But nearly every company deploying AI tools at scale has hit the same wall: exponentially growing costs. Colloquially, the term frontier model means “the highest intelligence model,” and frontier labs largely focus on advancing peak intelligence. Proprietary frontier models are increasingly co-designed to work well with specific harnesses, meaning certain harnesses “work better” with certain models. A developer dashboard at Databricks showing active spend Spend Gates: Developers can be asked to take actions or seek approvals at increasing levels of spend. Putting it all togetherThe exponential growth of AI coding costs is not an inevitability, it's a solvable engineering and governance problem.