Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya said on the All-In Podcast that his software startup 8090's token costs are doubling every forty-five days, while productivity has increased only "maybe 5% max," according to a conversation with his CTO. The CTO explained the ratio is lopsided because the model has "effectively already asymptoted," meaning early gains from AI coding assistance have been banked, and further improvement requires disproportionately more tokens. Palihapitiya previously attributed part of the cost blowout to "Ralph Wiggum loops," where engineers repeatedly fire the same prompt until finding a working answer. The article notes other examples: Uber's CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information that the company burned through its entire annual budget for tools like Claude Code and Cursor in just four months, as adoption among its roughly 5,000 engineers jumped from 32% to 84% in a single quarter, with individual engineers running up bills of $500 to $2,000 a month each. Meta had an internal leaderboard nicknamed "Claudeonomics" ranking employees by token consumption, which leaked and was taken offline. Similar dashboards have surfaced at Microsoft and Amazon, and Google's Sundar Pichai conceded the pattern on stage at I/O.