The questions get harder when the bill gets real.
We hit the monthly Claude cap again, and the conversation that followed was more interesting than the cap. The bill is still small relative to other line items, but it's a meaningful fraction of our non-prod GCP spend now, so the questions are starting to matter. A few we don't have answers to yet. Per-seat with overages, or move high-volume work to direct API consumption for better visibility? Should overages be equitable across the team, or should the people pushing hardest get more headroom by default? Are low caps actually a feature, in that they force a conversation about how someone's using their tokens? How do we get any real visibility into what's driving consumption — right now we mostly can't see it. And the one I keep coming back to: relative to the productivity gains we just earned, should we really be tight on costs at all? I don't think the answer is the same for any two of those. But it's worth being explicit that we're choosing, not optimizing.