I burned though $25 in just 3 hours. Claude code will be great when they can get the cost down. If the cost is like 1/10th of that I’d be using it all the time, but +/- $10 / hour is too much.
A US-based dev directing Claude Code has like 3x output.
So the biz is spending 125 + AI costs, but saving 250/hr.
An individual dev might feel like a superhuman compared to those not using Claude Code. Could even earn them a substantial promotion.
Either way, seems to net out.
I've been trying to figure this out, and I don't think it's malicious, but it's just a matter of incentives. Anthropic devs are certainly not paying retail prices for Claude usage, so their benchmark (or just intuition) of efficiency is probably much different than the average user. Without that hard constraint the incentive just isn't there for them to squeeze out a few more pennies, and it ends up way more expensive than stuff like Cline or Cursor.