Our founder fired 2 junior devs to save money with AI. We're now spending $38k a month on API credits lol *i will not promote*

I'm the CFO at a startup, so I handle our finances, expenses, budgets, all that stuff. A few months ago, our founder decided to let go of two junior devs who were making around $3k each per month. The thinking was that with Claude and AI coding tools, we wouldn't need as many developers anymore. We'd build faster, save on salaries, and supposedly be more efficient. Well, fast forward to today. We've spent around $25k on API credits over the last two months. This month alone? $38k. Just on APIs. That's $63k in three months. For comparison, those two junior devs would've cost us $18k over the same period. And that's not even including what we're paying our head dev and CTO, who are the ones burning through these API credits. The funny thing is, we actually DID build faster. I'd say we probably saved around three months of development time, which is great. But holy shit, the amount of bugs, things randomly breaking, and time spent fixing AI-generated code is getting ridiculous. It's like we saved three months building the thing, only to spend god knows how much time and money fixing it afterward. And from the finance side, I'm looking at these numbers wondering where exactly the savings are supposed to be. I'm not against AI coding at all. I think it's genuinely useful. But I feel like our team has gone from using AI as a tool to relying on it for practically everything, without anyone really keeping track of how much it's costing us. And the best part? Our founder recently admitted he kinda regrets firing those two juniors. I mean, $6k a month for two actual developers vs. $38k in API credits in one month is pretty wild. Obviously, it's not a perfect comparison because AI helped us ship faster, and there's value in that. But at what point does the cost outweigh the benefit? Curious if anyone else is seeing this at their company. Are you guys actually saving money with AI coding, or are we just doing something terribly wrong here?