If we really have intelligent LLMs, then I would guess they are going to inflate their token rates, which when someone sees "token costs" they should think "invisibly variable consulting rates".

I just did a complex (for me) task: I needed to wrap a 2015 build of Dosbox Daum, a 32 bit binary, in an AppImage. Claude kept finding incremental bugs, and I went through two cycles of depletion of my token rate with Claude. It kept getting close, but..... something was off each time.

So I took the Claude output and Chatgippity polished it off with a few more rounds. I then wondered how much Claude was "just showing enough" to try to hook me into subscribing.

That said, LLMs were quite useful, and I learned a lot about ELF binaries, and extracting dependencies. It's the ideal task: a breadth/obscure task that is documented but poorly explained, that I wouldn't have easily been able to do without LLMs.

Anyway, back to the article, do we really want arbitrary-billing silent tasks running? Like AWS billing spikes are bad enough to lose sleep over.

Also, if you want quiet rebellion against AI, developers should shove as much busywork on AI to overwhelm the AI budgets for your orgs, because it is very apparent to me that you can keep the LLMs doing lots of hardening, testing, redundacy, and optimization tasks with larger and larger and larger token windows and burn those tokens baby.