Tokens Over Humans?
A tech leader argues that by end of 2025, companies will prioritize allocating budget to AI tokens over hiring additional engineers. Drawing from his experience at Adobe, he predicts a fundamental shift from headcount-based budgets to flexible spending budgets where leaders choose between humans and AI compute.
Summary
In this brief excerpt, a speaker — likely a founder or executive with experience at large tech companies including Adobe — makes a bold claim about the near-future of engineering team budgeting. He argues that at the margin, companies will soon prefer to give their best engineers unlimited AI token access rather than hiring more mediocre engineers.
The speaker draws on his personal experience at Adobe, where engineering, product, and design (EPD) budgets were measured almost entirely in headcount, with other costs being negligible enough to ignore. He contrasts this with what he predicts will happen going into 2027: leaders will be given a total dollar budget and will have the autonomy to decide how to allocate it — whether toward human salaries or AI compute costs like tokens.
The core thesis is that AI token spend is becoming a legitimate and increasingly competitive alternative to human labor in engineering and product functions, and that organizational budgeting structures will evolve to reflect this new reality.
Key Insights
- The speaker argues that by end of 2025, companies will actively choose to spend on AI tokens rather than hire additional mediocre engineers, at the margin.
- The speaker claims that at Adobe, EPD budgets were measured almost entirely in headcount, with all other costs being insignificant enough to ignore.
- The speaker predicts that by 2027, budget conversations will become significantly more sophisticated, with leaders receiving a total dollar figure rather than a headcount number.
- The speaker frames the coming shift as giving leaders the autonomy to decide how to split budget between human hires and AI compute spend.
- The speaker specifically favors giving top-performing engineers 'unlimited tokens' over expanding the team with lower-performing hires, suggesting AI amplification of elite talent is preferred over broad team growth.
Topics
Transcript
[0:00] Do I want to have another 20 mediocre engineers on my team, or do I want to give my best guys unlimited tokens? I really do think by the end of the year we're going to choose tokens over humans for engineering and product. At the margin. You're going to go in and you're going to say cuz this is certainly the way it worked for me in the old days when I was at a big tech company. Instead of your budget being 100 heads or 200 heads, your budget this year is 100 million or 200 million or 400 million for EPD. And when I was worked at Adobe, it was that was all humans. Like we…
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