Two conversations have been rattling around in my head this month, and they frame the same question from completely opposite directions. The first is Steve Yegge on The Pragmatic Engineer podcast with Gergely Orosz. Steve’s argument is blunt. Every company has a dial, and he puts it like this: “Everybody has a dial that they get to turn from zero to 100. And you can keep your hand off the dial, but it just has a default setting of what percentage of your engineers you need to get rid of in order to pay for the rest of them to have AI. Because they’re all starting to spend their own salaries in tokens.” He thinks the dial is being set at about 50. Half the workforce gets cut to fund AI for the remaining half. And as he points out, “half your engineers don’t want to prompt anyway, and they’re ready to quit.”

You’re paying for the AI to write code, so surely the expensive part is what it produces, right? I would have guessed something like 60/40 or maybe 70/30 skewed towards output. The reality is nothing like that. Real-world data from OpenRouter’s programming category shows 93.4% input tokens, 2.5% reasoning tokens, and just 4.0% output tokens. It’s almost entirely input.