First thoughts about token limits

Bloomberg reports that Uber is capping employees' token spending at $1,500 per tool. Here is Simon Willison commenting. He notes that his own usage, were he not on a subsidized individual plan, would come out to approximately $1,000 per month on each of two tools. I am neither Simon Willison nor an engineer at Uber, but $2,000 of tokens per month sounds broadly correct for someone who is a full-time, AI-forward engineer. My own usage has a lot to do with how often given tasks let me /clear, and some of my planning / thinking time these days is using zero tokens, but that certainly seems like the right order of magnitude for doing a certain style of work (see below) day in and day out. Simon (reasonably) focuses on token costs as they compare to salary costs,1 but I'm tempted to think in a different direction: There's a limit to how many tokens you can use in a certain kind of programming, where you're juggling a bunch of terminal windows and are thinking about what's going on in each…