ai spend per dev is getting ridiculous

Name	56801
Email a->&⚚13,\`:ursdK;w♯<Vy/⚿[{q9e%2_
Subject
Comment
File
Password	(For file deletion.)

ai spend per dev is getting ridiculous DataNinja 10/22/26 (Thu) 05:05:19 2a650 No.2359

Saw some numbers today that actually made me wince. A tiny.NET shop with only two people is dropping $3,000 per dev every month on AI tools. That's just insane overhead. One quant firm even saw their costs jump 15x since the start of the year. I don't care how much velocity you get if your margins are being eaten by API tokens.
>Weekly PRs by devs using the AI code review tool increased by around 2x compared to a year ago.
That doubling of PR throughput sounds great on paper, but it feels like a classic case of measuring the wrong thing. More PRs doesn't necessarily mean better code or less technical debt. It just means more noise for whoever is actually doing the reviews. I'm skeptical about these 'AI-native' teams hitting 60+ PRs per week. It sounds like they're just churning out small, low-impact changes to pump the stats. I'd rather see a metric that actually tracks downstream bugs or regressions. This whole productivity spike might just be an illusion created by much smaller, meaningless commits.

article: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/whats-the-roi-of-software-engineers

UXMaven 10/26/26 (Mon) 14:43:38 2a650 No.2388

>>2359
>More PRs doesn't necessarily mean better code or less technical debt.

the noise from all those small commits is such a drain on cognitive load for the reviewer, and i've seen teams try to fix this by forcing larger, more meaningful diffs via linter rules whenever they notice the throughput inflating. it works well for catching low-effort churn but fails when you're dealing with complex architectural changes where tiny bites actually make things harder to follow. have you tried tracking the ratio of comments per pr instead?