The 'AI Will Do Everything' Myth — Why the Cost Bottleneck Kills the Argument
The "AI Will Do Everything" Myth — Why the Cost Bottleneck Kills the Argument Social media is overflowing with claims that AI understands your domain, writes your code, and even takes responsibility for it. Every YouTube thumbnail promises "Build a Full App with AI Alone." LinkedIn is packed with "I shipped an MVP in 3 days using vibe coding." Newsletters breathlessly announce that AI agents will replace entire engineering teams. People who've actually used these tools know better. Step away for ten minutes and the AI is frozen — waiting for approval. Run it at full intensity for an hour, and on a max-tier subscription plan, you've burned through your token budget in two or three hours. Then it stops. Again. That experience isn't telling you AI can't do the job. It's telling you cost is the bottleneck . Tokens Are Money Using a cloud LLM means every request costs something. Reading context, generating output, maintaining a conver...