October 21, 2026
While There's Profit, There Are Tokens
A trading firm went from $500K to $8M a month on AI without asking for returns. At other companies, pull request counts still don't show ROI.
A quantitative trading firm's AI bill went from $500,000 a month in January to $8 million in September. How do you approve an increase that size?
The answer is in Gergely Orosz's survey at the Pragmatic Engineer (Oct 20), based on conversations with 27 companies, most unnamed, at their request. The trading firm has about 2,000 devs and a $25,000 cap on AI spend per employee. There, with the trading desk's profit up, AI is just one more cost line and nobody has to ask for a separate return.
For the other companies, Orosz uses the pull request (PR) as a yardstick: a metric almost every company already has and that allows comparing before and after AI. At a public company with 5,000 employees, PR frequency stayed flat and PRs became, on average, three times longer. At a SaaS of about 100 people, with $2,000 a month per dev treated as a hard ceiling, the engineer interviewed says they see nothing shipping faster than before.
PR counts record how many changes reach review, and a big PR counts the same as a small one. It only becomes return when someone ties it to a business outcome.
The desk's profit accounts for the $8 million a month. While there's profit, there are tokens.
Sources: Pragmatic Engineer