Walmart’s new internal vibe coding tool is getting popular. A little too popular.
The retail giant’s tech chief said that the company decided to place usage limits on its AI-powered programming tool known as Code Puppy, which has been circulating for the past several months.
“There are large classes of problems that people are doing again and again,” Walmart’s Global CTO, Suresh Kumar, told reporters on Wednesday during the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Compared to a traditional search or app, asking AI to accomplish the same task is considerably more expensive. Companies are navigating how to balance rising AI costs as workplace adoption of agentic tools increases.
“You don’t need to keep asking Code Puppy the exact same question again,” Kumar added.
A Walmart employee who uses the tool told Business Insider he has yet to hit the token limit, which resets after a period of time, though he knows colleagues who have.
Overall, CEO John Furner is bullish on the meritocratic impact of AI tools like Code Puppy to help Walmart draw on the ideas of its more than 2 million employees.
“It doesn’t matter where the idea came from, it could be in Bangalore, it could be in greater Toronto, it could be Mexico City, it could be in Wichita, Kansas, wherever the best idea is, we should take that and scale it,” Furner told reporters.
The executives indicated that the AI usage caps are a way to nudge employees toward finding a solution that someone else already developed.
“We just simply surface what’s already been built, and then we see the adoption rates go much faster,” Furner said.
Kumar said Code Puppy is now used by about as many non-engineers as there are engineers, all the way to hourly associates.
If enough people are asking Code Puppy to build the same thing, that’s an indication that the idea should be given serious attention, the Walmart CTO said.
“If five associates or 100 associates are asking almost similar things, then it’s an opportunity for us to elevate that capability at an enterprise level; we’ve got a different vibe coding platform that our engineers use,” Kumar said.
Still, Walmart’s everyday-low-price retail philosophy has a flip-side: everyday low cost, or EDLC, which Kumar said underpins his view on AI usage.
“We want to make sure that we get the maximum benefits from from AI, but we also want to do it in a way where we do it in a Walmart-specific EDLC way, meaning that you don’t keep doing the same things again and again,” he said.
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