- An SDE shared on Reddit about forced personal payment for AI tools at work without reimbursement
- Employees were told to buy Cursor IDE subscriptions and were promised eventual reimbursement
- Management later required detailed usage reports to approve reimbursements, causing frustration
An India Software Development Engineer (SDE) has gone viral after sharing their experience of working for a company that has been exploiting employees by forcing them to pay for artificial intelligence (AI) tools for office work without any reimbursement. In a now-viral Reddit post titled, 'Feeling the burn of AI in a weird way at my workplace', the employee questioned if the company's behaviour amounted to 'employee extortion'.
"I am working as an SDE in a product-based startup. Recently, they came to know about Cursor IDE and they have been nagging us for some time to write unit tests on our codebase. They figured the developers can quickly use Cursor to write the test cases and reach an 80 per cent coverage," the user wrote in r/developersIndia subreddit.
The developers were initially told to buy the $20 monthly subscription for two months from their own pocket and get on with the work. They were told that the charges would eventually be reimbursed by the company. However, when employees demanded their money, the upper hierarchy flipped on its earlier promise.
"When people started to raise reimbursement requests to the accounts team, the management suddenly stops it and adds a condition, every developer needs to provide a report on how he used Cursor and how many unit tests he wrote and what was his contribution to the coverage number, the reimbursement will not happen for the individuals who don't submit the data or if they are not able to justify their use," the user said.
"So essentially we are being forced to purchase the subscription from our pockets, use it for company work, beg for reimbursement for something which they asked us to spend on them."
Check The Viral Post Here:
Feeling the burn of AI in a weird way at my workplace.
byu/thatsInAName indevelopersIndia
'It Baffles Me'
As the post went viral, social media users empathised with the individual and shared solutions to avoid getting exploited by the company.
"I feel genuinely sorry for you. It baffles me how easily the founders/employers get away with these things," said one user, while another added: "What kinda company is this? It's really weird to ask employees to purchase something that the company requires from their own pocket and then make them beg for reimbursement."
A third commented: "This is clearly wrong. But I can help you out. Try using Gemini CLI , it's an agentic AI tool that runs in terminal, reads and writes in your project files, and its free quota should be sufficient."
A fourth said: "If they can't reimburse the request just apply for sick leave for 1 or 2 days for chilling and relaxing. Find out ways to decrease your productivity so that you can get your time back instead of focusing on money lost."
