*Microsoft and Uber just learned that AI-assisted codebases are expensive to “operate”. I learned a smaller version of the same lesson in 2023, and what I built to cope with it turned out, by accident, to be an answer. * In the last few weeks, the industry got a bill it hadn't budgeted for. Microsoft, after handing thousands of developers an agentic coding tool late last year, burned through its entire annual AI budget in a few months and started pulling the licenses. Uber's CTO admitted publicly that the company torched its whole 2026 AI coding budget in four months. Individual engineers were running hundreds to thousands of dollars a month in tokens, each one of them productive, none of them wrong to use the tool, and that was exactly the problem. The tools were good enough that people used them constantly and the constant use is what broke the math. The reflex reaction is "we need cheaper models." That's true, but the token bill isn't dominated by the model writing one clever isolated function.…