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We were shipping faster than ever. The board didn’t care. They wanted to know if we could ever ship without it.
The bill came in on a Friday.
I was in the kitchen at the office refilling coffee when our finance lead walked over and asked if I had a minute. He was holding a printout. Finance people in 2026 do not walk up to engineers holding printouts unless something is on fire.
The number on the printout was $47,213. Three months of API spend. One team. Eight engineers.
I told him it was fine. Velocity was up. Story points were up. The CTO had cited us in the last all-hands as an example of “AI-leveraged execution.” I had a slide somewhere with a chart that bent up and to the right.
He nodded, said okay, and walked away. He did not look reassured.
The next Monday I was in the CTO’s office.
The setup
We bought into Claude Code in January. The pitch made sense. Our roadmap was packed, hiring was frozen, and the agentic coding wave was real. I had benchmarked it on three internal projects in December. The numbers were good. Not…