Post AI era. In the post-AI era, knowledge alone isn’t enough—money talks. AI compute is priced by tokens, even commas count. With models like Claude Opus 4.1 costing $15/M for input and $75/M for output, trying to refactor a six-year-old codebase can cost thousands. And even then, there’s no guarantee it’ll work—you might just end up in a loop of debugging. Without budget, good ideas hit a wall.