Robbie Wagner
Developer and podcaster who talks about web development, AI coding tools and developer productivity.
“We went from unlimited, which was great, to everybody has $1,000 a month. And I'm watching my single instance of open code, which has a counter at the bottom that's over $1,000… I think the subsidized infinite tokens are drying up.”
Whiskey Web and Whatnot · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Wagner says his employer has capped AI spending per engineer, just as his work depends heavily on agents. His co-host replies that his own company still lets people use whatever models they want.
Transcript
Yeah, I'm trying to go lower because I always tend to go six or up unless there's something really bad about it. But now it's like I've had so many. Okay. The bar is higher now. You gotta come to play.
Yep. Oh, dang. It has been a while since we've like just been us talking about like what we're doing day to day and all the AI stuff going on. I have just the notes I have are out of control for today. I don't know how much we're going to get to, but oh man.
Yeah, a lot has happened. I feel like my day-to-day changes every day. I think I told you sometime recently. So we have a limit to how much AI we can use now at work. We went from unlimited, which was great, to everybody has $1,000 a month. And I'm watching my single instance of open code, which has a counter at the bottom that's over $1,000. And I'm like, hmm, this is going to be bad. And yeah, so it's a problem because a lot of the stuff we're doing is like some greenfield agentic stuff, which I can't go into a ton of details on, but like, you know, there's not a lot of people working on it. So it's super important that we have a lot of agents to help us. So when we don't have that, it's like, I don't know how we're going to release this. But yeah, I think the subsidized infinite tokens are drying up. Are they at your company as well? Or is it you still having the whatever you want?
They are not. No. It's whatever we want. In fact, brand new models showing up on the daily. Today was Fireworks, which I hadn't heard of, which apparently is like a GLM something combo. And people are happy with it. So people are not only infinitely trying whatever they want, they get all the…
one is like 10x number two. Like, it's probably nowhere close.
It's a lot. And the thing that's interesting with this cat, though, is he's not token maxing just to token max. He's just genuinely curious and constantly. I also don't think he has kids. Just constantly hammering on it. You know, so it's like every whim and every thought is just like new thread…
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