# A fintech company said its employee burned through $80,000 in tokens making a 'brainrot shooter game' > Source: > Published: 2026-06-24 04:40:45+00:00 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 "skibbidi 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](https://www.businessinsider.com/pylon-ceo-tokenmaxxing-era-coming-to-end-ai-spend-limits-2026-6). Still, many companies are now looking at their AI spending with a more critical lens. Some firms have found that [AI costs](https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-bubble-heads-doomers-sam-altman-ai-costs-huge-issue-2026-6) did not translate into productivity gains, and have cut back on [AI budgets](https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-token-economy-spending-workplace-budgets-usage-caps-software-engineer-2026-6). Companies like Uber, Coinbase, and Walmart have now set caps on how much their employees can spend on AI, [with Walmart](https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-ai-coding-tool-limit-duplicative-requests-2026-6) specifically saying this was done to clamp down on unnecessary, repetitive vibe coding.