San Francisco fintech startup Slash encouraged employees to try Vibe coding—and one manager took it to the extreme. Nicolas Brilliante, head of the strategy vertical, burned $81,267 in AI tokens on the company credit card in just one week. His creation: a meme shooter game called Brainrot Shooter.
The game features Minecraft-style visuals, with players shooting characters named after viral internet memes like "skibbidi toilet" and "tung tung tung sahur." It's pure internet brainrot, and it cost over eighty grand to build.
Company Turns the Bill Into a PR Stunt
Instead of trying to bury the incident, Slash posted about it on X in a half-joking tone. They admitted that while the company wanted employees to experiment with vibe coding, one guy swiped the corporate card for $80K on a meme shooter. Then they pivoted: they asked the internet to play the game, arguing that if traffic is high enough, the expense could be reclassified as marketing. The post itself became free PR. According to reports, ad partnership inquiries have already come in.
Beneath the humor lies a real problem: corporate AI bills are spiraling. As GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code become mainstream, Vibe coding has moved from a niche Silicon Valley pastime to a company-wide productivity push. But these tools charge by token usage, and consumption can easily exceed non-technical managers' expectations. One misstep, and you're looking at a six-figure surprise.
Some large firms have already drawn the line. Walmart now caps employee AI tool spending to prevent personal experiments from draining resources. Uber and Coinbase have followed with monthly or quarterly limits. These moves signal the end of the AI honeymoon period, where "let them try everything" was the default. Companies are starting to ask: how much of this AI spend is real productivity, and how much is just the illusion of being busy?
Slash's accidental experiment crystallizes that question for everyone who's handed out AI credits without guardrails. The technology is powerful; the bills are real.