What Share of Engineering Salary Goes to Coding Tools?
Harrison Chase says they spend roughly 30% of engineering salary on coding tools. The share has gone down over the last two months, while the number of tokens used has gone up.
They did it in three steps. First, they tracked all coding agent usage in Langsmith so they could tell who was spending how much, what they were spending it on, and run analytics. Second, they set a budget. If someone hits the budget, they can talk to the VP of engineering, who almost always increases it. The budget is a safeguard against agents used incorrectly or stuck in a bad loop. Third, they control the harness. They built an in-house cloud coding agent called OpenSWE. People can still use whatever they want for an IDE or a terminal-based agent.
OpenSWE is the only way he codes anymore. He is in Slack all the time, so he messages it from Slack and it kicks off.
