"We're spending about five figures a month on coding agents. I think it's making the team more productive. I'm not sure. But I think." That's from a VP of engineering running a team of ~100. It's obvious that coding agents are faster than human engineers, but it's not obvious how you manage your spend. For decades, the constraint on shipping software was headcount. You had N engineers, you pointed them at the highest-priority work, and you shipped what you shipped. Today you can spend 2-3x the cost to produce the same software in a tenth of the time. The recent port of Bun from Zig to Rust took 11 days and $165k in API costs. That's obviously a net improvement over what it would have cost to have engineers do it by hand, but choosing to do that requires a new calculus. Because faster production is not the same as better economics. The fact that you can generate more code, faster, doesn't mean you should. Every task is now a choice: which model, how much speed, how much accuracy, how much human guidance. Get those parameters wrong and you pay a lot of money to build the wrong thing very fast. The challenge for engineering teams has always been picking the right things to build. Agents didn't fix that problem — it's faster but just as expensive: