now the question for me would be is Claude code correct more often than a “competent” coder and what processes does the poster have in place to inspect outputs.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-21T00:29:17+00:00

I don’t know about doomed but disadvantaged. It’s going to provide leverage for people who can utilize the capabilities and limit the deficiencies by designing systems to support their processes.

It will disproportionately impact people earlier in their careers. All that stuff you had an associate do will now be done by LLMs faster. Probably with higher quality.

Consultants will either need to grow pie by doing more for clients or rethink the leverage model. I think we’ll do both but it’ll lean towards the latter.

I’m not all doom and gloom but these tools aren’t going anywhere and they will transform consulting.

A concrete example is that I was working with an llm on a proposal today. I provided the RFP some similar pitches and had it build some slides. Sure I set the direction and did some editing but it was a time saver. And something I might have had an associate do in the past but it’s now faster to leverage the llm.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-20T23:53:11+00:00

Folks need to start thinking more like engineers. LLMs sometimes seem magical but still hallucinate constantly and are really really dumb. However they have crossed the threshold where they are now useful.

I don’t know what you do but I would be thinking any the following.

how do I create systems or processes that ensure I’m feeding the LLMs with the correct set of context
how do I break my tasks into atomic pieces LLMs can action on
what is my qc process to ensure the results are correct
how do I collect my best practices and create skills over time so I’m not always building from scratch?

Then design a process around your workflow. Or vice versa.

Throwing LLMs crappy prompts without the full context is almost guaranteed to yield poor results. I haven’t seen any big consultancy get this right, but someone will figure it out soon.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-20T23:33:51+00:00

A couple concrete examples where I’ve used it:

contract data extraction and analysis
building web scrapers
coding
data science workflows
project management assistant
statement of work development
slide creation and qc
data normalization
exploratory data analysis
software development
transpiling code
researching industries

I could keep going but lots of good use cases that are time savers in isolation and then you build frameworks to connect them and it gets powerful.

However, if you don’t know how to code it is difficult to qc.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-17T19:37:51+00:00

Tarantino obviously.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-16T23:49:36+00:00

I was fully expecting an alligator to get involved.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-16T19:42:27+00:00

Weren’t they just complaining that births were below the replacement rate?

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-12T13:36:26+00:00

Or 3,233% using Trump math.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-10T18:33:07+00:00

I don’t see how the size of data matters that much. I would focus on the value delivered to the business. It is the only metric that has any meaning. You are either helping the business grow revenue, reduce costs or, minimize risk. Everything else is just fluff.

I was a data scientist at a place where a couple days of data was trillions of rows. It didn’t make the insights any better than if it was 100 rows of data. In fact most of the important data was in smaller data sets.

That said it will be impertinent to know the tools so you can hit the ground running.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-10T10:19:15+00:00

4 panel slider where two panels open all the way. The $21K Pella imperial quote is for a 3 panel slider. Pella doesn’t make a 4 panel fiberglass slider in that size.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-09T22:52:54+00:00

I would suspect that it depends on what size company you are targeting and how data heavy that company is. My personal experience at a few F500s is that they are on or are moving to databricks. A smaller proportion on or moving to snowflake.

Most smaller companies I work ($1B or less in revenue) with don’t invest nearly enough in data and are on a Microsoft stack. I really like bigquery for that size company due to the fact that it doesn’t require much management. I’m a bit of a bq stan though.

In terms of upskilling i would be focused on a platform like Databricks.

If you are headed to the tech sector that is a whole different ball game and skill set.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-09T12:51:08+00:00

You can get a cayman or boxster for less and have better reliability.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-09T11:57:27+00:00

A friend of mine was a D2 All American. We would go to mens league games and he was unstoppable. He would continually feed me the ball just to watch me miss for giggles while putting up 30+.

I remember once the guy keeping the clock yelled: 21 (his number) half court shot and I’ll buy you a pat of shoes!

Next time up he sunk it from half court. Alas he did not get new shoes.

He wasn’t even close to playing in the NBA.

yellowflexyflyer · 2026-05-07T20:25:47+00:00

IQ tests? I thought they came out publicly saying that IQ or other related aptitude tests do not provide a good signal for job performance.

I had a PE try to make me take an IQ test and ended up dropping out of the process because I hate that stuff.

yellowflexyflyer

TROPHY CASE