I use $30 a day to produce a decent amount of code. Certainly more than we need - thinking about/designing the correct solution/distilling requirements is still the bottleneck. How can you possibly even review $300/day worth of output?
It doesn’t have to be $300/day worth of output tokens. It could be like $290/day worth of input tokens to teach both you and the model about the problem you are solving and then $10/day worth of output tokens.
And what about you knowing the problem and the solution, but are just worrying about the impact downstream. Most of my time is spent managing those. I know the exact code to be published. And some time I already have it committed in my local branch. Then you need to make everyone aware of what it entails and that's usually how you can spend days on a simple bug or a change request.
Software is a big graph of interlocked rules. And if you can grasp the whole or the part you own (and you should be able to), it's often very easy to see the control points. You don't have a coding bottleneck anymore, you have a communication bottleneck[0]. Which is an organizational issue, not anything relevant to engineering.
[0]: See Naur's Programming as Theory Building and Brooke's Mythical Man Month.
If you give it $290 of input tokens for $10 of output tokens, you are doing something wrong. I.e. you paste the whole CI output into the prompt instead of giving it a link to the file, and then the AI greps its way through it (using a fraction of the tokens).
Sometimes AI overdoes things and it re-runs the whole testsuite because the tail command didn't have enough lines, but the other way round messes up the context so much so that in the end all that context is useless.
I used Claude about a week ago to do a pretty intensive refactoring. Cleanup, initial modularisation, beginnings of a test suite, and better isolated build. In a span of couple of hours, and over a sequence of 20+ new commits, I burned a hair over $100 in tokens.
If you are working on a seriously large legacy code base, I can see how you'd get to >$250 on a bad day.
You, review bots and first pass bots can chew through tokens. Also if you haven't put effort into your harnesses, the agent will have to spend more time and tokens figuring things out again and again
Of course it's logically sound. The AI skepticism crowd is trying to tell me the reality I see before my very eyes and work with every day simply does not exist.
I know for sure that reality exists, and that they will either catch up or be left behind. Don't really need to explain myself beyond this.
I do find it quite ironical that the thread is about the fact that Mitchell states that there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis and then we see solenoid's comments and they do seem to prove a few part of it.
"Used to think exactly like you until I accepted the love of Jesus, our Savior, in my heart."
No AI believer ever gives any concrete examples or evidence of what they’re doing with all the tokens and how it’s objectively helping them make the world a better place. Even for the shareholders (excluding the shareholders of Anthropic, or course), never mind the rest of us.
This is a very common pattern with AI psychosis victims (and with crypto and NFT evangelists before). Comments whose haughtiness is matched only by their lack of content.
Wouldn't they save an enormous amount of money by getting rid of either you and the token quota, or a bunch of other people to continue paying your salary plus this insane quota?
How? I struggle to use the 1000 Kiro tokens I get a month, and that only costs $20. And I use it more then anyone else on my team. Maybe we're just massively behind?
Leadership is not being dumb, at least on this topic. If your token usage is that low, you just aren't using AI that much (even if you think you are.)