Stripe

Stripe AI

Stripe AI

Stripe AI

Stripe AI

Stripe AI

Stripe AI

Stripe AI

Stripe AI

Stripe AI

Stripe AI

Is AI Worth the Cost? The ROI Reckoning and the Coming Market Correction

Prof G Markets (Live) Episode Title: Is AI Worth the Cost? The ROI Reckoning and the Coming Market Correction Location: The Castro Theatre, San Francisco, CA Hosts: Scott Galloway & Ed Nelson ED: We're going to talk about a topic not enough people talk about called AI. Nearly 50,000 workers have been laid off this year supposedly because of AI — that's almost as many as in all of 2025. For companies adopting AI, the thesis is simple: AI is supposed to do much of the work that humans do. In recent weeks, however, that thesis has hit a roadblock. More and more companies are reporting that despite the enormous power of AI, the technology is actually more expensive than the humans it is supposed to replace. Uber, for example, just blew through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. According to the COO, it is now getting harder to justify AI costs within the company. Microsoft is cancelling its Claude Code licenses across multiple divisions because it's simply gotten too expensive. And over at Nvidia, one executive said that the cost of compute is now "far beyond the cost of employees." Which all raises a crucial question for the AI industry: at what point does AI actually stop being worth it? This has blown up basically in the last 48 hours, with many companies coming out and saying they're not as confident about this whole AI thing as they used to be. ServiceNow is another company that just blew through their entire Anthropic budget. Technical staff at Stripe are reportedly spending nearly $100,000 on AI tokens every day. Salesforce is on track to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year. Shopify said their earnings were "partially offset by increased LLM costs." We heard similar things from Meta, Spotify, and Pinterest. One Anthropic employee said his Claude Code bill came out to $150,000 in a single month. In some cases, it's getting very, very expensive. We've also seen an incentive — especially among tech companies — to use AI as much as possible. There was this idea that employees would engage in what we call "token maxing," where you use as many tokens as possible from your AI API. Companies like Meta and Amazon have even created internal leaderboards tracking how many AI tokens employees are using. The people using the most tokens are seen as the most AI-forward, the most AI-deployed — the ones who are going to get recognized, maybe even promoted. And this has resulted in extraordinary costs on the AI front. Now we're starting to see the next phase of this, Scott, where companies and their executives are beginning to realize: this is a little expensive. So the question becomes — at what point will AI actually pay off? I'll pose that question to you: at what point is it too much? SCOTT: I think we're already seeing hints of it, and I think it comes down to incentives. You were talking about how companies are trying to incentivize people to use AI more — and that's kind of an interesting part of the ecosystem right now. The adoption layer is trying to get people to use it, and companies have put in place the incentives to do that. But there was a recent survey by a professor at MIT who found that about 5% of the projects people are using tokens for can actually be connected by CFOs to some sort of return. So while I think they're really intoxicated by it — and talking about AI as much as you can in your earnings call is like adding "dot-com" back in the '90s — I think you're already starting to see some fatigue. And I think the AI companies are trying to get public as quickly as possible to raise that cheap capital before things start to — I don't want to say unwind, but... You can see how the string gets pulled here. A large company, a CEO who has a lot of credibility in the industry, just comes out and says: "We're dramatically scaling back our AI investment. Let's be honest, folks — we're just not seeing the return we'd initially hoped." And then Nvidia reports its first miss. Nvidia has beaten its estimates 15 quarters in a row. Nvidia's first miss probably takes the entire market down five or ten percent. You are seeing some productivity gains from this and quite frankly, they look as dramatic, if not more dramatic, than the internet. But look what happened in 2000. This definitely does feel like '99. And I'm waiting for the first CEO to come out and say we have to get procurement involved and dramatically scale back our expenses. I don't think it's that romantic, honestly. I think it's just going to be a traditional Fortune 500 company that starts the narrative: okay, this has been fun, but we have to dramatically decrease our AI investment because we're not seeing the ROI we'd anticipated. ED: Yeah. I mean, we heard a quote this week from the CEO of Match Group — not a huge company — but he said AI is costing them $5 to $10 million a year, and his exact words were: "I think we're benefiting from it, but it's hard to feel." So that's not great if we're supposed

Most people are using Claude at about 5% of its actual capability. Here's why.

After spending 60+ hours testing prompts on Claude Opus 4.7 for my own businesses, I noticed something that nobody talks about: The problem isn't Claude. The problem is how people prompt it. Most people type a sentence and hope for the best. "Write me a landing page." "Help me with my business idea." "Make this email better." The output is generic because the input is generic. Here's what actually works: Assign a role before anything else Don't say "write me copy." Say "You are a direct-response copywriter who has written landing pages for Stripe, Linear, and 20+ Y Combinator companies." The role activates a specific knowledge pattern. Vocabulary changes. Structure changes. Judgment changes. Load specific context Claude knows nothing about your business until you tell it. "I'm building a SaaS" produces garbage. "I'm building a SaaS for solo plumbers who hate ServiceTitan's $1K/month pricing, targeting 35-55 year olds running $50K-$200K businesses from a truck" produces gold. Specificity in = specificity out. Every time. Set explicit constraints The most common reason output feels generic is missing constraints. "Write a tweet" produces slop. "Write a tweet under 280 characters, hook on a contrarian claim, no emojis, include one specific number, no motivational language" produces something usable. Define the output format exactly Don't let Claude pick the structure. Tell it: "Output in this format: headline (under 12 words), subhead (under 25 words), primary CTA (3-5 words), body section 1, body section 2." You get what you specify. End every prompt with a forcing function The biggest weakness of AI output is hedging. "It depends on your goals" is useless. End every prompt with "Give me your single recommendation for THIS context, no hedging." It transforms output from advisory to actionable. These 5 things changed everything about how I use Claude. Happy to go deeper on any of them if useful. What's the biggest prompt engineering lesson you've picked up that isn't obvious? submitted by /u/Appropriate_Barber_4 [link] [comments]

I Renovated My Apartment With AI. Here's What Came Out of It

Spoiler: not a single visible cable, not a single piece of furniture moved twice. When I started, I had an apartment and dimensions from the building blueprint. No designer. No clear idea where to go. But there was a desire to make something that would turn a standard apartment in a high-rise into a place of power — a place comfortable to live and work in. Instead of a designer, I took Claude. How it all began The first conversation wasn't about furniture or wallpaper. It was about direction. I didn't know what I wanted. I knew what I didn't want — kitsch, heavy classics, excessive decoration. We worked through options together. Scandinavian minimalism. Japanese wabi-sabi. Loft. Modern classic. The AI broke down each style by character, materials, color logic. Not "this would suit you," but "here's what this means, here's what this requires, here's what you'll get." In the end I arrived at Scandinavian for the bedroom. Warm, light, calm, with one deliberate accent behind the headboard. The living room–kitchen — loft with a red thread running through the whole space, because the furniture there was already concrete-grey with red niches and replacing it wasn't on the table. The hallway and corridor — neutral grey, as a transition between two characters. Three zones, three moods, one logic. The bedroom This was the most detailed conversation. A room with one window, one door, three free walls. Together we came up with: an accent wall behind the headboard with golden geometric lines, the other three walls in cream from the same collection. Tone on tone, different saturation, same texture. The seam between walls reads not as a boundary but as gradation. White matte furniture with black hardware. A wardrobe with a top cabinet almost to the ceiling. Mirrored doors reflect the accent wall — the golden lines are present even where they physically aren't. Then came the centimeters. The AI calculated. Adding up wardrobe depth, gaps, bed width, nightstands, dresser. Checking that everything fits. Whether the wardrobe door opens without hitting the nightstand. It even accounted for the arc of opening — that's a whole separate half-page story with mathematical formulas. By the end I had not "approximate distances" but specific points. Where to mount the light. Where to place the bed. Where to cut a network outlet into the baseboard. At what height to mount the TV unit so that watching half-lying down would be comfortable — that was calculated too, through mattress height plus pillows plus eye position. The living room Different approach. Here there was already furniture that wasn't being replaced: concrete-grey, red niches, black desk, grey sofa. The task — give the space one wall that would tie it all together. We decided: accent wallpaper behind the sofa, on the longest wall. Red-black-grey circles. Red from the furniture niches, black from the desk, grey from the concrete furniture — the wallpaper literally collects the room's palette into one pattern. By the way, an unexpected moment happened with this wallpaper: it turned out to have glitter, which only added character to the room — it plays so beautifully at sunset. The fridge against the same wall is white. It was bought six months ago, and buying a new one wasn't an option. The solution — a vinyl sticker. In red-black geometry. The fridge stops being a white blot and becomes part of the wall. Between the sofa and the kitchen zone — a floor lamp with shelves in a black metal frame. And on the top shelf, an object with character — a replica of an iconic artifact from a favorite horror film. Yes, the Lament Configuration from Hellraiser. A personal thing with a story. Why not? The hallway and corridor Grey wallpaper with a vertical tone-on-tone stripe along the entire perimeter. Grey — a neutral buffer between the red-black living room and the cream bedroom. The entryway unit in oak and graphite. Warm wood against cold grey gives the temperature contrast needed. The vestibule is small, the unit doesn't take up the whole wall — the remaining meter of free wall is for a shoe bench, above which there will be either a mirror or some poster. By the way, ideas for posters Claude also suggested — both within the renovation discussion and in other conversations connected to my work and hobbies. The through-line Between all three spaces there are recurring elements: Black hardware — bedroom wardrobe handles, black curtain rod, black floor lamp frame in the living room, black handles on the entryway unit. Geometry — lines on the bedroom accent wall, circles on the living room accent wall, verticals on the hallway wallpaper. Warm base — cream tones in the bedroom, warm wood in the entryway. These aren't accidental coincidences. This is the logic we built in dialogue. What the contractors got The most valuable thing about all this work — I handed the contractor not "well, roughly in the middle" but coordinates accurate to the centimeter. Where to m

Is this tagline intentional?

submitted by /u/JoshMJohns [link] [comments]

Someone made a entire company OS for claude

I just typed in claude there is a GitHub issue. "Add Stripe payments with webhook support." And use aco-system for it. Didn't touch anything after that. Something wrote the user story. Something else broke it into 8 tasks with estimates. Another thing validated the whole thing before any code was written checked for secrets, missing criteria, bad config. Failed? It would've stopped right there. It didn't fail. So code got written. A branch was created. A PR was opened with a description that actually made sense. Then it got reviewed. Comments added. Tests flagged. I just approved it. The whole thing felt less like running a tool and more like having a junior team that doesn't sleep and doesn't need standup. https://github.com/aniketkarne/aco-system submitted by /u/AssumptionNew9900 [link] [comments]

Using DESIGN.md files as frontend context for Claude Code workflows

Been experimenting heavily with Claude Code workflows recently and realized something: The biggest issue usually isn’t model capability. It’s frontend context. AI tools are good at generating components, but they rarely understand: typography systems spacing rhythm interaction behavior responsive structure production design consistency So I built DesignMD. It analyzes live websites and generates structured DESIGN.md specs that can be fed into Claude Code as persistent frontend context. Recently shipped a CLI too: npx u/designmdcc/cli stripe.com > DESIGN.md Current workflow is usually: Generate DESIGN.md from a real production site Feed it into Claude Code Use it as design-system context for implementation Works surprisingly well for: frontend consistency landing pages UI recreation design-system exploration Still very early, but curious whether others here are experimenting with similar context-driven workflows. https://designmd.cc submitted by /u/hiehie [link] [comments]

Four backend concepts for Product Managers using Claude Code

You don't need to write backend code. But if you understand how backend systems behave, your prompts get dramatically better because you're speaking the same language as the system. Async vs Sync: user clicks "generate," you call OpenAI, it takes 3-5 seconds. If that's synchronous, the entire UI freezes, Nothing responds. The fix is to make the call async. Show a loading state immediately, let the user keep interacting, update the screen when the response arrives. Tell Claude Code "handle this asynchronously" and watch the output quality jump. Race conditions: two users click "claim this spot" on the last available slot at the same second. Backend reads the database, sees one spot, confirms both. Now you have a double booking. You don't need to write the fix, but you need to spot this pattern in your specs. Anytime a user action reads a value then updates it, ask one question: what happens if two users do this at the same time? The fix is an atomic transaction read and write happen as one indivisible operation. Idempotency user submits a form, internet cuts out for half a second. Did it go through? They don't know, so they click again. Without idempotency, you now have two records. With it, the second request returns the same result without creating a duplicate. The fix is an idempotency key is unique ID generated on the frontend, sent with every request. Backend checks if it already processed that key. Stripe uses this for every payment call. Graceful degradation: your app calls OpenAI and the API is down. If you haven't planned for this, users see a blank screen or a raw error code. Every feature needs three states: happy path (everything works), loading state (we're waiting), error state (something failed). Retry up to three times. If it still fails, show a friendly message and keep the rest of the page working. Never let one dependency take down the whole experience. TLDR: Next time you're in Claude Code, try using these terms in your prompt — "handle this asynchronously," "make this endpoint idempotent," "add graceful degradation." The output gets significantly better when you speak the system's language. Post inspired from this video, you can checkout SkillAgents AI on Youtube for similar content. submitted by /u/InfamousInvestigator [link] [comments]

I built this SaaS boilerplate using Claude Code

The project includes auth, organizations, roles and permissions, Stripe billing, dashboard pages, emails, i18n, tests, logging, monitoring, CI/CD and docs. But the most interesting part was not the feature list. The interesting part was seeing how much Claude Code improved once the repo had strong conventions. Clear folders, typed APIs, tests, shared UI patterns and Agents md made a much bigger difference than trying to write the perfect prompt. Stack: Next.js 16, Better Auth, Drizzle, PostgreSQL, Stripe, Shadcn UI, TypeScript, oRPC, Vitest and Playwright. Live demo at Next.js Boilerplate demo submitted by /u/ixartz [link] [comments]

Configured 9 MCP servers in Claude Code over 4 months. Here's the truth nobody tells you about MCP context bloat.

I started loading up MCP servers in Claude Code back in January thinking the more capability the better. I'm at nine now: filesystem, GitHub, Stripe, Linear, Notion, Postgres, Sentry, AWS, and a custom internal one. Total tools across all of them: 142. What nobody warns you about: every one of those tool definitions lands in your context window before any user prompt has been sent. I checked with Claude's tool inspector. Cold start: 38k tokens of system prompt + tool schemas. Every. Single. Turn. The math nobody talks about At ~$15/M output and ~$3/M input on Sonnet, doing 200 turns a day across my agent + Claude Code use: 38k input × 200 turns = 7.6M tokens/day = ~$23/day = ~$700/month JUST in MCP tool definitions This is before any actual work Cache helps but only on identical prefixes; rotate one MCP and the cache invalidates What actually breaks The model gets dumber with too many tools. Not theoretical, watched it myself. With 142 tools in context, Claude started picking the wrong tool for obvious queries (using linear_search_issues when I asked it to read a file). The tools API call itself slows down. Schema-heavy MCP servers (looking at you, AWS) take 4-6 seconds to enumerate. Errors compound silently. One badly-described tool taints the ranking for every related query. What the "MCP optimizer" startups won't tell you Most of them are just BM25 search dressed up. You don't need a vector DB, you don't need an LLM in the loop to rank tools. Tool descriptions are short, structured, and full of keyword matches. BM25 over a flat projection of name + description gets you 90% of the win, deterministically, in microseconds, and offline. The other thing: "replace" beats "suggest" every time. If your gateway hands the model 5 tools instead of 142, the math works. If it suggests 5 alongside 142, the model still loads 142 and you saved nothing. What I do now Switched to a gateway pattern. Claude sees three tools: search_tools, invoke_tool, auth. Everything else gets ranked on-demand. Cold start dropped from 38k to ~4k. Wrong-tool selections basically disappeared because the model only ever sees the top 5 ranked by query. Specifically running Ratel (open source, in-process Rust lib, BM25 ranking, one command does the Claude Code import). Not the only one in the space but the only one with the architecture I actually wanted. Set it up in 10 minutes. Anyone else hit the same MCP wall? Curious what other folks are doing, especially people running 5+ servers in production. submitted by /u/AbjectBug5885 [link] [comments]

Anthropic just bought the company that generates most production MCP servers

Anthropic acquired Stainless on Monday for a reported $300M+. Most coverage is framing this as a developer tools acquisition. Stainless is best known for generating the official Python and Node SDKs that ship with OpenAI, Google, Meta, Cloudflare, and Anthropic. The SDK story is real. The MCP side is the part that matters here. Stainless was one of the first vendors to extend their compiler to produce MCP servers from the same OpenAPI specs that produce their SDKs. MCP hit ~97M monthly SDK downloads by December 2025 and around 10,000 production servers by early 2026. A lot of that production code was Stainless-generated. Anthropic now owns the dominant MCP server generator. What actually changed hands on Monday: The engineering team. Roughly 40-50 people including founder Alex Rattray, who previously built Stripe's patented SDK generation system. Now reporting to Katelyn Lesse in Anthropic's Platform Engineering org. The technology. The generator, the templates, the language-specific runtimes, the OpenAPI extensions Stainless invented for SDK-specific edge cases. The hosted product is winding down. New signups stopped Monday. New SDK and MCP server generations stopped Monday. Existing customers keep what they've already generated but the pipeline is closed. My read: this is closer to what Google did with Kubernetes than to a normal acquisition. Anthropic created MCP. Anthropic donated MCP to the Linux Foundation last December. Anthropic now owns the dominant implementation toolchain. The protocol is vendor-neutral on paper. The implementation toolchain isn't. Six months of Anthropic M&A starts looking less coincidental: December 2025: Bun, the JS runtime, pulled into Claude Code February 2026: Vercept, computer-use AI April 2026: Coefficient Bio, ~$400M healthcare AI May 2026: Stainless, SDK and MCP plumbing They're not buying training infrastructure or GPU clusters. They're buying the integration layers around the model. The bet seems to be that frontier models are converging faster than anyone expected, so the moat is everywhere except the model. If you're building on MCP today, tooling quality probably improves. Stainless's generator was already the cleanest in the space and the team that built it is now at Anthropic. Patterns will standardize faster as Stainless-derived templates become the de facto reference. The flip side is concentration risk. Cloudflare's MCP server framework, Pulse MCP, and the open-source generators Stainless released during the transition all become strategically important if you want any diversity in your stack. Sources: Anthropic announcement Why Anthropic actually did this, and migration math Curious whether Stainless ending up inside Anthropic reads as good news (better tooling) or concentration risk (one company owns the standard and the reference implementation) from your seat. submitted by /u/Ok-Constant6488 [link] [comments]

Built a tool that turns websites into structured design docs for AI workflows

Been experimenting with a tool that converts websites/screenshots into structured design documentation. The original problem was that screenshots alone weren’t enough for reliable UI understanding inside AI/browser-agent workflows. So the tool tries to combine: visual hierarchy DOM/CSS structure spacing systems typography patterns interaction behavior reusable component analysis The interesting part is seeing how different products structure their UI systems internally. Still early and improving daily, but curious what people here think would make something like this genuinely useful in AI/dev workflows. Happy to Share Link -- submitted by /u/hiehie [link] [comments]

Experimenting with screenshot + DOM analysis for better UI understanding

Been experimenting with a tool that converts websites/screenshots into structured design documentation. The original problem was that screenshots alone weren’t enough for reliable UI understanding inside AI/browser-agent workflows. So the tool tries to combine: visual hierarchy DOM/CSS structure spacing systems typography patterns interaction behavior reusable component analysis The interesting part is seeing how different products structure their UI systems internally. Still early and improving daily, but curious what people here think would make something like this genuinely useful in AI/dev workflows. submitted by /u/hiehie [link] [comments]

If you've built a frontend with Claude Code, here's how to connect it to a backend

So people build using Claude Code but hit the same wall, you build a frontend that looks great, but it's running on hardcoded data. No database, no auth, no real API calls. You can use one of these to connect to other systems: API are raw HTTP calls the most granular option. Think of it like buying individual pages from a bookstore. You make one specific request, you get one specific response. Maximum control, maximum setup work. Every integration starts here under the hood. SDK (Software Development Kit) is a pre-packaged wrapper around APIs. Instead of assembling raw HTTP calls yourself, someone gives you a library with clean functions like supabase.auth.signUp(). Way less boilerplate, way fewer mistakes. Supabase, Stripe, Firebase all ship SDKs that Claude Code can use directly. CLI: for deployment and infrastructure tasks. You're not calling these from your app at runtime you use them to push code live, create database tables, set up environments. Claude Code runs these for you. MCP is the newest option. Lets Claude Code connect directly to external services as tools. Instead of writing integration code, Claude just calls the service natively. You can checkout this video for tutorial. submitted by /u/InfamousInvestigator [link] [comments]

I built SeeFlow – architecture diagrams that actually run, wired to your live app

Architecture diagrams rot. You spend an afternoon in Confluence, three months later it's wrong, and nobody updates it because there's no forcing function. https://preview.redd.it/l14h40ly3m1h1.png?width=2508&format=png&auto=webp&s=df60b2ba6da04fadf7e1039b9472a106ed163314 SeeFlow tries to fix that by making diagrams executable. It generates a flow canvas from your codebase, then wires each node to your actual running app. There's a Claude Code / Codex/ Cursor / Windsurf plugin that does the heavy lifting: /seeflow show me the shopping cart feature It also ships an MCP server so any MCP-aware editor can register and edit demos without leaving the IDE. Link to the site: https://seeflow.dev 100% Free/ MIT Open Source submitted by /u/mrtule [link] [comments]

I built SeeFlow - architecture diagrams that actually run, wired to your live app

Architecture diagrams rot. You spend an afternoon in Confluence, three months later it's wrong, and nobody updates it because there's no forcing function. https://preview.redd.it/9svmg8ih3m1h1.png?width=2508&format=png&auto=webp&s=0d06df1f82fd417ee9a45e504efd26628eaf33fd SeeFlow tries to fix that by making diagrams executable. It generates a flow canvas from your codebase, then wires each node to your actual running app. There's a Claude Code / Codex/ Cursor / Windsurf plugin that does the heavy lifting: >/seeflow show me the shopping cart feature It also ships an MCP server so any MCP-aware editor can register and edit demos without leaving the IDE. Link to the site: [https://seeflow.dev](https://seeflow.dev) 100% Free/ MIT Open Source