Coding agents: OpenAI and Meta buy, Apple cuts budgets
Follow-up to Monday Nov 2: Agents cost a lot, and the limits are showingOn Monday, we saw that agents cost a lot and the limits are showing. Now Apple is counting too. Bloomberg reports Apple cut its engineers' daily AI spending limits from $300 to $200, with $100 planned, even as it pushes them to use AI more. At the other end, TechCrunch says Y Combinator's Garry Tan spends up to $200,000 a year on tokens.
The shopping continues. OpenAI will acquire Pierre Computer Company to expand Codex's tools for building, understanding and reviewing code. Meta bought Conductor, a startup that lets engineers run teams of agents on one project at the same time. Cognition launched SWE-2 Flash, a coding agent model it says is 3x faster at one-fifth the price of SWE-2, free until November 30.
Coding agents are now a real line in company budgets, and even Apple watches the bill. Big labs are buying the tools that put more agents in charge of code. Friday's jobs report is the next number to watch for what this means for developers.
