“When I looked at the list of how much people were spending per person, and line them up to the names, I was like, would I say my most productive engineers are using the most amount of tokens or not? And it was just very mixed. I couldn't draw any correlation... It was just like completely all over the place. Seemed like a random walk.”
Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer · AI Builders · October 2026
Context
Laravel's president and COO on what he found when he lined up per-person AI token spend against who his best engineers are, after the company's AI bill went from zero to $50,000+ a month in a few months.
Transcript
…and some people will use more than others based on their jobs and their roles, but there's a limit to what we should just be aware of how people are using it. So we don't stay, you know, it's not just writing a check and just being like, oh, this person's uber productive. So one of the challenges
approving people using the most tokens they possibly can.
…at the list of how much people were spending per person, you know, and line them up to the names, I was like, would I say my most productive engineers are using the most amount of tokens or not? And it was just very mixed. Like it was like, I couldn't draw any correlation and be like, okay, my best people are definitely spending the most tokens or my worst people are spending the most tokens. It was just like completely all over the place. Seemed like a random walk. So anyway, so there's more to obviously figure out there. We haven't nailed it, but like we really just ultimately we really want to have a posture of like AI adoption though. So if someone wants a second tool, we're going to give them the second tool. I know a lot of people are starting to do that too, have you know the agent thing, one reviewing the other and working in parallel. So we're…
well. Yeah. I just saw a thing. I'm trying to remember who it was, but some prominent company is doing work at like a probably pretty expensive engineering level to ensure that they can build systems that minimize their token spend. And I was just in here and I was just like, does it matter that…
Yeah, it was, I would say it was roughly a factor of 10, maybe even 20 higher for the same amount of like tokens. So that's my rough order of magnitude difference on pricing for enterprise versus non-enterprise with a few extra bells and whistles that you get in that plan, but like 20 times more.
We've talked about your developers, but are you seeing pretty heavy AI usage on the non-developer side as well?
More from Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer
