Fintech company Slash is touting a new product that doesn’t quite fit in line with its usual offerings — an AI-coded shooter game.
In an X post on Tuesday, the San Francisco-based company wrote that one of its employees racked up a hefty AI coding bill building a video game.
“We encouraged the company last week to start vibe coding more but @nickbruhman burned $80k in credits on the Slash card for a brainrot shooter,” the company wrote.
“Pls play it so we can write this off as a marketing expense,” it added.
Literally called “Brainrot shooter,” it is a bare-bones game set in a Minecraft-esque landscape, where the player has to shoot characters with internet-viral brainrot names like “skibidi toilet” and “tung tung tung sahur.”
Prediction market Polymarket picked up the news, writing in an X post: “Fintech startup Slash reveals it was forced to roll back its AI coding push after an employee burned $80,000 in tokens in the first week.”
The employee, Slash’s head of strategic verticals, Nicolas Brilliante, posted a screenshot that appeared to be a dashboard of his AI usage, showing he had spent $81,267.
“This was a genuine accident, i underestimated my own ability,” Brilliante wrote.
Later, reposting a Polymarket X post, he wrote: “This is actually insane, am I going to become a case study for how AI spend can get out of control.”
Brilliante isn’t the only employee who’s been building things fast and furiously in the era of tokenmaxxing. Still, many companies are now looking at their AI spending with a more critical lens.
Some firms have found that AI costs did not translate into productivity gains, and have cut back on AI budgets.
Companies like Uber, Coinbase, and Walmart have now set caps on how much their employees can spend on AI, with Walmart specifically saying this was done to clamp down on unnecessary, repetitive vibe coding.
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